To founders: if you have a good recruiter, be grateful

Everybody wants the moon: designers from Apple, engineers who’ve worked at Google and Facebook. The question is, why would these superstars want to come work for you?

A good recruiter is like gold bullion

A good recruiter is like gold bullion: someone rare and precious, who knows how to find equally rare and precious talent and convince them to join your company. Not an easy task.

Here are four secrets a top recruiter employs to deliver premium talent that matches your specific requirements:

Needle in a haystack? No problem for a great recruiter

Good recruiters can befriend anyone. This makes sense. Why would you want to join a company when you don’t even like the person who is recruiting you? Top recruiters will be alert for talent everywhere, checking out GitHub repositories and Dribbble portfolios, and spending time at sales conferences just to rub elbows with the talent they’d like to reach.

They also need to know the best job boards to post openings that will attract the attention of the most suitable potential candidates — and they often work with a very limited (or zero) budget.

Less skilled recruiters miss such opportunities.

Good recruiters know how to tell your story

The recruiter is usually the first person with whom a candidate connects, which may be why they’re known in the trade as headhunters. They use metaphorical bows and arrows to pinpoint the best people. This means your candidates will learn about your company culture from the recruiter, long before joining the team.

Therefore it’s crucial that your recruiter delivers the message correctly, so you don’t hire someone with false expectations. An inexperienced recruiter can scare good candidates away by sharing inaccurate information.

You want problem solvers

Speaking of expectations: they’re not just external. Recruiters need to handle internal expectations as well.

Team leaders don’t necessarily know what is going on in the talent market. Every manager requests the best of the best on paper, regardless of how realistic this is:

“I only want to hire engineers from Stanford who have been working at Google.”

A seasoned recruiter knows how to translate the above sentence into targeted requirements that meet your company’s true needs, and skip the irrelevant restrictions that could rule out an excellent candidate.

What team leaders really want is someone who can solve actual problems, not simply someone from Stanford. And a good recruiter knows this.

Realistic job descriptions attract real talent

Team leaders tend to include every possible requirement in the job description, which can be overwhelming as well as unrealistic — and cause potential candidates to eliminate themselves from consideration.

A good job description needs to be realistic, because these are real people applying, not superheroes who exist only in a team leader’s imagination.

A less skilled recruiter will simply copy and paste the description. By contrast, a top recruiter will tell the team manager which points are non-essential — or wishful thinking — and ask for important requirements the manager may have missed.

In the end, nothing matters except hiring the best fit for the position. As a team manager, you experienced countless frustrations before every interview you conducted. And now, it’s a breeze.

So value your recruiter. Give them clear job specs, and tell them what a great job they’re doing for your company. A great company is only as good as its people, and great hires are only as good as the behind-the-scenes superstar who sources them for you.

Originally published at The Global Future of Work — Jobbatical.