TA leaders!  If you are not screening your prospective new recruiter hires for problem solving skills, then you are not a true "skills-based hiring" organization.

Hello again to the HR.com talent acquisition community. I am Evan Herman - Chief Evangelist for HR.com Talent Tech Marketplace & the “recruiter in residence,” collaborating with our talent acquisition practitioner community members. We recruiters often talk about skills-based hiring for our regular job reqs. However, in practice we often overlook skills-based hiring within our own ranks and when hiring for our own recruiting teams. 

Recruiting is a business skill, period. I talk to a lot of recruiters every day. I go to a lot of recruiter conferences. Almost universally, when talking theoretically, talent acquisition leaders and recruiters accept the "recruiting reality" that recruiting itself is a skill.

In my real life experience & observations, the nearly unanimous consensus is that with the probable exception of recruiting highly scientific or advanced degree type professions, experience recruiting a specific profession or industry itself does not matter for highly skilled & motivated recruiters. This is especially true for recruiters with the soft skills that combine into "will do whatever it takes to figure it out."

Good recruiters, within a couple of weeks, a couple of intake calls, a couple of hours of research for each req, and a couple of candidate calls for each line of business they support, will be up to speed enough to be successful in just about any recruiting job. Unfortunately, the recruiting reality is that all this talk, publicly and in private conversations, about everyone knowing “recruiting is skill,” does not translate into real life hiring practices for recruiters. 

It is time to end the doubletalk of talent acquisition leaders saying they believe in so-called "skills-based hiring" then immediately proceeding, when hiring recruiters for their own team require industry experience &/or buying into the halo effect of people having FAANG or other "top employers" experience on their resume. This approach is the opposite of skills-based hiring. It is hiring people only for on-paper experience & ignores the quality of the work & the soft skills they may or may not possess that went into those years of experience.

It is a “Herman’s Law of HR tech and recruiting” that “highly motivated & skilled recruiters will beat experienced recruiters over the long term every single time.” This is a recruiting reality. I have seen it time and time again in my personal talent acquisition experience at a variety of organizations. 

Recruiting is all about solving business problems, not filling open seats. Too many otherwise amazing employers struggle to recognize this recruiting reality. Recruiting is strategic partnering. Strategic partnering is a skill. Our profession is not TaskRabbit for talent acquisition. Too often, employers focus on tasks to be completed when hiring for recruiters, all the while proclaiming that they are hiring for skills.

This is a big root cause of why employers struggle to plan their workforce properly for how much talent acquisition support they need. This is why we had so many mass hiring followed by mass lay offs of recruiters since the 2020 pandemic. Tasks needing to be completed can vary widely. Business problems needing to be solved are much more constant and stable. 

The business problem solving recruiters, who will also be the highly motivated & skilled recruiters employers need, should be the foundation of any recruiting team.  We, as a profession, need to value the highly motivated & highly skilled recruiters rather than what I call  the “talent acquisition task completers.”