The Importance of Recruiter Performance Ratings

To succeed in recruiting the best talent, you must have great recruiters working on all your jobs. This is true whether self-sourcing or using third party search or staffing firms. Recruiter quality is a key determinant of success.

Traditional methods of relying heavily on generalists, relationships and qualitative “gut feel” criteria are not enough and frankly just don’t cut it anymore. In contrast, employers that are able to quickly and accurately assess recruiter performance, and ensure the right recruiters are working on the right jobs, will achieve a significant competitive advantage. They’ll have access to more qualified candidates, deliver a better candidate experience, improve efficiency, and as a result, make better hires faster.

Specialization Drives Performance

However, assessing performance can be tricky because not all recruiters or all jobs are created equal, and not all recruiters are good at recruiting for all jobs. In fact, just the opposite is true. Recruiters who specialize in one job type are very good at recruiting for that job type, but not so good at recruiting for other jobs. Just because a recruiter can find a marketing superstar doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be equally successful in sales or engineering. Recruiters increase in effectiveness when they specialize on jobs that are well matched to their experience, expertise and candidate relationships. Specialization is so important that specialty recruiters (those that focus on a particular job type) account for over 91% of search firm placements.

Obviously, in order to have great specialists working on all of your jobs, you need to know who is great at recruiting for each job type. But, how do you know who is good at what?

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Unfortunately, while hiring good internal recruiters or retaining good search or staffing firms can help, it is by no means good enough. This is because even at good firms, not all the recruiters are great, and they certainly are not all great at recruiting for all jobs. Likewise, having candidates and hiring managers provide subjective ratings can provide useful information, but there are many problems with using such information to determine who is the best recruiter for each job. Problems include difficulty determining if the ratings are based on how good someone is or how easy they are to work with, which job titles make up similar job types, which job types are easier or harder to fill in which geographies and how does one company’s experience compare with industry or geographic benchmark data.

In my next post, I will discuss rating recruiters’ individual performance objectively.

Ken Lazarus

Ken Lazarus
Ken Lazarus is CEO of Scout Exchange

Ken Lazarus

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