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17 Recruiting Skills You Need...

17 Recruiting Skills You Need To Hire the Best Talent

A recruiter’s role is multifaceted, requiring a balance of hard and soft skills. From sourcing talent and leveraging data to building relationships and understanding cultural fit, recruiting success depends on a well-rounded skill set that adapts to the needs of the job market of today and tomorrow.

Written by Gem Siocon

Reviewed by Monika Nemcova

12 minutes read

As taught in the Talent Acquisition Certificate Program

4.83 Rating

Recruiting skills encompass a range of abilities essential for attracting, evaluating, and hiring the right talent for an organization. With over 70% of employers reporting difficulty in filling roles, the importance of recruiting competencies and skills has never been greater.

With this in mind, let’s explore the essential recruiting skills every professional in the field should focus on enhancing to stay competitive and effective.

Contents
What skills do you need to be a recruiter?
Hard skills for recruiters
1. Interviewing skills
2. Sourcing skills
3. Technology aptitude
4. Data literacy
5. Marketing skills
6. Sales skills
7. Organizational skills
Soft skills for recruiters
8. Active listening
9. Clear communication
10. Emotional intelligence
11. Networking and relationship building
12. Cultural awareness
13. Negotiation skills
14. Time management
15. Collaboration
16. Resilience
17. Self-motivation
How to improve your recruiting skills

What skills do you need to be a recruiter?

Recruiters have a vast array of tasks and responsiblities. They need to search, attract, and screen candidates for open positions, and are responsible for the entire recruiting process within the organization. Duties include advertising job openings, reviewing resumes, performing background checks, interviewing candidates, and collaborating with hiring managers to select the right person for the role.

Great recruiters have a mix of soft and hard skills that help them match the best candidates to fulfilling jobs. Some of the skills that recruiters should continue to focus on and grow include:

Let’s take a closer look at key recruiter skills and competencies.

Hard skills for recruiters

1. Interviewing skills

Interviewing is a critical component of the recruitment process. It goes beyond simply asking questions and jotting down answers. Effective interviewing involves creating a comfortable environment for candidates to showcase their true potential while ensuring you extract the necessary information to assess their fit for the role.

Building a strong rapport with candidates during the (screening) interview helps them feel at ease, leading to more authentic responses. Whether you’re conducting behavioral interviews, technical assessments, or panel interviews, it’s important to ask the right questions that align with the job’s requirements and the company’s culture.

Together with active listening, strong interviewing skills help you gauge candidates’ soft skills, motivations, and overall suitability for the role. This approach not only helps you identify the best talent but also leaves a lasting positive impression on candidates, strengthening your organization’s reputation as an employer of choice.

2. Sourcing skills

Depending on the roles you are recruiting for, you might not want to wait for candidates to apply but instead take a proactive and strategic approach to finding and attracting top talent. Effective sourcing involves identifying where the best candidates are and engaging them through personalized outreach.

Mastering this skill means leveraging a variety of platforms—social media, professional networks, and niche job boards—to uncover potential candidates. It’s crucial to reach out to passive candidates, who may not be actively job hunting but could be ideal for your open positions. Well-thought-out outreach and data-driven strategies are key to identifying and attracting these hidden gems.

Building and maintaining a talent pipeline ensures you’re always prepared with qualified candidates when a position becomes available. By staying innovative and adaptable, you can consistently source top talent, regardless of market fluctuations.

3. Technology aptitude

As technology becomes a key recruitment tool, recruiters must know how to use different platforms to optimize their recruitment process.

On a daily basis, recruiters access an applicant tracking system (ATS), which manages the whole recruitment process, including job postings and job applications. It’s important to comprehensively understand the ins and outs of recruitment CRM tools to better utilize the tech behind them. Recruitment professionals also must know where to source and engage applicants, like Linkedin or Indeed.

In other words, recruiters should keep up to date with new technologies that their potential candidates might use, as well as those used within the recruiting function. This means embracing a continuous upskilling mindset when it comes to tech.

4. Data literacy

One key element of being a great recruiter is being able to measure your success. And you can only do that if you have the data to understand and analyze where and when you’re spending most of your recruiting efforts.

Now, more than ever, data-driven recruiting is crucial because it helps:

Streamline your hiring process so you can find and eliminate the bottlenecks in your hiring process
Cut down on your recruitment expenses by knowing the recruitment platforms where you get the most qualified candidates
Remove biases so you hire based on competencies and skills
Improve quality of hire by gathering employee data like top performers, turnover rate, and productivity levels (compare this data with different hiring sources (job boards, staffing agencies, social media) to determine the best recruitment channel that delivers the highest quality of candidates)
Obtain approvals from managers when you have the necessary figures and data to support your additional budget or resource request.

Boost your data literacy by learning data analytics, fundamentals of statistics, data collection, reporting, and basic technology navigation via software and tools.

Develop data-driven recruiting expertise

It’s important to build a data-driven mindset to truly excel in recruitment. AIHR’s Sourcing & Recruitment Certificate Program equips you with the skills to master recruitment analytics, covering everything from data collection and reporting to building recruitment dashboards in PowerBI.

Start developing your data literacy and transform your recruitment strategies to make more informed, impactful hiring decisions today.

GET STARTED

5. Marketing skills

In today’s candidate-driven market, searching for high-quality candidates is difficult. The number of open roles is much higher than the number of job seekers. As such, recruiters must be proficient in using updated recruitment marketing strategies to capture top talent like:

Developing candidate persona: Defining your candidate persona helps attract candidates with the right skills and culture fit for your company, which ultimately lowers your employee turnover rate.
Employer branding: This directly impacts recruitment and the organization’s overall market reputation. With the popularity of Glassdoor, Indeed, and other employer review sites, what the organization has to offer plays a huge influence on a candidate’s decision to apply. So if you create a good employee experience and word gets around, you’ll increase applications over time and save your organization money and resources.
Copywriting: Use the right words to convince people to want to work for your company. In your email, newsletter, and email messages, convey the message that your company is a good place to work and that you offer the best possible career growth opportunities.
Social media marketing: According to Sprout Social, 59% of companies found high-quality candidates using candidate sourcing on social media. To stand out on LinkedIn and other social networks, you need to customize your message to expand your candidate outreach. Not only do you share your latest vacancies, you also offer a glimpse of what it’s like to work for your organization by sharing company news and employee testimonials so you’ll be able to know which applicants are genuinely interested in becoming your employees.

6. Sales skills

According to sales and recruiting trainer Barbara Bruno, recruiting is sales because you sell your candidates on your company and opportunity. You sell the candidate to your hiring manager to schedule an interview. And after the interview, you sell the benefits of a potential offer to both employer and the candidate.

To develop your sales skills as a recruiter, focus on improving your cold calling and cold outreach techniques on Linkedin. Nail your elevator pitch by knowing your employee value proposition. Familiarize yourself with different sales techniques like solution selling and consultative selling, and understand how you can apply them in your recruiting role.

7. Organizational skills

Recruiters need to establish priorities between job openings, which means determining which positions need to be filled fast because they’re critical to the company’s business goals.

Delayed responses can lead to companies losing candidates. Organizational skills enable recruiters to keep track of the recruitment process and meet hiring targets.

Create a to-do list to understand what is urgent and not urgent clearly. Get a calendar and schedule daily tasks, meetings, interviews, and everything else to stay focused and productive every day.

Soft skills for recruiters

8. Active listening

Listening is the most important skill you can develop as a recruiter.

When you listen closely to your hiring manager, you’ll better understand the role’s requirements and how it fits into the whole organization. You’ll also improve your ability to gauge candidates so you can address them adequately, be it their knowledge and experience, their needs, wishes, and doubts.

Good listening skills can improve your relationships with hiring managers and candidates, resulting in more placements.

To develop your active listening skills:

Be open to new ideas and feedback
Pay attention to what the applicants and hiring managers are saying
Observe body language and be perceptive to non-verbal cues
Paraphrase and summarize to make sure you understand what they said correctly
Ask questions for clarification.

9. Clear communication

According to Lever, a high percentage (80%) of job seekers say they would be discouraged from considering other relevant job openings at a company that failed to notify them of their application status. To deliver a good candidate experience, inform candidates about the status of their applications.

Use email, SMS, and phone calls to ensure they get timely updates when you receive their applications, schedule job interviews, update them on the selection process, and finally send the job offer or reject the application.

Additionally, establish regular communication with your hiring managers to help clarify what is needed when finding the right person for the role. Be prepared with market research about the position, the industry, and the lineup of potential candidates. Define the must-haves and optional job qualifications. Together, commit to a timeline for reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews.

Use tools like ATS and recruitment CRM to keep track of your communications with candidates and hiring managers.

10. Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) is an essential trait in recruiting, deeply influencing how you interact with both candidates and colleagues. It involves not just understanding but also effectively managing emotions—yours and others’—throughout the recruitment process.

Connecting with candidates on an emotional level enhances their experience, making it easier to build trust and rapport. Recognizing and responding to a candidate’s emotions—whether it’s excitement, nervousness, or hesitation—can considerably improve the quality of your interactions and make your organization more appealing to top talent.

Emotional intelligence is equally important in your relationships with hiring managers and team members. It allows you to navigate complex discussions, manage expectations, and create a collaborative work environment. You can align more closely with the needs of everyone involved in the hiring process by practicing empathy, maintaining self-awareness, and communicating effectively.

11. Networking and relationship building

Networking is an essential part of recruiting—and it’s more than organizing candidate interviews and attending recruitment events.

Building relationships with hiring managers you’re working with is just as necessary. And if you’re an independent recruiter or work at a recruiting agency, you also need to build connections with (potential) clients. Working closely with them can guide you in learning current staffing needs and future employment requirements to develop a talent pipeline proactively and ensure a steady stream of business opportunities.

You can nurture those relationships by being a professional, reliable, knowledgeable, and friendly job expert. Research your industry and the day-to-day aspects of the role you’re recruiting for to gain the trust of your target candidate.

12. Cultural awareness

Targeting diverse candidates in your hiring process starts by developing cultural awareness. Having a diverse workforce enhances an organization’s creativity and innovation, which leads to increased profit.

Learn to appreciate other people’s values and beliefs and the differences between people of various backgrounds. Get to know the challenges people of color, women, people of different religious traditions, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, immigrants, and those who served in the military have experienced in the workplace.

Join community events organized by groups from different cultural backgrounds than your own. Familiarize yourself with different traditions and customs. Learn the basic principles of diversity hiring and be aware of your own unconscious biases so you can adapt your communication styles accordingly.

13. Negotiation skills

Negotiating plays a vital role in all kinds of business transactions, even recruiting. Once you’ve made a job offer to a candidate, you are selling against a counteroffer or other job offers from other companies. Recruiters must negotiate a deal between a candidate and the company that’s agreeable and satisfying to both parties.

And if you don’t have what the candidate desires, you have to find a way to offer an alternative and persuade the applicant to choose you over your competitors. Work with hiring managers to customize a competitive compensation package to increase your chances of getting selected by your shortlisted candidates.

14. Time management

On a typical day, recruiters juggle tasks like reviewing résumés, screening applications, scheduling interviews, performing background checks, and creating job offers. On top of that, they usually deal with multiple job requisitions from hiring managers.

To avoid missing hiring deadlines, recruiters must have excellent time management skills. Recruiters can use software or create schedules to keep things on track. It is important to effectively organize the time to manage all tasks while communicating with stakeholders promptly.

15. Collaboration

Recruiters who work closely with hiring managers and team members make the best hiring decisions. With more people involved, you are more likely to get a complete picture of the applicants, the talent pipeline, the overall hiring process, and how it affects business goals and decisions.

With collaborative hiring, you increase your chances of hiring candidates who are a better fit for your company culture, create a more transparent hiring process, remove unconscious biases when recruiting, and cut down on your time to fill. Moreover, you help hiring managers gain a deeper understanding of the candidate market.

Use ATS, which allows everyone to view candidate information and where they are in the recruiting process. Create employee referral programs so everybody can be involved in recruiting, which reduces your time to hire while improving your quality of hire.

16. Resilience

Recruiting people is not an easy job. There are many challenges, like attracting the right talent, filling job openings quickly, and reducing the lengthy recruitment process.

When facing these challenges, recruiters need to be resilient and patient. They need to adapt to different situations and manage the expectations of both the candidates and the hiring managers.

And no matter how efficient the recruitment process is, they may still be unable to close the deal. For instance, a candidate may accept a job offer from another company, or hiring managers may cancel the hiring process because business goals have changed.

Develop resilience to overcome these obstacles and prepare for future recruitment challenges.

17. Self-motivation

Recruitment is a very competitive industry. In the current candidate-driven landscape, it’s essential to follow up with top talent. And since it’s a sales job, you have to be ambitious and hit your targets every month.

It’s normal to experience rejected job offers from candidates or declined business opportunities with employers and hiring managers. It can be demotivating; however, remember that these situations are outside your control. What’s important is for you to learn the lessons. Be proactive in completing your tasks and achieving the goals you’ve set for yourself to achieve a successful career as a recruiter.

How to improve your recruiting skills

Here are a few quick tips to help you improve your recruitment skills that you can start implementing today:

Optimize your time management: Create a daily schedule or to-do list prioritizing your tasks, such as sourcing, screening, and interviewing. Efficient time management allows you to handle more candidates without sacrificing quality and meet deadlines consistently, preventing any bottlenecks in the hiring process.

Practice mock interviews: Conduct mock interviews with a colleague to refine your interviewing techniques and improve your ability to assess candidates more effectively. This practice will also help you become more comfortable with different interview formats, whether virtual or in-person, which leads to a smoother candidate experience.

Develop your emotional intelligence: Work on recognizing and managing your emotions and those of others during the recruitment process. Strengthening this skill will not only improve your interpersonal relationships but also enhance your ability to navigate challenging situations, such as difficult negotiations or candidate rejections, with empathy and professionalism.

Leverage data in decision-making: If you aren’t already, start tracking key recruiting metrics like time to hire and source of hire. Use this data to refine your strategies and make more informed decisions, helping you identify areas of improvement and measure the effectiveness of your recruiting efforts over time.

Seek feedback: Regularly ask for feedback from hiring managers, candidates, and peers on your recruiting process. Constructive feedback can highlight areas for improvement and help you refine your approach. This will ultimately result in better hiring outcomes and stronger collaboration with your team.

Stay updated on industry trends: Set aside time daily to read industry news or follow thought leaders on social media. Being aware of trends helps you better understand the evolving job market and candidate expectations, adjust your strategies accordingly, and stay competitive in attracting top talent.

Continuously learn: Enroll in online courses or attend webinars focused on recruiting trends, technology, or diversity and inclusion. Ongoing learning keeps your skills sharp and relevant in a rapidly changing field, ensuring you remain adaptable and well-equipped to meet the demands of modern recruiting.

To conclude

Being a successful recruiter involves continuously learning and improving your skills, whether technical skills like working with new recruiting software or soft skills like active listening.

You must set your professional development goals and know what you want to improve. Actively seeking growth opportunities and embracing feedback will keep you ahead in the competitive recruitment field, enabling you to consistently achieve outstanding results.