How to Hire a Recruiter
Recruiters are the front door of your company. They shape candidate experience, build talent pipelines, and play a direct role in the quality of every hire you make. Great recruiters are consultative partners to hiring managers — not just schedulers — and they genuinely enjoy finding the right person for the right role.
What to Look For
- Track record of filling roles efficiently without sacrificing quality
- Sourcing sophistication: LinkedIn Recruiter, Boolean search, community sourcing — not just posting and waiting
- Strong candidate experience instincts: candidates talk to each other, and employer brand matters
- Hiring manager partnership: ability to push back, advise, and educate internal stakeholders
- Data-driven: time-to-fill, offer acceptance rate, pipeline conversion — they should know their own numbers
- Specialization that matches your hiring needs (technical recruiting vs. go-to-market vs. executive)
The Hiring Process
- 1
Portfolio and metrics review
Ask for the roles they've filled, time-to-fill, and offer acceptance rates. If they can't give you numbers, probe why.
- 2
Sourcing exercise
Give them a hard-to-fill role and ask them to map out their sourcing strategy. Look for creativity and specificity.
- 3
Hiring manager interaction roleplay
Role-play as a demanding hiring manager. How do they manage expectations, push back on unrealistic requirements, and maintain the partnership?
- 4
Candidate experience interview
Ask about their approach to keeping candidates warm, delivering rejections, and building a talent community.
Interview Tips
- Ask 'Tell me about the hardest role you've ever filled — what made it hard and how did you solve it?'
- Ask how they handle a hiring manager who keeps rejecting candidates for vague reasons
- Probe on passive sourcing: 'Walk me through how you'd find a senior backend engineer who isn't looking'
- Ask about a candidate they regret not moving forward — and a hire they regret making
Red Flags
- Describes recruiting as primarily reactive — posts jobs and screens responses
- Can't give metrics for their own performance
- No experience with passive sourcing or building pipelines proactively
- Dismisses candidate experience as 'not their job'
- No ability to push back constructively on hiring managers — just takes orders
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