Recruiter

What levels exist in a recruiting function and how do people progress?

Progression usually runs from coordination into sourcing, from sourcing into owning a full search, and from there into managing a desk of hiring managers or a team of recruiters. The step people underestimate is from executing a search to advising on one: a senior recruiter is hired for the ability to tell a director that a brief is unfillable at that budget and to be believed. Titles are inconsistent between employers, so ask what someone actually owned rather than trusting the label on their profile.

How should an employer decide whether to hire a recruiter at all?

The trigger is not a headcount number, it is the point at which hiring stops fitting inside somebody else's job. Founders and managers can run their own searches while volume is low and the network is warm, and doing so keeps them close to the market. It stops working when roles queue behind other work, when the same sourcing has to be rebuilt from scratch each time, or when candidates go quiet because nobody had time to reply. By then the cost of a recruiter is smaller than the cost of the delay.

What goes wrong when a recruiter is hired without anyone to manage them?

A recruiter dropped into an organisation with no owner defaults to whatever the loudest hiring manager wants, which is rarely the company's priority order. Nobody sets the load, nobody arbitrates when two managers want the same week of attention, and nobody notices that four searches have stalled for the same underlying reason. Someone has to hold the hiring plan, decide sequencing, and review the pipeline on a regular rhythm. That person does not need to be a recruiting specialist, but the job cannot belong to nobody.

Which recruiter model should an employer buy: in-house, agency or embedded?

Three purchasing models exist and they are not interchangeable. An in-house recruiter is your employee, carries your brand in every conversation, and builds knowledge of your teams that compounds over years. An agency recruiter works for a supplier, holds their own candidate network, and is paid per placement. An embedded recruiter is a contractor who sits inside your process on a day rate or monthly retainer, using your systems and working in your name.

Choose by the shape of the demand rather than by price alone. Steady, predictable hiring across familiar roles rewards an employee whose institutional memory keeps improving. A short burst of hiring that will end, or a market you have never recruited in, suits a supplier. A long but temporary spike, such as a funded expansion or a new office, is where the embedded arrangement fits, because you get in-house behaviour without a permanent salary commitment.

Where does the recruiter's ownership start and stop?

The recruiter owns the search and the machinery around it: agreeing the brief, generating candidate flow, running the first assessment, keeping the pipeline moving, and negotiating the close. What sits outside that boundary matters more than what sits inside it. The choice of who gets hired belongs to the person the hire will report to, and diary logistics belong to a coordinator once interview volume justifies one.

Blurring the boundary is where searches quietly fail. A recruiter who starts making selection calls will filter towards their own taste, and nobody notices until shortlists stop matching the brief. A recruiter left running all their own scheduling at volume trades sourcing hours for calendar hours. Write the boundary down when the search opens, so both sides can point at it later instead of arguing from memory.

Why does a sensible requisition load differ so much between recruiters?

Requisition counts are a poor unit of work because the roles behind them are not comparable. Someone running repeatable volume hiring with strong inbound flow can hold many live roles at once. Someone filling scarce senior positions, where every candidate has to be found, approached and persuaded one at a time, will do the same total work across a small handful and look unproductive on a count.

This matters most when you are deciding how many recruiters to employ. Dividing open roles by a number you read somewhere will either starve a specialist search of attention or leave a volume desk underused. Look instead at how many separate hiring managers each person serves, how much of the pipeline has to be built by hand rather than arriving on its own, and whether anyone absorbs scheduling. Staff to that.

What does each recruiter pay model actually incentivise?

A salaried in-house recruiter is paid for running the process regardless of outcome, which is exactly right when you want honest advice that a role should not be filled as written. The risk is drift: without visible output the job can slide into administration. Bonus schemes tied to hires are the usual correction, and they often reintroduce the very pressure they were meant to remove.

Agency placement fees pay only on a signed offer, so the supplier carries the risk and prices it accordingly. That structure rewards speed and volume of submission, and gives the sender no financial reason to tell you a candidate is a stretch. Commission inside an agency pushes individuals the same way. None of this is dishonest, but read every submission knowing what the person sending it is paid for.

What can you genuinely test when interviewing a recruiter?

Most recruiter interviews test presentation, which is the one thing a recruiter will always be good at. Test the work instead. Hand them a real job description from your own team and ask them to run the intake conversation on you. A strong candidate will refuse to accept the requirements as written and will press on which are genuinely essential, what the market for that profile looks like, and how the process will run.

Then ask for a search plan for that role, out loud, in the room: where those people would be, which channel they would use first, and what the outreach would say. Ask what they would do in week three if nothing had landed. Finally ask about a search that failed, and listen for whether they can name their own contribution to it rather than only the hiring manager's.