If you’re curious about a career in human resources, then you will want to think about becoming a recruiter or even become an IT recruiter. In this role, you can help talented candidates turn their dreams into reality by finding the right employment opportunities. In this article, you will find everything you need to know about getting started in recruiting, including why you should consider recruiting as a career, what does a recruiter do, what qualifications do you need to be a recruiter, and how to position yourself to land your first recruitment job.
Why Recruiting?
For starters, recruiters bring home a mean salary of around $50,000 a year; however, experienced recruiters within the top 10 percent can make over $100,000 a year. Of course, recruiters with a lot of experience and expertise in specialized industry niches can actually earn significantly more money.
While recruiting can be a financially lucrative career path, one shouldn’t neglect the ways in which it is also emotionally fulfilling. Once you are helping skilled candidates to find the right employer for them, you are practically helping other people to achieve their dreams and goals, which is one of the best rewards of its own.
What does a recruiter do?
In a nutshell, a recruiter is the person in charge of finding the best people for organizations’ job openings. This involves tasks like producing job ads, sourcing candidates, reviewing their qualifications, negotiating the salary, and everything else involved in hiring new staff. Their duty is to fulfill job openings in organizations with the most suitable candidate.
Skills, Knowledge, and Education Requirements
While education is certainly important, it’s often a recruiter’s skills that are most significant to their career success. It includes things like building proper relationships and effective communication. They matter most because successful recruitment often comes right down to whether or not a candidate trusts a recruiter. However, a recruiter should also possess skills like:
- Attention to detail
- Marketing skills
- Multitasking skills
- Time management skills
- Patience
- Listening skills
- Confidence
- Teamwork skills
- IT skills
- Reliability
One of the things that can definitely help you becoming a recruiter would be a specialized degree, even though it is not a necessary prerequisite for becoming one. Great recruiters can come from a good sort of educational backgrounds, and lots of degrees in psychology, business, marketing, sociology, and/or human resources. Looking at these degrees, we see a standard element: These are all fields that involve the study of individuals and their behaviors.
Getting your first recruiting job
Past job experience isn’t necessarily a requirement for your first recruiting gig, but it helps to possess some relevant knowledge, perhaps through similar work in human resources or a client-facing role like customer service.
Since we already know what are the requirements for getting a recruiting job, we can look at a step-by-step process, that can really help you to get started to achieve this goal of yours:
Step 1. Get Educated
A bachelor’s degree in a people-centric field or similar can be of great help to a potential recruiter.
Step 2. Gain Experience
While pursuing your education, it might be a good idea to figure employment that needs interaction with clients and/or leadership skills. A supervisory role in customer service would be a very good example, since it would combine multiple skill-sets.
Step 3. Build your brand
Building your brand means building your online presence. You will want to use social media to showcase your relevant skills, knowledge, and keenness for recruiting. Your interviewers might want to know how you present yourself online, so they will try to find you on the internet.
Step 4. Build a recruiting network
As you get your social media presence situated, reach bent other industry professionals to ascertain if they might be willing to supply you with some advice or insight into the recruiting landscape. This tactic is particularly useful if you’re getting to land employment at a selected company.
Step 5. Ace the Interview
When you reach the interview stage, one among the key elements on which you’ll be evaluated is your ability to steer the conversation. The recruiting community is filled with go-getters, and permanently reason: Recruitment is actually a search, and people who sit on their hands will have a difficult time succeeding in this career.
Therefore, you would prefer to be prepared to effectively communicate why you want a job as a recruiter and the way you’ll use your skills to create interpersonal relationships and make value for clients and candidates.