Profession of IT recruiter

The profession of an IT recruiter is only gaining popularity. Recruiting is not taught at university, and there are few quality courses on the market. Therefore, we decided to figure out how to grow in recruiting and learned first-hand the features of working in an IT recruiting agency.

What do the experts say?

Article experts. ITExpert is a Ukrainian IT recruiting company that has been on the market for more than 6 years. Each team recruiter undergoes long-term internal training on technologies, the structure of the IT market, and consults with a mentor. We asked three ITExpert specialists how they chose a career in an IT recruiting agency and why they are so excited about this field.
The demand for IT recruiters is growing rapidly. For example, the number of vacancies in the HR field has increased 3.5 times over the past three years, according to information from the DOU resource.
The threshold for entering the field is not so high: it is enough to understand the hiring structure and IT, and have a minimum of English. Most often, large IT companies have their own courses for recruiters, and the most talented are given an offer already during training.

Who is IT recruitment suitable for?

Article experts. ITExpert is a Ukrainian IT recruiting company that has been on the market for more than 6 years. Each team recruiter undergoes long-term internal training on technologies, the structure of the IT market, and consults with a mentor. We asked three ITExpert specialists how they chose a career in an IT recruiting agency and why they are so excited about this field.

Here are a few qualities without which you should not start a career as an IT recruiter:
1. Love of constant communication and emotional intelligence. 95% of the time, recruiters communicate with people: candidates, the development team, the hiring manager. You need to be flexible and understand each side: the developer who doubts whether to accept the offer, the manager who wants to “look at a couple more resumes” and so on...
2. High level of self-motivation. Nowadays, candidates are responding less and less to recruiters’ messages and are increasingly refusing offers. It is very easy to burn out in such conditions - a recruiter must be able to remain calm and motivated in any situation.
3. Willingness to develop all the time. The IT sector is growing rapidly, some technologies are becoming obsolete, others are becoming more popular, new tools for sourcing are appearing, the pool of vacancies is rapidly updating... In such conditions it is impossible to stop developing!
4. The desire to benefit people. Bonuses for filling a vacancy can be several times higher than the recruiter’s rate. But this should not lead to a conveyor belt approach: recruitment is interaction and helping people. Candidates will return only to those recruiters who were truly able to win them over and tried to help.

Diana Savenko, IT Recruiter at ITExpert: “It is important for me to benefit people. I have worked in different fields. But even after volunteering, I don’t feel the same return as after recruiting. I know that my work is not for show. I offer great work, a useful product. The same Internet banking makes people’s lives easier, and AI projects help increase the productivity of teams... When I find talent for useful products, I myself feel more involved.”

Where to work as an IT recruiter?

There are three main types of IT companies that employ recruiters: products, outsourcing/outstaffing and recruiting agencies. In addition, recruiters can work “for themselves”, as freelancers. The main difference between the recruiter’s functions is who the programmers are being searched for:
• in product companies you are looking for candidates for your own company, you know in detail about all the processes and you see how the specialist you just wrote to yesterday goes to work;
• in outsourcing companies you need to look for specialists for customers whose projects your company is currently developing; there may be several such projects in the works at once;
• in IT recruiting agencies you need to help other companies with recruiting: the same products and outsources. An agency recruiter can simultaneously search for candidates for 5-7 different companies.
• in freelancing, the recruiter also helps many companies; he can regulate the workload according to the number of vacancies. But at the same time, you need to independently search for customers and communicate with them directly.
The functions of a recruiter can vary quite a lot. For example, in small companies, a recruiter can also perform some HR functions such as onboarding and recruiting newcomers to the team. In enterprises, on the contrary, a separate position is allocated for searching candidates - sourcer/researcher.

How to start a career: advice for beginners

Now there are quite a lot of offers on the market for internships in the recruitment department. Some companies have internal courses on basic IT. But even so, you will need to try very hard to achieve good results. Here are some tips from article experts to help you do this:
• Study a lot and “roll up your sleeves”:
At the beginning of your career, you will need to study a lot and try to immediately apply these approaches to your work. At the same time, the field is changing rapidly: the tools that were relevant yesterday no longer work today. Therefore, the learning never ends.
• Find a mentor:
The ideal option is to start your career where there are other recruiters with whom you can consult. But if this is not possible, find a mentor, a more experienced specialist who can give you small consultations on various issues and share his experience.
• Come with solutions, not problems.
After just a few weeks of work, try to think through possible solutions. For example, if a candidate cannot attend an interview during company business hours, you can ask the manager to stay late or hold a meeting on the weekend. Most likely, your ideas will be rejected the first time. But later you will solve even the most complex cases on your own.

Do you have any doubts about which company to work for as a recruiter?

Very soon we will continue the dialogue about the career of a recruiter. Specialists from well-known European companies will talk in more detail about how to build a career in an IT recruiting agency and how to quickly grow from a sourcer to a Recruitment Team Lead.