How to Clone Your Best Recruiters

Overview

The recruiting function often works according to Pareto: 80% of output is from 20% of people. But … how do you take your stars and clone them among junior recruiters? Here’s a map.

This is a question we get a lot

Most recruiting teams, whether they are in-house or agency, have 1-2 superstars. (Hopefully even more!) A few years ago, at a trade show, we met a CFO from an organization in Tampa, and he claimed 95% of his recruiting productivity came from one woman. We’ve met agency owners who say the same. A lot of business works on Pareto Principle in general (80% of output comes from 20% of people), and recruiting is often no different.

But if you’ve built a recruiting team, and it’s a mix of stars/not-stars, and senior recruiters/junior ones, how do you effectively clone the junior ones into superstars?

It’s possible, and it’s not even as hard as you might think.

Here are the steps

Let’s roll:

Audible Job Previews: Let the junior or under-performing recruiter hear about the job directly from the hiring manager, even if they aren’t on the intake call. This is called an audible job preview. It tends to be significantly more realistic than a bullet-pointed list of needs, and now the junior recruiter can hear the tone and inflection of the hiring manager’s voice, which gives key clues as to what’s really important about the role.

Call Guides: Provide them with the key technical questions to ask candidates. These are called “Call Guides,” and it’s an element of our tech stack and helps non-technical recruiters perform technical phone screens.

Talent Previews: After a phone screen, Recruiting Managers can quickly review soundbites to confirm quality of candidate. This also works great in the hand-off from sourcers to recruiters to account managers to hiring managers. “Talent Previews” allow the recruiting silo head to do less scheduling and interviews, but serve as a form of QC on the back-end because they have the audio and the transcript available to them.

Use the power of voice: Did you know that very recently, Paris Hilton of all people began a podcast? And when she did, she said it was clearly the “era of audio?” Well, hot damn, Paris! It is. And audio can power recruiting too: let the junior recruiters hear the best answers to technical questions by hearing highlights from past interviews and top candidates. This is one way you can supercharge technical recruiting.

Hiring Manager Collaboration / Senior Recruiter Collaboration: Both hiring managers and more-experienced recruiters can listen to candidate calls — “play back the tape,” if you will — and provide real feedback. This is a concrete form of training where a manager can point to a specific question, question order, question phrasing, follow-up opportunity and say “Did you think of this here? You might consider…” It’s actionable feedback, not vague nonsense.

You just cloned yourself.

Case Study

The PeopleLift RPO team used Honeit software for exactly this reason: to train and level-up younger, less-experienced recruiters to be revenue generating recruiters in 3 weeks!

The leadership team recruited well-spoken and enthusiastic recent college graduates and taught them the basics. The Honeit platform then provided the framework to perform structured technical phone screens, quickly ensure quality and enhance candidate submittals.

Learn more here, including some key metrics: