Recruitment is a dynamic industry and requires people that are energetic and driven. Without that personal level of motivation, you will struggle to make money. It is a competitive industry filled with opportunity but requires you to work hard.

Good interpersonal skills

The ability to interact professionally with people at different levels of an organisation will help you develop good working relationships. Relationship building must be intentional and focused – not just what you can get from the conversation, but what you can learn about your clients and their business. It is where you start to find opportunities.

Being able to communicate well

Communicating is as much about listening as it is about talking. A good communicator provides the answers that someone is looking for more effectively simply because they are hearing what is looked for and frames their response within that reference.

Being able to probe effectively

Knowing what probing questions are and how to use them is highly advantageous in recruitment. Probing questions open up the conversation and lead into more questions that allow you to get to know more about the client, candidate or job you’re working with. The more information you can get the more you have to work with, which in turn makes your job much easier.

Reading between the lines

Knowing how to read people and hear what they are communicating is very important in recruitment. When you are on the phone, for example, you don’t have the benefit of seeing facial expressions but you can listen to tone of voice. Sometimes the tone tells you more about what they are saying or feeling than words do. 

Developing intuition

Intuition is what is often referred to as a ‘gut-feeling’, knowing something instinctively without any hard evidence. If someone is being vague or avoiding answering a certain question by steering the conversation in a different direction, intuition can help you pick up on the fact that they aren't being entirely open and honest. A gut-instinct will tell you there is more to uncover and nudge you to ask more probing questions. You may not get the answers you want to hear but it can save you a lot of time, effort, and trouble if you uncover all that is being said. 

Good summarising skills

Being able to listen and then summarise the important facts is vital in recruitment, especially when writing up emails. Using bullet points is a great way to highlight important information and present it in a way that is easy to read. One way in which you will use this is in creating a skills summary to send to a client before presenting them with a CV. You need to be able to pick out the skills that will sell the candidate to the client and link up with what they are looking for.

A good memory is a good asset

A good memory gives you confidence and helps to inspire confidence in your abilities as a recruiter with both clients and candidates. A good memory will help you to keep on top of your daily tasks, remember your priorities, and help you to operate more efficiently.

Selling – always be closing

While it may seem that recruitment is about placing people in jobs, what it involves is sales. It is target driven, sales revenue driven and it requires that you know how to sell. Recruitment is largely a sales job and to be successful, you need to have the confidence to fulfil that sales role

Multi-tasking

In recruitment you will be performing multiple procedures so the ability to multi-task is important. It is easy to get bogged down doing many tasks and think you are being productive. But at the end of the day if those tasks are not helping you to get more clients or place more candidates in jobs, then you are not very efficient and you won’t reach your full earning potential.  

Resilience

As exciting as the recruitment industry is, it is also quite tough because it is competitive and demanding. Recruiters need to have a degree of resilience and be able to keep at it when doors are being closed in their face or when someone else places a candidate in a position they’ve been working on.

Recruiting requires a combination of different skills. Many people in the industry do well enough on at an average level but there are only a few that excel. The people that do excel at recruitment are people that have the right personal attributes and can multitask, prioritise, know what’s important, be able to build relationships and most important of all - sell! The opportunity exists in recruitment to make a lot of money and be a very fulfilling career. It’s up to you to develop the skills and qualities you need to become a recruiter that excels in the industry.