'Chelle Peters, PMP

Partnering with global teams and candidates is an excellent way to grow as a recruiter. While working across multiple geographies does present challenges, I’ve found that productivity, collaboration, and communication improve significantly when expectations are clearly defined from the start. Setting SLAs that outline meeting schedules, action item timelines, and update and decision deadlines are crucial for everyone’s success.

Entering the Talent Acquisition (TA) field can be daunting for an early in career professional. The best advice I received to establish your reputation and brand are: Develop solid listening skills. Commit to life-long learning and skills development. Adopt and practice good collaboration, communication and follow-up skills. Be open to asking questions and learning from others. Lastly, develop a thick skill and learn how not to take things personally. Dealing with rejection is at the core of a TA career. The sooner you can adopt strategies to deal with feedback, the faster you will progress in your career development.

Bulletproofing your career in talent acquisition begins with a focus and commitment to life-long learning. Luckily, there are many available resources to take advantage of. Blogs and web casts, LinkedIn influencers, on-line courses and articles and your current network. Investing in your skills is investing in your brand.

Referral programs are an essential way to build and strengthen employee brand, candidate pipelines and employee engagement. Unfortunately, many companies don’t leverage referrals to achieve these results. When an employee refers a candidate, there is nothing more detrimental than failing to take action. I recommend assessing each candidate referral then determining priority for follow up. Reach out to each referral candidate according to prioritization. Make sure send a follow up contact response (phone call, email, text message etc.) to all referrals. If a referral is hired, share the success story internally and externally and see your candidate experience and branding metrics rise and your quality referrals increase.

The hiring process is a team sport. The more that all members of the hiring team are educated, prepared and ready for prompt collaboration and communication, the more efficient the interview process can be conducted. I recommend starting with a solid intake meeting where all of the requirements, expectations, budget, market factors and due diligence are defined. I then follow up with action items, expectations for the interview team and the communication cadence for all team members and engaged candidates. In my experience, a systems focused approach really sets up the hiring process to have clarity, consistency and better candidate experience.

The ability to establish rapport with candidates is a basic skill needed for successful, long-term relationship building. My best practice is to do my homework about the potential candidate and be able to present a good overview of the organization and opportunity. Second, is to ask the candidate what their goals are for the next step in their career? What are their compensation requirements, willingness to work on-site or remote, type of position they see themselves in next and what type of company/industry are they interested in. Understanding the candidates’ needs are just as important as knowing the requirements for a position. Why would a candidate work with a recruiter who doesn’t take the time to get to know them first?