Simple Guide on how to hire Technical Recruiters

I've done some writing on hiring software engineers. But nothing on hiring the people who hire engineers: Recruiters.

This post includes an overview of our battle-tested process to hire Recruiters.

We have gone through this process multiple times. This time in 2024, I kept track of the data to help illustrate our approach.

We had 305 candidates and ended up hiring 3 candidates.

Hiring Process

Any hiring process can be broken down into 3 phases:

1. Attracting Candidates
2. Assessing Candidates
3. Closing Candidates

In this article I'll focus on the Assessing Candidates phase. This is the bulk of the hiring process and the part where I think we have a different - and better - approach.

Assessing Candidates

There are 3 main steps to our hiring process:

1. Screening Interview
2. Hiring Challenge
3. Mock Interview

Click below if you're interested in getting the resources for this hiring process. Read on if you want the full explanation.

Step #1: Screening Interview

I enjoy starting interviews with recruiters with the classical question:

"What do you know about us?"

I have found this to be a good proxy of motivation - especially for recruiters. I assume they ask this question often in their interviews (if they don't, they should!).

Other than describing the role, the company and collecting more details about candidate's experience, there are additional 2 questions we like to ask:

1. "Imagine a Hiring Manager asks for your help with a new role. What steps will you take to close the position?"
2. "Now imagine all the candidates you send to the Hiring Manager are rejected and you disagree with the rejection reasons. What would you do then?"

Question #1 helps us understand if they can think about a hiring process from the beginning to the end. The best candidates usually focus on understanding the role before moving on to decide exactly how to approach it.

Question #2 shows how candidates would manage conflict with clients. This happens a lot in practice. The best candidates approach this topic collaboratively and suggest we refine the approach to move forward.

There are no right answers - but there are wrong ones! The goal is to see how people think of these topics. Since they are both open questions, the answers vary wildly.

We rejected about 66% of the candidates in this step.

Being a bit more selective early in the process pays off - it allows you to spend more hours per candidate in the ones that make it to the next rounds.

This is the Interview Script we used for interviews in this stage. You can get the editable Google Docs document at the bottom of the article.

Step #2: Hiring Challenge

I am a hardcore fan of Hiring Challenges.

The best way to predict a candidate's job performance is to evaluate their performance at a task similar to what they will do on the job.

This is what we attempt to do here.

We ask candidates to do 3 common tasks:

• Write a job description based on a Technical Requirements document;
• Send a sourcing message to invite a candidate (me) for an interview;
• Interview a candidate for that same job (this is Step #3, we'll get to it later).

We send candidates this set of instructions for this challenge.

Alongside these instructions, we also provide access to a separate Technical Requirements document with all the information necessary to write the Job Description.

You can get access to these documents at the bottom of this article.

Evaluating Hiring Challenges

The process of evaluating hiring challenges is simple, as long as you have a set of defined criteria.

The table below is what we use. We score candidate submissions from 1-5 in 4 dimensions: Format & Delivery, Job Description, Sourcing Message and Effort.

Step #3: Mock Interview

The last step in the process is the mock interview: we have candidates interview us.

It's the logical next step after the Hiring Challenge. They interview us for the role they learned about when writing the Job Description and sending the Sourcing Message.

There's a lot of things we pay attention to: what questions they ask, how they deal with difficult candidates (we act out on purpose...), how they conduct the interview.

But what I am actually looking for is quite simple:

• How do I feel when being interviewed by this person?

This is the most important question.

Whenever I meet a candidate (or any person), I know there are 2 types of characteristcs of this person's behavior: mutable and immutable ones.

As an interviewer I try to ignore all the mutable traits (their technical abilities, their knowledge of the role, etc.) and to make hiring decisions based on immutable traits (energy, motivation, attitude).

I can teach someone how we hire at Remote Crew. I can't teach intrinsic attributes.

Hiring Results

For this process we reviewed 305 applications, 3 of which were referrals and the other 302 were inbound applications from the role we posted on LinkedIn.

We made 4 offers, 3 of which were accepted. Believe it or not, 2 out of the 3 offers accepted were made to referred candidates.

As someone with a background in Data Science I know what you're thinking - "surely there was a biased approach. No way this happens naturally."

It did.

Nobody in the team knew 1 of the candidates was a referral (a friend of mine told me about a candidate and I didn't share this with the team - I even forgot about it myself).

And 1 other referral applied directly via the form so we only found out this person was recommended by someone when she was in the final interview round.

I'm not saying there is no chance this fact influenced outcomes. I am saying the majority of the people who voted for these candidates were not even aware of this fact.

The truth is - referrals are extremely effective as candidate sources, especially if you have some connections in the industry.

Need help hiring Recruiters?

I've done it before and I am happy to help :) Just book a call in the section below.

At the very least, feel free to use the resources I shared in this article to get ideas for your own Recruiter hiring process.

Good luck! 🚀