Recruiters are often known as the “source of hiring”, but as a recruitment agency, your search for the perfect candidate can only go as far as how well trained your recruiters are. Therefore, building an exceptional team of recruiters is just as crucial as finding exceptional candidates—which can only be accomplished with highly skilled and trained recruiters.

As a recruiting agency, it’s crucial to develop an effective training strategy for recruiters to acquire the best talent within your organisation. As a hiring manager or human resource specialist, recruiter training can directly impact your organisation’s productivity and growth.

Talented recruiters can provide candidates with a positive experience and bring in excellent new hires during the recruitment process. However, if you don’t provide proper training for your recruiters, they’ll make some common recruiting mistakes, leading to a hard time finding those great candidates.

According to ClearCompany, training strategies have become so important that 68% of employees believe that training and development is the company’s most crucial policy.

In order to successfully train recruiters for agencies, here are ten pointers you’ll need to consider to sharpen and elevate their skills.

10 Things To Keep In Mind While Training Recruiters In Your Agency

1. Offer Mentorship

Mentoring may seem like the obvious solution to training new hires, but it is not something that should be overlooked as it is a crucial step towards developing an effective strategy that will affect a recruiter’s performance in the long run.

Assigning new recruiters with an experienced mentor allows them to observe the techniques used in recruitment agencies and helps new recruiters gain insight into the functioning of the agency and work ethics.

In addition, a mentor is an excellent asset to any organisation as it allows new hires to get an in-depth understanding and helps establish positive relationships. Mentoring also gives seasoned recruiters an excellent opportunity to share their expertise, skill, and ideas with new recruiters, promoting a more empowered workplace.

Most importantly, make sure that your mentors are constantly updated about the latest trends and strategies in training and the recruitment industry to keep your training relevant to changing times. Recruiters would find it easier to do this if a training manual were implemented.

Read more: 5 skills & strategies required by a recruiter in the post-COVID-19 market.

2. Be Resourceful!

Inevitably, new recruiters will have many questions and gaps in their knowledge. These gaps can be mitigated by having go-to resources and knowledge repositories for everything related to the agency’s guidelines, resources, sourcing lists and questions that can be asked in interviews. One of the most substantial tasks for any recruiter is the task of sourcing and attracting ideal candidates.

Recruiters need to know where to find them before engaging in any cold-calling, emailing, or other interactions with potential candidates. To ease this task for new recruiters, you can create a list of sources, questions or a database that your agency has previously utilised to locate the best talent.

To further structurise this aspect of training, your agency can take a step ahead by creating a guide or handbook for new recruiters to steer them in the right direction.

3. Showcase Your Work Culture

When it comes to training new hires, organisations often focus on the most apparent aspects, like what to expect from the employer, the tasks they are expected to work on and the practical information.

However, a plan to integrate new recruiters within the agency’s work culture is often neglected. Your agency can put this into practice by demonstrating problem-solving and essential customer service skills and the most effective ways for communication as a recruiter. Showcasing your agency’s work culture and ethics is a great way to help imbibe new recruiters with the voice of the culture and help them engage faster.

4. Conduct Intake Meetings

Conducting informative intake meetings for new recruiters is fundamental to their success. Intake meetings are an excellent way for recruiters to get a clear picture of the agency’s expectations and pick up on new information around the existing candidate pool and recruitment marketplace. Ensure that there is a two-way communication to establish relationships and fill any gaps.

5. Involve Other Departments

As a recruitment agency, successfully sourcing candidates and getting them placed can only occur with the proper integration and cross-functioning of recruiters with the rest of the agency.

Inter-departmental connections are also a great way to encourage the flow of ideas and exchange of information which can significantly benefit the productivity and efficiency in workflow. To attain a common goal, all the departments involved must function in synchronisation.

Fresh recruiters should be trained from the initial stages to gain a deeper understanding of the functioning of other departments so that there can be smooth cross-functional communication within the agency. Involving other departments within training recruiters help emphasise values like cooperation and trust within the agency.

6. Instil Confidence Within New Recruiters

Focusing on confidence during training gives recruiters a chance to learn how confidence can help them attract great candidates and persuade them to develop their career within your agency. Providing fresh recruiters with knowledge, skills and the tools for successful recruiting can boost their confidence and evoke a sense of reliability in their positions for the agency.

A confident recruiter will ultimately lead to improved engagement with prospective clients and candidates.

7. First-Hand Operations Learning

To give new recruiters a taste of the recruitment practices taking place in the agency, make them comfortable by taking them along to weekly operational meetings, including them in any projects and asking for their valuable input.

Such first-hand experience encourages micro-learning, which helps fresh
recruiters pick up on the techniques and strategies used by the agency, and it’s an excellent way to help recruiters ease into the agency’s practices.

8. Continuous Training

Ideally, training for successful recruiters should be constant and never-ending. With the constant changes in the ever-growing, competitive recruitment industry, training never really ends for a recruiter.

Instead of completing the training period and leaving recruiters off to their work, implementing a continuous learning or training system is an excellent strategy for retaining recruiters and helps them stay up to date with the latest advancements and industry standards and allows them to review their skills and knowledge periodically.

Consequently, this leads to much more efficiency and functionality within your agency. Providing continuous learning is bound to improve the standards of your recruiters, which will directly improve their ability to find and hire great candidates.

9. Conduct Follow-Ups & Encourage Feedback

While recruiter training, ensure that you incorporate follow-ups and take time out to review the work of new recruiters.

Checking in on fresh recruiters can help determine if there are still some gaps left to fill, questions that need answering, or any other information they still require. This also provides an opportunity for new recruiters to provide any feedback—allowing healthy two-way communication.

Following up on recruiters and opportunities for providing feedback can be implemented by arranging meetings or even small workshops.

Agencies can also provide feedback to recruiters to help them learn where they did well and where they can improve by providing post-interview feedback.

Post-interview feedback is vital as it can help them have a better experience which helps build a good reputation for any recruiting agency.

Requesting feedback from your recruiters also ensures that their input is valued and allows them to work more effectively for your agency.

10. Provide On-Going Learning

Recruitment agencies belong to a fast-paced and technologically driven industry. To stay current and up to date with the newest trends and technological advancements, on-demand recruiter training are an excellent initiative that can be incorporated into the training of new recruiters.

With the advent of the internet, numerous online courses are available that be taken up anywhere, at your convenience. These on-demand courses are an excellent way to stay up to date with the ever-changing industry.

This ensures that recruiters are always ahead of their game, so agencies will have to spend less time and resources to train recruiters formally. Ultimately, this leads to much more productivity and higher quality work by the recruiters.

Here are a few online courses that you can sign them up for—

Undoubtedly a stellar recruiter training program speeds up the onboarding process, fills any development gaps, and increase employee productivity and engagement—all of which is essential for the long-term functioning of a successful recruiting agency. Keep in mind that the best leaders understand the importance of training and make it a priority.

Excellent recruiter training is the foundation for successful recruiting!