As I look back on my career in talent acquisition I can’t help but think of how little training I received for my primary functions as a recruiter. I did a light HR certification that touched on the do's and don'ts, read some blog post, and sat in on a couple of interviews with another recruiter. But outside of that, I was just learning on the fly.
There’s no one to blame here because this I’ve come to learn is pretty common. If we were to blame anyone it should be recruiters, for not speaking up and asking for more training. But that’s not what recruiters do. They almost thrive in an environment with no budget, minimal resources, and technology that just doesn’t work. So, recruiters have developed what is probably the most important skill as a recruiter, to the ability to wing it…or more gracefully put, the ability to adapt. It’s the same skill that allows them to go from sourcing for a hard-to-fill engineer role to an interview with a sales guy to a back-to-back-to-back-to-back phone screens for a marketing role that doesn’t even have a job description yet. And while the technology is starting to improve, the training recruiters receive is still seems very minimal. This is particularly surprising because most people I’ve met in HR & TA don’t have undergraduate degrees in recruiting, they didn’t attend at 10-week recruiter Bootcamp. They just got a laptop, LinkedIn, and a phone and a list of jobs.
It was over 10 years ago that I started recruiting so I wanted to know how companies are training their recruiters today. But before we get into that I wanted to share a few things I wish I did to make myself a better recruiter.
Now let's jump into the resources that I crowdsourced from a group of HR & TA practitioners on the LinkedIn HR group. Check out the original post here. There are a couple of things you need to consider before investing in any of these platforms. Talking with your recruiters about the areas they feel least confident in is a great place to start. Some full-cycle recruiters might be great at interviewing, but they are relying on job boards to bring candidates which means they might need more training on sourcing candidates. For others, it may be both. You’ll also want to look at your current recruitment strategy and hiring goals to understand where your bottlenecks are. For example, if you have a steady flow of quality applicants but the screening process is holding up interviews then there may be an opportunity to train your recruiters to be more effective on the phone screen. You will also want to take into consideration your budget when it comes to training and development. Some of the resources that were mentioned are platforms or online training classes that can be done outside of business hours, where others are more consultant based and require you to block off several days to train. Which brings me to my last point, you should take into consideration how your recruiters learn. While blocking off training days is inconvenient, it might be more beneficial in the long run if your team won’t retain the information from online video training.
Here is the list in no particular order. Keep in mind, I have never used any of these products or services, they were recommended by people in the HR & TA space.
If you know of any resources that didn’t make this list send me a quick email brain@nextwavehire.com and I’ll update the posting and add as a resource to our website.
