Recruitment: The Holy Grail to Become a Successful HR Professional

Recruitment is integral if your aspiration is to be a successful human resource professional. It is the thread that weaves the business and HR together. Many important fields of HR are essentially extensions of recruitment. The skills that you acquire in recruitment are transferable to other disciplines in HR. They will help navigate areas like employee engagement, performance management, business collaboration etc. with relative ease. Allow us to elucidate.

1. Talent Acquisition

What is the greatest asset for an organisation? R&D team? Patents?  None of them come close to any company’s pride – Its people. There is a story behind every employee who is on-board. Recruiters know the grind. Only after having sifted through hundreds of resumes, coordinated dozens of interviews, and dealt with offer rejections will an organization be able to bring someone on board. The hardships that recruiters go through makes them appreciate the value of an employee better than most others in the organization. This experience influences and serves them well when they work on employee retention initiatives.

2. Negotiation Skills

Negotiation is a key skill in HR. We are all selling one thing or the other, be it a product, service, opinion or an idea. To be an HR professional means to be a master salesman. Knowing how to tactfully negotiate with employees and functional heads on policies, practices, systems, common values, beliefs and a number of other aspects is critical in this role. Recruiters will frequently find themselves having to negotiate with different stakeholders in the recruitment cycle. Recruitment is a good training ground to hone their negotiation skills.

3. Brand Ambassador

Recruiters represent the company and its work environment. Prospective candidates form their first impression about the organization based on their behaviour. Recruiters learn to maintain an appearance that is in line with the values of the company. This is a directly transferable skill when recruiters move to a well rounded HR position. Throughout their career, HR professionals are expected to conduct themselves as a model employee.

4. Interpreting Behaviour

Human resource is all about working with people. Decisions are driven not just by logic, but also by emotion and intuition. A hunch is nothing but a muscle that is developed over a period of time. A recruiter’s role involves making several intuitive decisions.  By spending a few minutes with a candidate, a seasoned recruiter can adequately gauge the fitment of a candidate to a role/ organization. The ability to be perceptive comes from experience observing the behavioural traits of candidates. It is an essential skill that can be practiced in recruitment and applied to solve complex and ambiguous people issues in other HR areas.

5. Organizational Knowledge

Recruiters get opportunities to interact directly with business leaders. It allows them to understand an organization’s pain points, challenges and plans for growth. They will arm themselves with intricate knowledge of the business that can help them when they move to the role of a business partner.

6. Market Trends

Recruiters are an organization’s connection to the world outside. Because they regularly interact with candidates, they will have access to external market trends. This data will help senior management benchmark their current practices against their competition and influence decisions.

All recruiters are inherently HR professionals but the converse is not true. The tacit aspects of HR can be learnt from recruitment. Embracing it is essential for a successful career in HR.

If you are passionate about recruitment and interested in working for Cortex, please write to us here