A Day in the Life of a Recruiter at Trainline

Hi! 👋 I’m Luke. I’m a Talent Acquisition Manager at Trainline, responsible for the recruitment of software engineers of different levels for our offices across Europe. I have 5 years of experience recruiting in the tech world and joined Trainline in the Summer of 2022. In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through a day in my life working in the Talent team at one of Europe’s most recognisable tech companies. I’ll leave out some of the intermittent tasks such as scheduling, replying to messages on Slack and rejecting speculative agency recruiter messages as I do those too often to bother mentioning…

9am — 9:30am

Time to log on. I usually take the first half hour of the day to make my way through unread applications whilst simultaneously sipping on a mug of hot coffee ☕. We get a lot of interest on our vacancies, so it’s important to monitor how quickly we get back to people. As a team we try to stick to a 72hr window between application submission and letting the candidate know if they are progressing or not. Candidate experience is important to us, and quickly getting back to candidates is a basic but key pillar to a positive candidate experience. It can be tricky to stay on top of things all of the time, especially with high application openings, so creating habits as a recruiter can help.

Depending on how many CVs I need to read, this usually takes about 30 minutes, but sometimes longer. We have automated self-scheduling software built into our Applicant Tracking System (ATS), so it can be really quick to send a message out and allow people to book time into my calendar for screening calls throughout the week.

9:30am — 10am

Applications done. I noticed that one of my roles didn’t get many relevant applications over the weekend, so I’m going to do a bit of sourcing. I hop into a project I’ve built in LinkedIn Recruiter, type in my Boolean strings and get hunting!

All roles are slightly different when it comes to where is relevant to headhunt. We have a Payments team, so experience with payments gateways could be advantageous. We have an Ecommerce team, so ecommerce experience could be advantageous… you get where I’m going with this.

In a broad sense, considering what a good match for Trainline could be, I think about people working at companies like ours. We’re a large digital product company whose services are used by close to a hundred million people each month. Are you used to dealing with challenges that come with scale? ✔️ Have you been a part of a company’s journey as it expands its products internationally? ✔️ Then you could be a good candidate for us.

Of course, we don’t just hire exclusively from target companies. We believe in equity and giving people the space to step up and grow with us, so we can be flexible depending on the role and the seniority we’re searching for.

10am — 10:30am

The first call of the day (can I say how much I appreciate my first meeting of the day not being at 9am? 🥱) is a Talent & HRBP team update. We come together once a fortnight to update on delivery — updating on what we feel might result in a hire in the short to mid-term so we can forecast to the business accordingly. We also use this time to update on new incoming vacancies and on potential challenges and how we can support each other as a team.

10:30am — 11am

Time for my weekly 1-to-1 with my manager. These are half an hour check in meetings to catch up on anything and everything. I talk about what I’m working on and update on my open roles and my manager asks if she can help unblock anything that needs unblocking. Fortunately, that’s not a long list as we always keep each other up to date via Slack. As much as we do talk about work, we also use the time to catch up on non-work-related stuff too. What we did over the weekend, what we’re doing for the rest of the week etc.

11am — 12:30pm

From now until lunch time I go back to candidates. At any given time, I work on between 5 and 10 open vacancies and try to ensure pipelines have a healthy mixture of applications, referrals, and headhunts. I pop on a playlist on Spotify, pause all notifications on Slack and Outlook and knuckle down.

We use a few different sourcing platforms to find the best talent — Otta, Hired, Welcome to the Jungle and of course LinkedIn. It’s important to get your money’s worth and utilise all of them daily to make sure you’re staying on top of the active talent on the market. 🔍

Outside of finding new candidates, I also take this time before lunchtime to book in any existing candidates for interviews that are still outstanding. Normally by this time I’ve received a few new applications, so I make sure I review those too.

12:30pm — 1:30pm

Do you really need to know what I ate for lunch? 🥪

1:30pm — 3pm

Time to speak to candidates. When sending candidates self-schedule requests, I normally allocate this slot in the afternoon for people to book in calls with me. I usually speak to 3 candidates a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I try to make sure my schedule is not super rigid, so I have flexibility to free up more time if I need to throughout the day.

I start off screening calls by disarming people — I always reassure them that these are not formal interviews but rather a casual way to get to know each other and set expectations and timelines for the process. I really enjoy having the opportunity to speak to people about a career at Trainline. I don’t often have to do a big sell on who we are as a company as fortunately we’re a well-known brand, however I get the chance to speak about some of the exciting stuff going on behind the scenes to help paint a clear picture to the candidate on why it’s great to work here. As much as these calls are informal, I will always prepare a list of questions to ask the candidate which I would have checked off with the hiring manager when kicking off the vacancy. So, I’ll weave a few more ‘interview style’ questions into the call.

When I think about the kind of people that we hire, I think about t-shaped problem solvers who are excited to learn and explore new things. We’re a values lead business, so equally the cultural factor is as important to us as the hard skills or experience. On screening calls, it’s often easy to understand whether someone will elevate our culture beyond just the requirements of the role they’re interviewing for.

When done with the calls, I input all my feedback into the ATS and decide if the candidate should move forward to the next round. If the candidate isn’t a match, I’ll send them a bespoke message to let them know the reasons why — that is unless I haven’t explained it to them in the call itself.

3pm — 3:30pm

Project work. Outside of recruiting, a daily part of what in-house recruiters do is work on projects that contribute to the efficiency of the wider team. This can include everything from monitoring analytics through to planning events, building user guides or implementing new software. I always try to get some level of project work completed in a day depending on the hiring velocity at the time.

4pm — 4:30pm

Hiring manager update. It’s important to keep hiring teams informed with where we’re at with their vacancies, so I’ll sit down with each hiring manager about once a week to give them an overview. Every hiring manager likes to be engaged differently, and as a recruiter it’s important to know how to manage these relationships successfully whilst maintaining the right level of service for each one. Some managers like weekly check-ins, some bi-weekly, some managers prefer to be kept up to date ad hoc via message and sometimes I verbally update all hiring managers for an entire department, including the executives, on one call… whatever the method is, it is essential to give the relevant stakeholders a transparent view on the health of their pipelines.

I also supplement these meetings with hiring dashboards which automate via our ATS to be sent out at certain points in the week to give further detail as well — useful for times where people need to skip calls.

4:30–5:30pm

To wrap up the day, I do a notification purge and clear out anything outstanding. If a candidate has not passed an interview, I usually take this time to drop them a call to tell them the reasons why. I check my inbox to see if candidates have responded to my headhunt messages and if so, arrange time to speak with them. More applications to review.

That’s the day done! We’re encouraged to make sure we don’t work late (if my manager catches me working late, she often tells me to log off 😅) so I try to ensure for a hard stop at 5:30. I’ll always work until the job is done, but if it isn’t by 5:30, then I’ll look at how I can improve time management for the next day.

And that is an average day in the life as a recruiter at Trainline. There are still some parts I haven’t covered (how we deliver offers etc.) but we can save that for part 2 😉!

We’re hiring for multiple roles across all of our offices in Europe! You can check out all of our active vacancies here https://www.trainlinegroup.com/careers/en/

You can connect with me on LinkedIn here https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukemellor/