Recruiter Skills -1

I subscribe to Lou Adler's newsletters. Though i vow to myself to read them regularly that rarely happens what with the daily to dos looming over me.Especially while running such a young organisation there are tons of things which demand my attention all the time.

But on a lazy friday evening i was glancing through some of the old newsletters which i had sincerely preserved in my folder.
i came across some neat stuff which i thought i should share with all. Lou Adler's company has recently conducted a Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey amongst recruiters and hiring managers. It had thrown up some really interesting data.
Collating the responses of the same Lou points to 3 important deductions.

1. Understanding the Job is the most important skill that a Recruiter should possess. This DOES NOT mean obtaining a job description from the hiring manager but an understanding of the challenges and the performance deliverables for the potential hiree. It means understanding what the selected candidate needs to be delivering upon to get him or her going ahead in the organisation. Its about understanding and questioning the standards e.g why does the candidate require 7 years of exp - what of these years of experience will come in handy in the new opportunity ? Getting the Recruiter to demand all of the above from the hiring manager is the need of the hour

2. Competency Assessment . No recruiter can get out of this one. It is not enough to send to the client an essay which is a verbatim of every thing the candidate had to say. It is also not enough to understand what a candidate is looking for, but important to check whether the candidate has what the client is looking for

3.Do not set up good candidates for bad jobs...This is a tough one when you have revenue numbers staring at you. But this tests the real guts of a recruiter who protects his good candidates from jobs which do no justice to the former.

While there are other skills also that recruiters need to be honing on; especially the one on using the net more effectively for search (i think the same has been bandied around far too long that every one takes it for granted - alas a big error but something which i donot wish to tread upon in this post) - the above 3 cut since they really take you to the core of what differentiates a good recruiter from a great one. This is also because there is no short cut to achieving competence in all of the above