You want to attract the best and brightest employees for your client to ensure your hiring processes run at peak efficiency. Effective recruiting makes that possible.
To sustain the growth and development of your client’s company, you need a talented recruitment team that can help you recruit top-level talent to fill job orders.
Bringing together professionals in different recruitment roles ensures your search firm consistently finds the right employees and retains them.
In this article, we’ll outline the key recruiting roles, along with their individual responsibilities, and share tips to help you build a team of recruiters for your agency.
What Are the Key Recruiting Roles?
Different people exist in a recruitment team, each with a specific role(s) to play.
While the number of posts may be more or less depending on the size of your search firm and your client’s hiring needs, there are six key roles that every recruiting team must have.
Let’s take a look.
1. The Recruiter
An agency recruiter oversees the entire hiring process from start to finish and is critical to finding the right talent for your company.
This person fills the core role of sourcing for candidates, screening, and interviewing, right down to feedback and negotiation.
Their responsibilities include–
- Meeting and communicating with the hiring manager
- Writing job descriptions and conducting interviews
- Attracting and sourcing the desired applicants, pre-screening them, and presenting the qualified ones to the hiring manager
- Serving as the company’s brand ambassador
- Conducting background and reference checks
- Ensuring the candidate has an exceptional experience
- Facilitating the new hire onboarding process
You can rely on the recruiter to ensure the recruitment process runs smoothly and that every candidate leaves with a positive impression of your company, regardless of whether they get selected.
It’s why this person lays the foundation for a strong relationship between the candidate and the hiring manager.
2. The Hiring Manager
The hiring manager is the person initiating the recruitment process. They request an open position to be filled in the organization and also get the deciding vote on who gets hired.
That’s why a hiring manager is commonly referred to as the head of the hiring team and is often responsible for overseeing the team of recruiters and talent sourcers.
They work in close contact with the recruiter, helping them understand more about the job role that needs to be filled by giving information, like:
- What makes a particular role interesting for the ideal candidate?
- What will be expected of qualified candidates?
- How will the new hire positively impact their colleagues?
- What will be the negative impact if they do a poor job?
- What personality, knowledge, or skills are required for this role?
- Details of working hours, salary and other benefits
When the new hire is being onboarded, the hiring manager’s close contact shifts from the recruiter to the employee.
Now their focus is to ensure the new employee understands their role in the company and embraces the company culture.
3. The Sourcer
The main job of the sourcer is to find (“source”) suitable candidates from a talent pool. They are responsible for looking into appropriate places and identifying potential candidates that meet the requirements of the job.
Works in the preliminary phase of the recruitment process, the sourcer scours through resume databases, social media, job boards, or niche industry sites to find the exact match for an open position.
They also use sourcing tools like an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to effectively screen candidates.
Read more: Top 10 places where recruiters can get CVs for free.
The sourcer can also build and maintain a talent pool to meet the company’s future hiring needs.
4. The Recruitment Coordinator
Recruitment coordinators manage the logistics of the recruitment process in your recruiting team structure. They play more of a supporting role to the recruiter and help move the applicant through the hiring funnel.
Their responsibilities include–
- Posting job adverts on job boards
- Scheduling interviews and making changes if needed
- For remote work, they ensure no technical difficulties arise during the virtual interview process
- Managing candidate travel and hotel accommodations if needed
- Drafting offer letters and running background checks of potential hires
Read more: How to write a job offer letter that candidates will appreciate?
Think of the recruiter coordinator as the middleman who will assist in your company’s recruiting and talent acquisition strategies, including finding, attracting, and hiring new employees that meet the company’s needs and goals to fill open positions.
5. The Employer Brand Marketer
Similar to how recruiters research top applicants, applicants also research the best companies—and often turn to social media to get the inside scoop on these companies.
The employer brand marketer, also known as the recruitment marketer, makes sure the candidates like what they see.
According to Matt Charney, editor at Recruiting Daily, “In recruiting today, it’s not only recruiters who are doing the research. With 85% of job searches starting with a search engine, top talent is searching for a company the same way they would any other purchasing decision, which is why employer branding is so critical.”
The key responsibilities of the employer brand marketer include–
- Ensuring the company’s career site content is optimized and resonates with the candidates
- Running events attract target hires
- Sending press releases on local media about the company’s accomplishments
- Drafting brand materials
- Maintaining social media platforms
Read more: What is recruitment marketing? Top 7 tips, strategies & ideas.
To reiterate, the job of the employer brand marketer is to present the company to the public in a good light. They share positive impressions about the organization in a way that potential candidates develop an active interest in working there.
Think of them as the ambassador for your company’s brand who ensures the right message lands in front of the right people.
6. The Owner or Company CEO
Hiring decisions aren’t only based on the data-driven company culture but also on instinct, which is why having the owner or CEO on board to make executive decisions about new hires is a great idea.
While their presence in the recruitment process helps show the candidate the company’s expertise and values, the owner or CEO of the company may not always be physically present during the recruitment process, especially if it’s a medium- to large-sized company.
If that’s the case, they can still be part of the recruitment process virtually.
They are also responsible for making new employees feel welcomed in your search firm, involved, and important, serving as the friendly face of the company.
How to Determine the Right Size for Your Recruitment Team?
If you want a smooth recruitment process, you need a balanced recruitment team. Emphasis on balanced.
Sometimes a small but mighty team of recruiters is enough.
When deciding the right size of your recruitment team, you need to consider your clients’ average company sizes, how many job orders you’re receiving on a monthly basis, how much of your hiring process is automated, and the level of sourcing that needs to be done.
1. Startups & Small Recruitment Agencies
The founder (or CEO) is actively involved in the hiring process. In most cases, this individual will be the sole person who fills the job orders.
2. Mid-sized Search Firms
Usually, a three to four-person recruitment team is responsible for the entire recruitment process, right from sourcing and screening to negotiating offers and onboarding.
3. Fast-Growing Recruitment Agencies
If your search firm has scaled past the size of a startup or SME, you’ll need a bunch of recruiters depending on the number of vacancies you want to fill.
A fast-growing recruitment agency typically has 80-100 vacancies per year (and sometimes even more), so you may need more people to handle some specific tasks in the recruitment process.
4. Large Recruitment Agencies
A large recruitment agency may need to fill up 80-1,000 vacancies in a year. At this stage, you need to have a full-fledged, well-oiled recruitment team for the job. We recommend having a team of people for each of the six key roles we discussed before as a starting point.
If you plan to scale globally and hire talent for your offices located in different parts of the world, you can also employ the services of a language service provider and a diversity/inclusion expert to your team to smoothen the process further.
Defining KPIs Success Measures for Recruitment Operations
Quantifying your idea of success is an essential part of every strategy, and recruitment is no different.
Measure your recruitment team’s strength and the effectiveness of your hiring process using certain KPIs and metrics to make better-informed decisions. These will help you quantify the specific efforts during the recruitment process to know what’s working and what’s not—and step up team performance.
Below are a few KPIs to help you get started:
a. Time-to-Hire
Time-to-hire is tracking the amount of time it takes to shortlist an applicant, interview, and extend an offer of employment.
b. Quality of Hire
Quality of hire indicates how well a newly onboarded employee fits in with your client company.
Measuring this KPI will tell you just how successful you are in getting the right candidate for the open role. Plus, you can use the results to determine what kind of candidate typically turns out to be your client’s strongest performer and which screening method brought them.
c. Source Quality
Source quality is the overall effectiveness of a specific sourcing channel. This will show you which channel brings in the best hires—something that’s handy to avoid wasting time on a source that doesn’t bring in high-quality candidates.
Tracking this KPI also gives insight into what type of postings attract the best candidates. It’s an information gold mine, really!
d. Cost-per-Hire
Cost-per-hire refers to keeping track of the exact or estimated cost of hiring a new employee. It allows you to budget for your next recruitment campaign effectively, helping you decide whether to cut down costs or bring in more money to get the best candidate.
e. Candidate Satisfaction
Measuring candidate satisfaction involves sending out a survey asking the candidates to share feedback throughout the hiring process. This enables you to find out if they had a positive or negative experience at your company, plus understand where you need to improve to enhance the candidate experience and team building.
In Final Words
A recruitment team structure comprising the key people helps you onboard the best talent to enhance your company’s performance.
While the size of this structure largely depends on the size of your company, among other needs, building the right team can help steer your company towards growth, backed by a highly talented workforce.
Want to enhance your recruitment process? Try Recruit CRM’s Applicant Tracking System for free to create a customizable hiring pipeline that helps you manage and visualize each candidate to make the right hiring decisions.
