Recruitment and the Art of Reading People

When confronted with the question “What exactly is your profession about? “, every recruiter will give you more or less the same answer: Recruitment means communicating with people. How do you keep it fresh and personal? Most recruiters need to follow a fixed procedure of qualifying and submitting suitable candidates. Once you have left the same voice mail message for ten different people in a row, your actions begin to feel increasingly automatic. Yet every candidate needs to be equally committed. Every candidate has a unique combination of thoughts, feelings and actions. What are the options available?

• The first option would be to ignore all individuality. Sadly, agencies like these do exist. Their recruiters will not put much effort into building professional relationships. As a result, candidates will most likely never hear from them again.
• The second option is to embrace individual situations and find a personal understanding with the candidate. This is what good recruiters do: they try to avoid risks by including every important aspect into the conversation, while at the same time assuming every candidate to be an individual person.

In order to create this personal understanding, good recruiters will know how people think and react. Even when talking to twenty people a day, one has to master what I like to call “the art of reading people”.

Our consultants at RIZE work with highly trained professional candidates that, at time of meeting them, have already carved out a career path for themselves over many years. In most cases, it is our task to find out their interests, skills and most importantly, risk points. The key to reading candidates properly is to transform your mind into a detector during the call, as the listening process is based largely on intuition. One needs to be in constant deduction mode in order to analyze everything said, not said, how it is said and why it is said. If in doubt, you need to check again by asking further questions and be absolutely honest with them about what the role entails. It is important to understand the precarious balance between “finding a person to match the job” versus “finding a job to match the person”.

Done well, recruitment can be similar to being both a counselor and a detective. While we might not be able to read a candidate’s entire life story from a LinkedIn profile, we can certainly extract a lot of information from one phone call. An effective conversation boils down to:

• preparation,
• building trust,
• thoroughness,
• intuition,
• skills of deduction
• active listening,
• honesty.

It can take some time to achieve everything on this list. Building trust especially is an aspect that cannot be ticked off after one phone call. As one gains more and more knowledge in recruitment techniques, it gets easier to identify candidates’ attitudes. But since these are subject to change every now and again, a combination of rational and subconscious evaluation is essential. Good preparation is the key to being professional. Only candidates that are committed see the application process through to the end.