Happy Global TA Day, recruiters! (Celebrated each year, the first Wednesday in September.) Recruitment marketers like me celebrate your skills today!
Let me count the ways:
You are skilled at developing candidate personas.
While we’re here trying to understand what a nurse in Milwaukee wants out of life, you know already. If nurses, for example, are who you’re recruiting, you’ve talked to hundreds of them first hand. You’ve got the numbers. And you’ve got the quality. You can paint a picture of who will be successful at your company in that role. You inadvertently conduct persona research all day.
You might be the best kind of weird.
Strangers tell you their real motivations, their goals, the secret reasons they’re not happy. And sometimes it means you have to go first to earn their trust. Add the ghosting, the offers accepted and rescinded last minute, and the 1,000 outreaches with zero responses, and somewhere along the way you stop caring about pretense and bravado.
As a result, recruiters have the gift of being so completely themselves, that others can’t help but be their real selves too. When I was in talent acquisition, I once ate two french fries off a painfully shy candidate’s plate during a work lunch. I don’t know what came over me. I apologized, and I was embarrassed. But he laughed and finally opened up to me. I placed him in his first tech job.
We admire your timing.
You know the stories candidates need to hear, and at what moment in the candidate journey. You know who they need to meet in the interview, and whose romantic partner needs to hear from a recently relocated family member of an employee during the offer stage. Your ability to understand the needs of people making major decisions, at specific points in the process, is a marketer’s dream.
You make the world of work better.
You shepherd the right people into the right roles at the right companies, because you are the person who understands all three. Thanks for trying to make everyone more fulfilled and engaged during the quarter (or more!) of their lives they spend at work.
Thanks for everything you do for today and everyday.