Jelmer Zuidema is a recruitment marketeer at Booking.com. He’s not a recruiter. He’s never processed a candidate from application to his or her desk. However, sometimes it’s good to not be too close, to you can objectively observe successful behaviors of those who are. Close enough to understand everything that’s going on, far enough away to be able to observe objectively and surrounded with several really awesome colleagues to analyze for successful behaviors.
So what are the most important skills for a successful recruiter?
- Adaptability
There is a lot happening in the recruitment space – more focus and budget means a lot of innovation. Combine that with a high attrition rate (recruiters can work anywhere they want) and you have an ever-changing department. This asks a lot from everyone within the company, but recruiters get the hardest hit. All of a sudden they are forced to work with a different ATS, a chatbot delivers them leads instead of candidates and.. What happened to the resumes? Oh yes, the new careers site doesn’t ask for a resume.. Well, let’s call the lead and ask for all the information we need to update the fields in our new ATS in order to process him / her as a candidate. Adaptability is flexibility with the will to improve.
- Data-informed decision making
Everyday a lot of people (recruitment marketers, employer brand specialists, career site builders, advertisers etc) work towards one common goal – getting the right people in the right chairs. To make sure that all prediction models, hiring forecasts and toolings can deliver the right results, we need recruiters to give us the right data. This means that they need to keep their funnels clean (ATS hygiene), but more importantly, they need to know what they can do to influence the data. Recruiters should give meaning to the data that all the others just see as numbers – 100 applications per day seems like a good thing, but if 99 are rejected straight away then the focus is on the wrong metric.
- Communication
“With great power comes responsibility” – not only is that my favorite Spiderman quote, it’s also something that recruiters need to remember. If you still want to see the labour market as a theatre of war, then recruiters are the companies’ CIA. With the intel that recruiters provide, employer brand specialists can create the propaganda needed to win the war. Do you hire a lot of developers because your company offers a higher salary than the competitor? Perfect, let’s state that in our ads. Do candidates decline offers because of a lack of information? Let’s make sure that future candidates get more information while on their candidate journey. An advertising strategy stands or falls by having the right information, and recruiters are the gateway to that information.
At Talent Acquisition Live, march 12th in Amsterdam, Jelmer will talk about recruiter skills with Hung Lee in a fireside chat.
Jelmer Zuidema is a recruitment marketeer at Booking.com. He’s not a recruiter. He’s never processed a candidate from application to his or her desk. However, sometimes it’s good to not be too close, to you can objectively observe successful behaviors of those who are. We wrote about the three most imporant skills according to Jelmer in this article. Today we ask him about his skillset.
Jelmer, can you give us an example of how possessing one of the skills you mentioned before, adaptability, data-informed decission making and communication made all the difference in one of your jobs?
Adaptability has always been one of the skills that I’m most proud of. Former colleagues and clients call me a sponge – I like to indulge myself with information. Having the right information makes sure that you can join any conversation and not make a complete fool out of yourself – which is nice. But adaptability is more than being able to have a conversation, it’s also about accepting different opinions. It’s the ability to change your actions, course or approach in order to make the most impact.
What are the skills you expect to make a difference in the future? Say in the next 5 years?
All the predictions say the same – if you want to succeed in your future job you will have to focus on learnability, agility and resilience. Learn, pivot, pivot, pivot and bounce back when things are not going as they should. I would say that’s a perfect start, but would like to add ‘problem-solving’ to that list – bouncing back is way easier if you are able to quickly come up with a set of solutions.
What’s the one recruitment related skill you would like to become better at yourself?
In order to properly understand recruitment, I would like to learn how to assess candidates with minimal information. I know recruiters that look at a Twitter feed and immediately see matches between that person and open jobs. That’s a skill that is not only really valuable within recruitment, but also in business – one of the focusses for me in the coming ~40 years. Another skill that will help me in both is negotiation – what are triggers to act on in order to turn a ‘maybe’ into a convincing ‘yes’?
At Talent Acquisition Live, march 12th in Amsterdam, Jelmer will talk about recruiter skills with Hung Lee in a fireside chat.
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