11 Habits of Highly Effective Tech Recruiters

11 HABITS
OF
HIGHLY EFFECTIVE
TECHNICAL
RECRUITERS

HELLO THERE…
As a Senior Technical Sourcing Recruiter, I consider it my personal and professional
mission to help people stretch their professional capabilities. Often, it means that I
am working with individuals to help them advance their career or organization.
I’ve been a Recruiter, Business Development Manager, Sr. Sourcing Recruiter, Director
of Recruiting, and RPO Manager with Twitter, AWS, RentPath, Apple, Relus, Kabbage,
Vanguard, ZocDoc, and more!
If you’ve got a question about Agency or Corporate recruiting, I am here for YOU!
Speaking of being here for you, you can find me here!
• Connect on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfink/
• Connect on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bfx777/
• Connect on Peloton thebrianfink
• Connect on Twitter @thebrianfink
• Connect on Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sourcing-school-by-recruitingdaily/id156
5198287

WHAT’S THE PLAN, SOLO?
• Learn Three Tools
• Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
• Organize or Else
• Always Be Closing
• Always Stay a Student
• Plan to Execute OR Plan to Get Executed
• Leveraging Research and PreSearch
• Embrace The Data
• Strategy Sessions vs. Take Out Sessions
• Master Your Boolean
• Earn the Speed of Trust

“FROM A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW”
SOME WORDS ON INTERCHANGEABILITY

PLAN TO EXECUTE OR PLAN TO GET EXECUTED

• What’s your plan?
• How do you plan your work?
• What’s first?
• In what order do you work?
• Is it a trap?

• Identify Your Goal. Your very first step in work planning is to identify what
you will deliver
• What will you tackle first?
• How will you find your candidates?
• What are your resources?
• What obstacles could you encounter?
• Assign Accountability (who will interview, what’s the interview plan)
• Execute Your Plan.

• Identify Your Goal. Your very first step in work planning is to identify what
you will deliver
• What will you tackle first?
• How will you find your candidates?
• What are your resources?
• What obstacles could you encounter?
• Assign accountability (who will interview, what’s the interview plan)
• Execute Your Plan.

LEVERAGE RESEARCH AND PRESEARCH

• We should be accustomed to using market research. It makes the job of strategically
targeting qualified candidates much easier if you come over-prepared. Challenging
markets, positions or divisions to find talent for usually have a clear underlying
problem, and it’s impossible to overcome it until you can identify what it is.
• Researching is the first step to recognizing the most difficult aspects of the
recruitment process and overcoming it.
• Presearching is the first step to understanding the organization and hiring manager
you will recruit for.

61%
According to iCIMS’ Hire Expectations
Institute, 61 percent of hiring managers said
recruiters had, at best, a low to moderate
understanding of the jobs they were
recruiting for. You don't want to be
contributing to this statistic!

• Industry trends: Take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Industry Insights research
and you’ll quickly see how easy it is to analyze industry trends and employment statistics.
• Supply and demand of qualified candidates: This will give you an idea of how competitive
the market is for your specified positions. It will provide insight on whether you should
offer relocation for hard-to-fill positions.
• Professional groups and associations: Are you aware of all relevant groups and events on
LinkedIn OR Meetup OR Eventbrite? Those who are a part of these groups are all at least
passive candidates for you.
• Recruitment metrics benchmarks: Have an idea of what the industry-, location- and
position-specific time-to-fill, offer acceptance and submit-to-interview rates are so you
set the right expectations of recruitment for yourself and your managers.
• Market trends and knowledge: Your familiarity with the market should include all of the
latest happenings, including mass company lay-offs and major relocations, for example.

EMBRACE THE DATA
• Data-driven recruitment is a data-driven approach to hiring uses technologies,
techniques, and data to analyze a large talent pool and identify candidates with the
right skills, experience, and mindset to help the organization achieve its goals.
Recruiters will take a large talent pool, analyze it using a variety of technologies, and
narrow it down until only the best candidate remains.
• Data tells a story – it goes beyond thinking from the “gut” or the 10,000 hour rule.
• Data is dichotomous – either it happened or it didn’t.
• When discussing the limitations of a search with hiring managers, the data doesn’t lie.

EMBRACE THE DATA
• Most recruiters have been there. A choice between two (or more) incredibly
qualified candidates with seemingly nothing to distinguish which one is the better
choice for the job.
• In such situations, it not uncommon for some emotion or bias to creep into the
equation and prompt the recruiter to make a decision “from the gut.”
• In these situations, data-driven hiring can help make this decision for you by showing
variables that you may not have seen. Perhaps there is some nugget of information
hidden in one of your candidates’ work history that pushes him or her to the front
(or back). Or, perhaps one of your candidates has some of the same “intangibles”
that make a number of your top performers so effective.
• By collecting and analyzing this type of data, you’re giving yourself a much more
holistic view of each hiring situation, allowing you to be objective in your
decision-making.

EMBRACE THE DATA
• Making more informed and objective decisions based on data and recruitment
analytics on who to hire can have the very important benefit of improving the overall
quality of your work. That’s the same for virtually any industry.
• Take the time to analyze your data to gain a full understanding of what makes your
best hires tick.
• Who are they?
• Where did they come from?
• What are some common qualities they all share?
• Analyze the variables that are consistent with your best hires, and focus on those
going forward.

EMBRACE THE DATA
• If you’re focusing only on the variables that lead to the best hires and eliminating as
much waste or churn as possible, then you should also start to see the overall cost of
hiring decrease.
• That’s because you’re essentially trimming the fat on your traditional hiring process.
For example, identifying the platforms that you spend a lot of time and money
advertising on, but which offer little to no tangible results, makes it much easier to
cut this program altogether.
• This could save you lots of money, which in turn can be folded into more successful
recruitment endeavors.

EMBRACE THE DATA
• Analyzing and experimenting with different ways to improve the quality of your
recruitment process can also have the added benefit of improving your overall
candidate experience.
• Think about it. If the metrics around your application process imply that candidates
are repeatedly dropping off at the same point, then there’s probably a good reason
for it. That reason is likely that this step is annoying, redundant or too intensive for
most candidates to complete.
• By identifying these data points, you can remove the roadblocks that could be
stopping top tier candidates from completing the application process. As a result,
you begin to evolve and refine your candidate experience into one that is desirable
for your target candidates.

EMBRACE THE DATA
• Lastly, the more time you spend analyzing your recruitment data, the easier it
becomes to identify patterns and trends that suggest future situations.
• Understanding the ebbs and flows of your company’s recruitment and TA
environment will help with forecasting potential vacancies and the associated hiring
and labor costs associated with filling them.
• You can track things like turnover rate annually and common times of year when
people are leaving your company.

WHAT ELSE COULD THE DATA TELL US
• If your time-to-hire is consistently greater than your industry
average, examine which stages of your recruiting process lag.
• Sourcing: Consider diversifying your sourcing methods with
social recruiting or using a sourcing tool to help you reach
more candidates faster and build talent pipelines.
• Screening: Include qualifying questions on your job application
forms and prepare effective phone screen questions before
you start screening applicants.
• Interviews: Consider using software that will help
you effortlessly schedule interviews with hiring managers and
candidates across multiple calendars.

STRATEGY SESSIONS VS. TAKE OUT SESSIONS

Both you and hiring managers will
benefit from intake meetings, as long as
you ask pointed questions that help
shape the profile of a qualified
candidate and get at the motivation
behind hiring for the position.

• Why do you need to hire for this role?
• What’s your department’s function within the
company?
• What’s the structure of your current team and who will
your new hire report to?
• Will your new hire have any direct reports?
• What are the main responsibilities that your new hire
will have?
• What are the top three contributions this new hire will
make to the company within their first 90 or 120 days?
• What is the relationship this role has to other lines of
business within the organization?

• What qualifications are must-haves for candidates? (e.g. X technical skills,
experience with Y projects, Z certification or license)
• What would be some nice-to-have skills for candidates and why? (e.g.
experience in retail, familiarity with X programming language)
• Is it necessary for candidates to have industry experience for this role? Why
or why not?
• What software should your new hire be proficient in?
• What are your dealbreakers and why?
• How do you plan to assess candidates during the hiring process?
• Will you give them a written assignment or a project?
• What’s the career path for this position?

• When in doubt, ask “Why?”
• The 5 Whys technique was developed and fine-tuned within the Toyota
Motor Corporation as a critical component of its problem-solving training.
• Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s,
describes the method in his book Toyota Production System: Beyond
Large-Scale Production as “the basis of Toyota’s scientific approach . . . by
repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution
becomes clear.”
• Ohno encouraged his team to dig into each problem that arose until they
found the root cause. “Observe the production floor without
preconceptions,” he would advise. “Ask ‘why’ five times about every matter.”

MASTER YOUR BOOLEAN
Boolean search is a structured search process that
allows the user to insert words or phrases such as
AND, OR, NOT to limit, broaden and define the
search results. Boolean search allows the
combination of five different elements to conduct a
search and utilizes a search engine to its fullest
potential.

MASTER YOUR BOOLEAN
Five elements of Boolean search:
1. AND: placing AND between search keywords will allow
user's results to include both (or all) of the keywords. The
search terms that follow the AND must appear in the
search results.
2. OR: user writes OR when he/she wants to search for
something that has the possibility of including either set of
search terms. All combination possibilities will come up.
3. NOT: when a user dos not want a specific search term to
appear in the results, he/she writes NOT after the preferred
search term. This will prevent the terms from coming up.
4. Quotation marks “”: when users want to search for an
exact phrase, they use quotation marks around that phrase.
5. Parentheses (): placing parentheses allows separation of
the terms and preference to be given to specified ones.

MASTER YOUR BOOLEAN
• AND
• OR OR or | (pipe)
• NOT - (minus)
• “ “ “exact phrase”
• ( ) Nesting
• * * (one wildcard)
• ** **(two wildcards)
• Sequence #..#
• Word in title intitle:
• Word in url inurl:
• Site search site:
• File type filetype:

MASTER YOUR BOOLEAN
INURL:RESUME INTITLE:RESUME “ELIXIR“
(INTITLE:RESUME | INTITLE:"MY RESUME" | INTITLE:"RESUME OF") INURL:BASE
(INURL:RESUME OR INTITLE:RESUME) JAVA “RESTFUL API”
(OBJECTIVE OR SUMMARY) “MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY”
"COMPUTER SCIENCE" "SOFTWARE ENGINEER"

MASTER YOUR BOOLEAN
SITE:COM (RESUME OR CV OR VITA)
RESUME (ME OR MY) (INURL:BLOG OR INTITLE:BLOG OR) -INTITLE:JOB
-INURL:JOB -SEND –SUBMIT
FILETYPE:PDF (RESUME OR “ABOUT ME”)

EARN THE SPEED OF TRUST
Know Their Needs from the Start
• Sound obvious? Mmm-hmm. Now, what if we called this
section “Know Their Needs Better than They Do,” which is
more like what we mean here? Hiring managers don’t always
know right away what they want from the open role, or
exactly how to communicate their talent needs. It wasn’t so
long ago that 51% of recruiters were saying hiring managers
had to do a better job communicating what they were looking
for in a candidate.

Use Data
• Talent acquisition teams finally have analytics at their fingertips
like they never have before. Use them both to answer any
remaining questions you have about the open role, and to help
your hiring manager understand what the talent market looks like
and what they can expect in terms of candidate quality and
time-to-hire.
• As a repository of all your past hiring efforts, your ATS and CRM
hold the data that allows you to forecast your recruiting outcomes.
• Combined, they tell you the number of people you sourced,
screened, interviewed, and extended offers to in order to get an
offer accept the last time this role was open. They show how long
previous candidates sat in each of those stages of the funnel
before moving on. They hold the reasons candidates rejected your
offer, or the reasons you didn’t move forward with them.
• This might be an eye-opening moment for hiring managers: how
many candidates withdrew from process due to their own
unresponsiveness?

Educate Hiring Managers on Your Recruiting Process
• The title “hiring manager” is a bit of a misnomer. Most hiring
managers fall into that role by accident, and they’re only “in”
that role for as long as their team is hiring. Since they’re not
hanging out at the top of the funnel with you, they may not
be fully aware of how “the recruiting process” differs from
“the interview process.”
• They may be wondering what’s taking so long to even see a
qualified candidate. Let them know what’s happening in the
background.
• When in doubt, bring the data!

Build Trust
• Transparency can make or break the relationship between
recruiters and hiring managers… and thus the strength of your
hires. One great way to practice transparency is to share sourcing
insights with your HMs.
• What subject lines have led to exceptionally high open rates in
previous searches like this one?
• Be up-front about your limitations. If you’re recruiting for
particularly hard-to-fill roles, be honest about your bandwidth
when your HM comes to you with another req. They'll respect your
honesty, and you can come up with workarounds together.
• Be up-front about how reasonable their expectations are. If your
HM wants an A+ candidate at a B- salary, tell them that those
grades don’t match up. If they want the role filled in three weeks
but the average time to fill that position in your industry is 45 days,
tell them.
• Bring the data! You’ve got hard data available to prove your
point—from Glassdoor, to PayScale, to LinkedIn’s Talent Insights, to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and more.

Be a Student to the Business
• Turn the tables when you can and let your HM teach you
about their business. The better you know their business
function, the more credibility you have with your HM, and the
stronger an advisor you’ll be when it comes to crafting
meaningful outreach messages and suggesting alternative
talent pools.
• Ask to attend conference talks?
• Who are they following on Twitter?
• What YouTube Channels are there “go to” when they are
learning new concepts?
• Organize team trivia or game nights?

GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE
• Public speaking.
• Attending a networking event.
• Confronting a coworker.
• These are uncomfortable tasks, but sometimes need to be performed
for us to grow professionally. So how do you move out of your
comfort zone? It’s simple: be honest about your excuses; recognize
your strengths and take advantage of them; and finally, jump in. If you
make a few mistakes along the way, don’t worry. It’s just another part
of the learning process

• Start with small steps.
• Instead of jumping right into speaking at an industry event, sign up
for a public speaking class.
• Instead of speaking up in the boardroom, in front of your most senior
colleagues, start by speaking up in smaller meetings with peers to see
how it feels.
• And while you’re at it, see if you can recruit a close friend or colleague
to offer advice and encouragement in advance of a challenging
situation.

• Free Classes?

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
WHOA! That’s like a separate webinar!

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
• Automate Where You Can
• Use a Scheduling Tool
• Let’s Be Magical
• Trello My Fine Fellow
• When Do You Check Email or Does Email Check You?
• Get Scrummy
• Avoid Multitasking
• Follow Up Friday H/T Stacy Zappar
• I Shamelessly Promote Evernote
• Yellow Hammer: What about Grammar?
• Social Needya versus Social Media
• Pomodoro Technique

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Automate Where You Can
• IFTTT
• Zapier
• Airtable
• Clay

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Use a Scheduling Tool

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Trello My Fine Fellow

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
When Do You Check Email or Does Email Check You?

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Avoid Multitasking
How many Tabs do you have open right now? Why do you
have 100 tabs open right now?
You can only drink from one Tab at a time, or can you?

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Follow Up Friday H/T Stacy Zappar

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Shamelessly Promote Evernote

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Yellow Hammer: What about Grammar?

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Social Needya versus Social Media

ORGANIZE OR ELSE?
Pomodoro Technique

ALWAYS BE CLOSING
• Provide a great candidate experience from the onset.
• The closing process actually starts at the opening, with the
first phone call.
• Visualize the process as a crescendo from there — each
step should get the candidate more and more excited
about the job, culminating in the actual offer.

ALWAYS BE CLOSING
• Set compensation expectations upfront.
• There’s nothing worse than investing hours in recruiting,
only to have everything fall through during the offer call
because the candidate’s compensation expectations exceed
what you can offer.
• Discuss salary as early as possible.
• Discuss work authorization as soon as possible. Be able to
articulate your company’s abilities to support work
authorizations, visas, or green card.

ALWAYS BE CLOSING
• Constantly checking in with your candidate, putting the
feelers out, and being receptive to their emotional
landscape.
• One good practice is to ask your candidates, “if we were to
make you an offer today, how would you feel about that?”
• There are various ways to phrase the question, but the
principle is the same – you’re aiming to understand where
your candidate’s head is at throughout the recruitment
process.
• Get into the habit of regularly asking because the earlier you
know about potential objections, the more easily you can
resolve them.

ALWAYS STAY A STUDENT
• MAKE TIME FOR OTHERS
• BLOG ABOUT WHAT YOU LEARN WITH THE INTENTION OF TEACHING
OTHERS
• ATTEND CONFERENCES
• TRY YOGA
• TAKE A MASTER CLASS W/ SHALLY, BATMAN, KIERSTEN, OR OTHERS
• ONE THING THAT SHANNON TAUGHT ME

QUESTIONS + ANSWERS
• Connect on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfink/
• Connect on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bfx777/
• Connect on Peloton thebrianfink
• Connect on Twitter @thebrianfink
• Connect on Apple Podcasts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sourcing-school-by-recruitingdaily/id1565198287

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