What is it you that you actually do?
Building tech companies is complicated; this is why my job exists, and why you get so many specialist recruiters these days.
Thing is, most people don’t really understand the work that goes into finding someone a job. Hence I thought it would be fun to elaborate on what it is I actually do!
This is as much for my friends who don’t work in recruitment, as it is for perspective clients, so here goes.
BD — Does this stand for boring day? No it stands for business development, and it’s as fun as you want to make it.
Technically recruitment is a sales job, but (thankfully) in my experience the sales side of it isn’t as you imagine. There are no polyester suits, amount of ‘dials per day’ or Wolf of Wall street clichés in sight.
In short, BD is selling yourself as a specialist recruiter to perspective clients. But like every aspect of this trade, its not that simple.
For me BD, is essentially networking. I make sure to speak to as many of the right people, in the right way, as possible.
I once read on LinkedIn how a ‘competitor’ had called a Head of Product’s mobile, from a UK landline, on a German bank holiday, to inform them they are a “German recruitment expert”. So, yea It’s people like this who stigmatise us and make our job hard!
Yes, it can be hard to stand out from the white noise (see above) of other recruiters. And of course writing 100’s of bespoke emails with either no reply or the timeless ‘we don’t use agencies’ response can be tiresome — thats why you have to get creative and stand out!
Qualifying a role — Once you’ve convinced a company you’re the person to help solve their problem, you need to dig really deep to learn as much about them as possible. This is what we call qualification.
In short this means going beyond the job spec and learning all about a companies story, culture, roadmap, working methods, tools, team set up, etc.
How’d you do this? Questions — lots of them. The more you know about a company the better equipped you are to help build them.
It also means defining why they cant seem to fill the role. The Product Manager’s busy doing Product Management. The Head of Design wasn’t convinced by any of the profiles our adverts generated. The agency we’re using aren’t any good, and so on. This is why specialists are a smart investment of a companies time.
Consulting — Whilst learning about companies, its important to advise them on where they are going wrong and how to improve.
Obviously I share knowledge and advice on recruitment processes, but there’s so much more beyond that. Granted, I’m not a product designer by trade, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand product design.
This is the benefit of working with specialist recruiters. We just do one thing — really well, generalist recruiters will sell you the world.
My friend switched from being a specialist to the latter. Which is fine, but he did once reach out to me after telling a new client he was “the best UX Recruiter in the country”. Obviously I gave him some help and guidance, but it goes to show the benefits of using specialists as opposed to generalists. Ross Gordon if this sounds familiar stop worrying — I’d never tell everyone about the time you did that.
Doesn’t being a specialists minimise your scope? Theoretically — yes. But it means I know my specialism well; I’m able to advise on the actual roles as well as the hiring process.
So, you want to hire a designer with 5+ years experience working in a ‘tech top 20’, to come and be a one person design & research department, define your MVP then design your product from scratch for €58K a year? ROFL. Who told you those people exist? I know the market; they don’t.
We need a German speaking UI Designer — really, are you sure? In the end I helped them hire a ‘Product UX Designer’ that didn’t speak a word of German for that role. Are you sure that the consultancy you’re paying mega bucks to build your product is really right about everything?
Why don’t we get any decent applicants through our advert? Simple, because it’s boring, and written by someone who doesn’t know what makes designers tick.
In depth knowledge of the subject you recruit for delivers a lot of benefit when working with start-ups & young companies, especially when they don’t have an existing design or recruitment function.
Resourcing — AKA, finding people! There are platforms you can find people on relative to specialisms, such as Dribble (design) & GitHub (coding). Obviously Reddit & Insta also if you know how to do it properly, but let’s be honest — the majority of resourcing is done on LinkedIn.
Big reveal for non recruiters…LinkedIn sells recruitment companies lots of amazing tools so they can easily perform really in depth searches. There are 156 people on LinkedIn with the word Kohlrabi in their profile.
Ah so you just type in what you want need and it shows you who? Not exactly. Attracting the right candidates via LinkedIn is a skill within itself.
Resourcing also goes way beyond this, networking & being visible / known in your specialism via digital channels and meet-ups is super important. If you’re a memorable recruiter and know your specialism people will come back to you.
Qualifying Candidates — This is kinda similar to qualifying roles; it is asking lots of questions to find out why this persons a good match for the role, whilst identifying all the factors which could result in this person not taking said job.
I spend my days happily, on zoom getting to know people, learning and managing their expectations, discovering what excites them, and hearing what they want to do next. If this all aligns with your clients desires and expectations. Bingo!
Ah nice so you’ve found the right person for the job, problem solved right? Not exactly, there’s still lots of work to be done.
A lot of candidate qualification is about identifying and managing risks, are they interviewing anywhere else? Are they actually serious about changing jobs? These are just the obvious ones, thorough candidate qualification takes a long time — there are simply too many factors to list.
This is the psychology side of the job & it’s really interesting. Plus if you’re smart with it, its also how you improve knowledge of your specialism.
Managing Processes — So you send the CV & get an interview request, this is where it gets exciting /complicated. So much of what we do is managing processes — people just don’t realise how much can go wrong.
Scheduling interviews, gathering feedback, re-iterating feedback, scheduling more interviews gathering & reiterating more feedback. Making sure the candidates happy, making sure the clients happy, informing the client of, and minimising risks such as offers from other companies, or counter offers. Phew!
Essentially you’re like glue doing everything you can to make sure the candidate and client stick together. But If you’ve done points 2–4 properly recruitment karma should come up good for you.
Closure — So thats it, you’ve found a company, learnt about their role, resourced a candidate, made a match, helped them through the process, presented the offer, and closed the role. It’s a great feeling when it goes right.
Sounds kinda simple right? Wrong! Take the above process, multiply it by ten, start them all at different times, then add different intricacies for each role and candidate, then add lots of BD. We are continually striving to pick up new clients, whilst always working on several roles for multiple companies at any given time.
That’s recruitment & every day is different, but once you get your head around it all, it’s actually super fun and rewarding, provided you like a challenge!
