Team of Recruiting Professionals

Recruiters, the folks who recruiting leaders actually lead, are a difficult bunch to lead. Without sounding overtly generalizing, many recruiters are very outgoing, gregarious, socially adept folks who excel at building and managing relationships. And, many of the relationships recruiters have are with hiring managers and company leaders. These relationships are the key to understanding how to effectively lead recruiting teams. This here is the crux of this article: as much as you as a recruiting leader believe the recruiting team works for you, they don’t. Most all recruiters work for the “love” of their hiring managers. Pure and simple, many recruiting managers simply don’t get this concept. They don’t understand that the recruiting teams that report to them on the org chart, may in fact get almost all of their motivation or demotivation from hiring managers they serve as their clients.

In reality, everyone wants to feel as if the hard work they do makes a difference. This is the reason why recruiters recruit. They work to see the efforts of their hard work become successful: that is: great people getting into great jobs that make the organization successful, successful and meaningful careers for people who are hired into the organization, and hiring managers and leaders who are pleased with the people they selected. Things like metrics (time to fill, etc.) are less motivational to a recruiter then having hiring managers really happy with them. A recruiter who gets measured on time to fill may be less motivated to improve a poor time to fill metric if they get good feedback and “feel the love” from hiring managers and executives.

So leading recruiters is a much more difficult management job than most believe. Add into the mix the desire to increase the ability of the corporate recruiting department to improve and become “more consultative,” and efficient … it is a big challenge to lead, coach, motivate, direct, manage, and lead recruiting teams.