The Secret Ingredient to a Senior Recruiter

Technical recruiting is like real estate. The first year for a new technical recruiter is like a mixture between Gladiator, Gamer, and Alice in Wonderland. It's brutal and triumphant, insane and jumbled. Those of us who have been there know what it feels like to have your human worth measured by a whiteboard of doom that defines you as bunch of fractions – "ACTUAL/GOAL" - suddenly, your life revolves around ratios of call metrics, phone screens, interviews, and placements. You're terrified of your boss. You're terrified of your headset. You're even more terrified of the 70 engineers you are supposed to call every single day, as they all-too-willingly place their career in your trembling, sweaty hands.

You read scripts. You practice saying, "What is a commutable distance for you?" and you pretend to know what C# and C++ are, secretly thinking they look like the letter "C" saying a swear word, and dying to ask someone why there isn't a "C-" programming language. You pretend not to mind that your boss listens in on your phone conversations and critiques your sentences (in real-time), over instant messenger as you talk. You pretend to "get" the jokes about Microsoft and pretend to understand comments about open source "hippies". You literally spend 10 hours a day faking it – and fall face first on your pillow every night, not wondering, but KNOWING you made a huge, ginormous, colossal career mistake. When your significant other asks you how your day was, you manage to generate an anguished, "hurmmmmmmmph," into your pillow, lift your face only enough to intelligibly demand alcohol, and try not to cry.

And then you say "Congratulations!" for the first time.

You are a geek gladiator. Russell Crowe with glasses. You get high fives from your boss and your assigned mentor, who has precisely 7 months more recruiting experience than you do. You are royalty in your company (for about an hour). You did something right. You made a difference in someone's life. You made something happen. You get a commission. Your candidate sends you a thank you note that calls you "their favorite recruiter ever". Your client loves you for finding that engineering needle in a haystack. Suddenly, when a new job description lands in your inbox, a instead of a big "huh?" popping into your head, a name of a candidate to call pops into your head. The game changes. Suddenly, the "ACTUAL/GOAL" fractions are bigger on the top than the bottom. Suddenly, you get it.

And then the next month hits. You get abused again by a never ending cycle of unreturned, too-long voicemails, impossible hiring managers, and counteroffers. And you "hurmmmmmmph," into your pillow again. And you drink some more. And you try not to cry again.

This rollercoaster ride of misery and elation will deep-fry even the most Teflon-coated recruiter. I've often wondered what makes a recruiter stick it out past the first couple of years, especially as I try to bring new recruiters on board at Idea Entity. I've often wondered what made ME stick it out. Part of me thinks it's just stupidity, or insanity. Both tough things to put on a job description for a Junior Recruiter. But I think what makes a recruiter successful in the long run, especially in the hyper competitive world of technology, is more than insanity, stubbornness, or stupidity.

Pleasing people is in a successful senior recruiter's DNA. We thrive on the impossible search. You want to really get an experienced recruiter riled up? Tell us "I bet you can't find this – nobody else has been able to." We take a perverse pleasure in requests like that - tirelessly networking, networking, networking, in a valiant effort to prove you wrong. It's more than a job – more than money for us. To a fault, we genuinely want to surprise you with the perfect person, make friends, be memorable, please you. We really, really care about what we do. Every successful senior recruiter I know has that People Pleaser thing in common. But that looks weird in a job description, and doesn't even make sense when taken out of context. Looks a bit like a recipe, actually:

Sr. Recruiter

• 2 Tbsp. loves proving people wrong
  
• ¼ cup stubborn
  
• Dash of insane glimmer in eye
  
• 1 cup People Pleaser
  
• Bake in intense heat until thick skin appears.
  

Finding great recruiting talent is harder than finding the most niche engineer in the world. There are no keywords, no parameters for the "right background." Some of the best recruiters I know have the weirdest backgrounds I've ever seen – a shoeshiner, a horse trainer, a professional student. Most people "fall into" recruiting through people they know - it's not a deliberate career choice. I often wish I knew what would magnetically attract the above recipe, incarnate in a person, to our doorstep at Idea Entity. We've been lucky in the past, to have Teflon-coated people pleasers come to our recruiting team - but it's tough to scale to our newly bulging business at IE while reliant on luck.

More on that in the next installment.