More Than Just Resumes: 4 Ways Great Recruiters Help Their Clients Land Top Talent

You might think all a recruiter does is send you a string of candidates to interview. It’s true plenty of recruiters do just that, but the best ones go much further.

Whether they’re selling your position to passive candidates, helping your team avoid bad hires, or even taking care of your full hiring process, the right recruiter can offer major benefits to you and your company. Let’s take a look at some of the ways great recruiters go above and beyond for their clients:

1. Great Recruiters Sell the Position

A good recruiter’s mission is to bring every client the right hire for their position. When a new job lands on their radar, the first thing a recruiter worries about is fully understanding exactly what the position is and what the right candidate needs to fill it.

Recruiting is a sales job. The best candidates on the employment market can get jobs wherever and whenever they want. Recruiters get to know your role in depth in order to position themselves to sell your job to the best candidates in the market. As the recruiter probes into your job further, you may even find the conversation helps you get to know your own open roles even better.

Every position is unique. Each requires different personality traits, core competencies, responsibilities, and cultural fit from a successful candidate. As your recruiter gathers information to sell the role, they’re also gathering information about what the right candidate will look like. This way, the recruiter can sell the right role to the right people.

2. Great Recruiters Expand Your Talent Pool

Hiring is about bringing in the right person for the job, but it’s all too easy for hiring teams to get hung up on finding a candidate who ticks every single box — someone who has the right degree, the perfect amount of experience, and the right set of skills at exactly the right level.

Sometimes those things truly are nonnegotiable, but more often than not, the hiring team is passing over great candidates in search of an ideal applicant who doesn’t even exist.

For more expert recruiting insights, check out the latest issue of Recruiter.com Magazine:

You might not like the sound of this very much, but look at it this way: Is it better to hire a candidate who fits all the requirements perfectly but leaves in three months or a candidate who needs a bit of training up front but stays with the company for 10 years?

Great recruiters can help you expand your talent pool to reach all of those great candidates you may not have considered on your own.

3. Great Recruiters Win Over Passive Candidates

Candidates are either “active” or “passive.” Active candidates are actively looking for new jobs, because they’re either out of work or unsatisfied with their current role.

Passive candidates are just the opposite. They’re satisfied with their current jobs and not actively looking for new offers. They might be interested in a better offer if it comes along, but they’re not going out of their way to find such opportunities.

The vast majority of applications a company receives come from active candidates, but here’s the thing: Active candidates are usually active for a reason. Passive candidates, on the other hand, tend to be solid performers who are valued by their companies. That’s why they have no motivation to enter the job market.

Connecting with passive candidates and getting them to consider your role can be a major challenge, but good recruiters have a lot of experience with sourcing and selling passive candidates. This allows you to tap one of the most powerful segments of the talent market, which is usually off limits.

4. Great Recruiters Give You the Facts You Need to Make the Right Hire

Plenty of hiring teams make their hiring decisions based on gut feelings. This can be a serious problem. Bad candidates can make great impressions in interviews, while great candidates can have off days and make lackluster showings.

Just because a candidate is a smooth talker doesn’t necessarily mean they can do the job well. Just because a candidate is soft-spoken or nervous during an interview doesn’t mean they won’t excel in your role.

The point here is this: It is important to make the hiring process more objective than it normally is, and great recruiters specialize in building systems which do just that. Recruiters are invested in getting the right person for the role, so they take steps to prevent themselves from being swayed by charm alone. Instead, they use objective methods of assessing and ranking candidates to zero in on the right choice.

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A good recruiter should do more than just send you extra resumes. They should partner with you to bring the right candidate to the role no matter what. Hiring can be a tough process; don’t hesitate to get some outside help.

Jeffrey Audette is president of VMG Recruiting. Contact Jeff at jeff@vmgt.com.