5 Tips to Advance Your Career as a Technical Recruiter: The Path to Professional Development

In such a competitive market for qualified talent, you want to get ahead. We’re here to help make it happen. We’ll outline five actionable ways to advance your career as a technical recruiter: from implementing automation to tracking market trends and more.

Together, these strategies will strengthen your recruitment process — and put you on the path to measurable hiring success.

1. Invest in relationship management

As you know, recruiting revolves around people. At any given hour, you could be interviewing tech candidates, briefing hiring managers, or coordinating with coworkers. Succeeding on the job means having standout interpersonal skills — and committing to open communication.

Remember: Strong relationships have powerful payoffs. “Building trust with hiring managers is a critical component of a productive search that can deliver results,” said Nick Gonzalez, a former technical recruiter at Hired. Staying in sync with company wants and needs is a proven route to sourcing success — increasing your odds of finding the right people for open roles.

Of course, candidate relationship management is equally important. By building rapport with candidates, recruiters can uncover critical insights like target compensation, competing interview activity, and honest company feedback. 

“Oftentimes, transparency from the first call is appreciated and reciprocated,” explained Gonzalez. “Maintaining an informative and transparent candidate experience goes a long way in securing talent — driving activity in the short term and positive brand awareness in the long term.”

As a recruiter, you’re also a brand representative. You typically serve as the candidates’ first point of contact with the company. Positive interactions improve your brand reputation, while negative ones do just the opposite.

In the words of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” First impressions don’t happen twice, so make yours count.

2. Become a subject matter expert

The tech landscape is constantly changing — and so are popular programming languages. When speaking with candidates, it’s important to know your CoffeeScript from your Java.

Staying on top of programming trends can help you reap major rewards, from increased credibility to a better response rate.

Knowing different languages, frameworks, and tools also helps you build confidence with hiring managers. You can advise them on what’s available in the marketplace and what might be substituted for other experiences. It makes the search much easier.

Wondering where to get started? Have a look at these programming insights from Hired’s 2023 State of Software Engineers Report. Our survey of more than 1,300 software engineers revealed that engineers ranked Python, JavaScript, and Java as their favorite programming language.

When relevant, recruiters should reference these languages in job descriptions and candidate outreach. Emphasizing areas of overlap between programmer preferences and your company’s tech stack creates a competitive edge — and spurs hiring success.

“Transparency in the tech stack is huge,” said Gonzalez. “Engineers want to work with modern technologies that they find interesting or challenging, and most are willing to learn hot new skills to use in a production environment.” Clear communication around programming languages also helps recruiters filter out people who don’t align with the position and reduce time spent speaking to the wrong candidates.

3. Streamline your team’s workflow

Back in 2017, McKinsey predicted that automation would help businesses achieve “outcomes that go beyond human capabilities.” Today, we know these words to be true. Take one look at the world around you and innovation is undeniable. Technology has fundamentally changed countless industries and hiring is no exception. 

AI will increasingly surface as a tool to maximize efficiency in recruiting. Karen Weeks, Chief People Officer at Obviously on Hired’s podcast, Talk Talent to Me: “AI will push us to nurture and build relationships within our networks more honestly and authentically. AI may streamline some processes or tasks but we’ll see a renewed focus on relationship-building as a major point of difference in recruiting and hiring.”

Curious about ways to use ChatGPT to unlock your efficiency? Check out this blog for inspiration. 

Related: The Future of Tech Hiring: 8 Bold Predictions for 2024 

With Hired and the automation that comes along with it, you get:

• Top talent, tailored to company needs. All Hired candidates are vetted for experience, skills, and salary requirements. Powered by machine learning, our algorithms adapt to your hiring needs.
• Easy access to engaged candidates. Hired boasts a 90% candidate response rate and a 60% interview acceptance rate.
• Streamlined processes. The tech industry moves quickly. And we do, too. Our platform’s average speed to hire is 37 days. Hired even integrates with applicant tracking systems for added efficiency.
• Significant time savings. No more sifting through unqualified resumes. On other platforms, it takes 52 hours to source for a single role. With Hired, it only takes 7 hours. 

Less manual work means more time back in your day: precious hours that can be dedicated to personalization, employer branding, tracking market trends, and more.

By helping you fill roles faster, automation also reduces recruiting spend. This maximizes benefits for both you and the business.

4. Expand your search

All too often, recruiters seek sameness: filtering for specific colleges or companies during the sourcing process. But it’s time to put pedigree bias in the past. Skilled candidates are everywhere, eager to be found.

One way to expand your talent pool? Pursuing strategic partnerships with innovative organizations that support diversity, equity, and inclusion. By searching in new places, you can discover top candidates who have taken the path less traveled — while reaping a significant return on investment. And by now, we all know diverse hiring practices boost company innovation.

Here are just a few organizations to consider:

• Educative 
• General Assembly
• The Knowledge House
• Thinkful

Related: Hired partners for employers

Another avenue for finding skilled candidates is embedding yourself in the tech community. By joining Slack groups and dedicated developer sites, you can meet talented candidates who may have otherwise been overlooked.

5. Track market trends

Data tells a powerful story. By tracking market trends, recruiters can determine which cities to target, what salaries to offer, and even which employee benefits to emphasize during candidate conversations. 

For example, data from Hired’s 2023 State of Software Engineers Report revealed that engineers believe these are the top benefits that make an ideal company culture and work environment:

• Flexibility around work hours, schedule, etc. (76%)
• Coworkers they get along with and learn from (57%)
• Opportunities for professional development and career growth (55%)

With these insights, you might tailor outreach to reference those perks. Personalized messages to candidates perform 25% better than a default message on the Hired platform. Attention to detail can significantly increase your response rate, proving that a little research goes a long way.

Related: Want advice from the best in the biz? Listen to Talk Talent to Me, a podcast featuring recruiting and TA experts across industries.

Advance your technical recruiting career and engage with top talent

Just as the tech industry revolves around innovation, so does technical recruiting. To attract top candidates in a competitive landscape, modern recruiters must commit to actively adapting and advancing their hiring strategies.

The tips we shared will help you achieve tangible results to accelerate your recruiting efforts and your career. Ready to get on the path to professional development? Try Hired today.

Originally written in March 2021. Updated March 2024.