How Recruiters Can Balance Having Heart with Being Strategic

It’s About People

Pressure to hire quickly and efficiently can persuade a recruiter to automate as much of their process as possible. While it’s effective to use technology to reduce time spent in daily tasks (like scheduling job ads), it’s important not to get carried away. Recruiting is ultimately about connecting with people—and connecting people to their career.

Making a personal connection with a candidate and ensuring they get the best job is going to have a positive effect in the long run. In fact, 15% of candidates who have a good hiring experience put more effort into their job. You guessed it—that’s healthy for the bottom line.

What Does Fit Have To Do With It?

In short, candidate fit is everything. A recruiter’s job is more than just “getting butts in seats,” it’s about finding the perfect match between candidate and company. And more importantly, it’s the bridge between recruiting strategically and recruiting with your heart. Cultural and team fit have some of the biggest impacts on a company’s bottom line. Recruiters are the ones who make it happen—they make the matches that make both candidates and companies happy.

Happy employees are engaged employees, so finding a candidate a job where they’ll be excited to come into work is crucial. Recent research into companies in the United Kingdom revealed that those with a highly engaged workforce experienced a 19.2% growth in operating income over a 12-month period. Meanwhile, disengaged employees cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year.

How important is candidate fit to your bottom line? Find out:

How To Make It Happen

Recruiters have to work closely with hiring managers to fully understand the team personality and find candidates that fit. Giving a general idea of the company’s culture isn’t cutting it anymore. Candidates want all the minute details before they invest too much time going through a company’s interview process. They want to know if they’ll be a good fit before they even walk through the front door.

That being the case, there are some things recruiters absolutely must remember in order to be strategic and heartfelt at the same time.

Be passionate. This may sound cliche, but just like their candidates, a recruiter isn’t going to perform as well if they’re not invested in the job. Recruiters must have a real desire to help people find the right jobs and pursue their dream career.

Never give up. Some positions are going to be much harder to fill than others. After a month of unsuccessful searching, a recruiter might be tempted to make a match that they don’t feel 100% confident about. That wouldn’t be good for the candidate or the company, so recruiters should persevere until the right match is made.

Wear the candidate’s shoes. In order to make the right match, a recruiter can never forget what it was like to be a candidate. It’s just as difficult for the candidate to be searching for the perfect job as the recruiter. Remembering what it was like to be in that position is key to empathetic recruiting.

Recruiting is not an easy job, but it is crucial to helping companies (and employees) be successful and happy. Having a true passion for working with people and a dedication to making the right matches is what makes the process worth it in the end. To help recruiters focus on making personal connections, ClearCompany’s Applicant Tracking System takes care of the rest.