What all top performing recruiters have in common and how to hire them

¡Hola! Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me. I'll wait a couple of seconds for people to sit down, but can you hear me all right at the back? All good? Okay, cool. I'll let people sit down, get comfortable. There's some seats up here, some too there. Cool. Well, thank you so much everyone for joining me, giving me your time today. Really appreciate it. My goal with this time that you've given me is just to try and give you as much value as possible. Particularly around the context of what do top-performing recruiters have in common, and also how can we get better at hiring them. So just, just to help me out here, I'm gonna ask you to just engage with me because I think it's way more fun when you guys get involved rather than me just speak at all of you. But just so I can get some context, could you put your hand up if you listen to the podcast that I host, or have at some point, or checked it out? Okay. Firstly, thank you so much, really appreciate it. So yeah, one of the things that— just a bit of context about myself and why I'm quite well positioned, I believe, to talk about what top-performing recruiters have in common, um, is 5 years ago when I was in recruitment, I started a podcast, a recruitment podcast. There's a lot more podcasts now, um, but yeah, I started a podcast when I was in recruitment with this simple idea that If I interview great recruiters and find out sort of how they got to the top, what they do differently, the challenges they learnt from, then hopefully that can help one other person in industry be more successful. So I've been doing that for 5 years, religiously, every single week, and we've interviewed over 400 recruitment professionals now who are current top performers. They're entrepreneurs. So every single week I'm sitting down, getting to know these people, finding out what they would do differently, the challenge they face along the way, and all that. And then the final bit of context is 2 years ago I started a business called Recruitment Mentors, and really simply, it's an all-in-one training development platform where we partner with ambitious recruitment companies who are committed to unlocking the full potential of their teams. And our mission, really simply, as you can see there, is to help thousands of recruiters achieve their potential by providing the best on-demand training development delivered by today's top performers. We've just found that recruiters are a lot more engaged and consistent when it comes to spending time at getting better at the job, when they know they're learning from people that have been there and done it, rather than people that did the job 5, 10, 15 years ago, which is very typical of the training experiences that I experienced in recruitment and other people do. So who— put your hand up if you can relate to this. When someone asks you 'How did you get into recruitment?' Who answers with this? Put your hand up. Yeah, a lot of us, right? So I think, for me, I think that's one of the amazing things about our industry is that so many people from different walks of life, different experiences, can enter our industry and be successful. But the challenge of that is how the hell do we know what an absolute exceptional top-billing recruiter looks like when they walk through the door. Because they all come in different shapes, different sizes, and different backgrounds. So these are some of the things that I'm going to share that I've found when sitting down with people. So the goal here is by the end of this session, I want all of you to be able to, yeah, identify the most common traits and characteristics of top performers, and also most importantly, develop strategies to discover and these traits in potential hires. Feel free to take notes, but at the end you're gonna be able to scan a QR code, and we put together just a nice key takeaway document you can take away. So it's super bite-sized, easy to digest. So how have we uncovered the common characteristics and traits? Well, how I kick off my podcast, or how I have kicked off over the last 200 episodes, is I've asked people the million-pound question. In your opinion, what characteristics and traits do you think make up a highly successful recruitment consultant in today's market? That's the key bit, in today's market. So what we did is, I didn't, but I got someone to listen to like the first 10 minutes of the last 200 episodes, put a bit of a spreadsheet together, and we wrote down the responses. And I'm going to share the top 3 that have come out of that, and then a few that came around the sort of top 5. Top 6 characteristics and traits. So this is the first one. Probably not surprised by this one at all. Resilience. Whenever we speak about recruitment, you'll probably hear this word resilience come up. I'm gonna sort of talk to you a bit about sort of my perspective on resilience, but when looking online for a definition that sort of resonated with me, we can see here the definition by American Psychological Association. Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. So I'm not surprised that when it comes to working in recruitment, we need to be resilient. There's a lot of things that we have to deal with that comes our way, a lot of things we can't control, and that's people, right? And it's bloody difficult. However, for me, when I'm sitting down with people that have been successful over the long term, built a successful recruitment career over 5+ years, my thoughts are resilience is absolutely crucial. Probably even more like really crucial at the beginning of your recruitment career, and you have to find yourself brushing things off, bouncing back, and going again. And at the beginning, you really have to build that muscle. However, for me, when I sit down with people that have been successful over the long term, they, they're not coming in every day bouncing back because that is exhausting. That is exhausting to pick yourself up every single day and bounce back with this resilience muscle. It's absolutely still there. But for me, what the best recruiters are great at is what I put here— detaching from the outcome. And you might hear things in your office like, look, my best piece of advice to you is don't get too high to the highs, don't get too low to the lows, do everything you can to stay in that middle. So for me, yes, resilience, that's something that we're probably going to find in most recruiters, but I think the best recruiters over a long sustained period have got really good at experiencing a setback and coming on or going into the straight call, that not affecting them. And that's because what What they've got really good at is detaching from the outcome, making doing the thing the thing, not what you get out of doing the thing. That's what the best recruiters focus on every single day. And I think if you were to bounce back every single day, it's difficult. So for me, what's helped me in my life, I don't know if any of you are familiar with Stoicism or Ryan Holiday's work, but for me, this has really helped me in my life in terms of trying to adapt principles that just help me 'Have more good days than bad days.' And I absolutely love this quote. I think it's something to have top of mind in recruitment. And I think the best recruiters will view their journey in recruitment like this. So yeah, focus on the things you can control. Recruiters are really good at that. Let go of everything else and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, and tougher. So I'm sure we're not surprised by resilience, but I just wanted to give you my take on what that sort of means to me. We're sitting down with these people If you're someone that likes to read books or audiobooks, I'd highly recommend The Obstacle Is the Way. Absolutely great book to read. The second most common trait is relationship builder. So again, I wasn't surprised to see this because from all of my conversations, the best recruiters are not transactional ones. I think we've all at some, at some point heard a story in the office where we have a recruiter go, This person I placed in their first job, and now they're hiring for their team, and now they've asked me to help them build their team. You don't get into that position if you don't double down on building relationships. So I think for me, something to definitely take away from this is how many people in our office really focus on not just the short-term wins, but also the long-term opportunity. Are they doing the right thing consistently? And I think in order to have that long-term success in recruitment, you can't be transactional. You can be, but it's probably going to be a bit more difficult. There's going to be a lot more ebbs and flows. But I think being a solid relationship builder, connecting with people, playing the long game is absolutely essential. Third and final trait that came out, we put mindset here, but what sort of came up in different ways was basically growth mindset. Positive mindset. Again, things that you're probably not surprised by, but I think again, the best recruiters do have a growth mindset. And really simply, what that means is they go through an obstacle or they face an obstacle or they experience a setback, and the first question isn't, oh my God, is the client's fault, is the candidate's fault? And they're pointing the finger. They take responsibility. And they go, what could I have done differently? What could I have learnt from this opportunity? And they sort of view their setbacks as learning opportunities. Now that isn't to say that they don't have their moments of effing and blinding. Well, how has the client done this? The candidate's dropped out. We've all been there. You have to find your own mechanisms that work. For me, it was going for a walk. It was getting out of the office so I don't give that negative energy to everyone else. I'm sure we've all been around those people that I'd love to give everyone else a negative energy when shit goes wrong. But I think mindset, specifically having a growth mindset, viewing challenges as learning opportunities, and these people willing to take responsibility. They don't have a victim mindset, and they don't try and point the finger. They take responsibility and they try and learn. Top 3 traits. That's what came out of all the different conversations that we had and people answering that question. So just to recap, the top 3 traits that came out when we did this exercise was resilience, relationship builder, and mindset. Now, there's probably a number of other traits that you think are really consistent in top performers. These were sort of common ones that came out of just the sort of top 3. Couple there that I really like. For me, I definitely think the best recruiters are curious. Can annoy people, but always wanted to ask questions. I think that's a good sign. I think accountability, I was just talking about it there. That's like so important. Like, I think your time in recruitment will be really miserable if you're really good at pointing the finger. And I think you've got way more chance to grow, develop, improve if you're willing to take accountability. So these are just, again, a few of the other traits that came out. A lot of the time when we ask this question to a lot of people. So just really quickly, again, just asking you to engage with me here. How many of you would you say who manage or hire in your team, how many of you would you say have complete clarity on the traits you look for when hiring for someone in your team that maybe doesn't have much experience, or just hiring for someone in your business? Do you have complete clarity on the characteristics that these people have to have in order for you to consider hiring them? Put your hand up if you feel like you've got clarity on that. It's not many, right? And I think this is the thing. It's like so many people can— there's so many, we hear so many stories of like, yeah, so we've got Geraldine who's our top biller and she used to work in Greggs. Right, so how does that work then? Like, how did she go from there to come recruit? So you just have all these people in different backgrounds and different walks of life. So in terms of being really strict or sort of focused on what are the non-negotiable traits that I need to look for when it comes to hiring people, it can be difficult. So this is what I would encourage you over the sort of next part of this talk is how can we get to the position where a lot more of you put up your hand and you have a lot more clarity on your non-negotiables. So I'm gonna take this from my conversation with Alex Elliott, who is a successful recruitment entrepreneur. Built a business called Liquid Personnel, which he exited, and we had a really great podcast episode. I'd highly encourage you to check that out. And this was the exercise that he gave when successfully scaling his recruitment business, because as we all know, one of the biggest reasons you won't hit your business goals, your objectives this year, is because you haven't got the right people in the right seats. It's the problem that we try and solve for our customers. So for those of you that didn't put your hand up, A really practical exercise for you to walk away and do in your business is the following. And this is something that Alex highly recommends, particularly when you're a business of a smaller size. This should be a lot more easier to do. So the practical exercise here is sit down with your top performing recruiters and find out and understand what do they have in common with each other? What do they possess that's consistent? And write these things down. Is it curiosity? Is it work ethic? Is it having a growth mindset? But something that could be really useful to walk away with from today is how can I get better at hiring amazing people for my business that work out and are successful? Well, the best place to start is with the people inside your organisation and what made them successful. And the reason why Alex shares this, which I think is just a really good point here, this isn't to say that If you do find out what those common characteristics are, that you can't hire anyone that doesn't possess them, what Alex shared here is like, if you at least have some non-negotiables, a bit of science behind who you hire and why and what you look for, it's just stacking the odds in your favour of these people actually being successful and not being part of the high attrition numbers that we have in our industry. So again, just a really practical exercise here, a bit of a top tip in terms of, yeah, do this exercise. Hopefully, that should mean that you're going to put the odds in your favour to get better at hiring better people. And then to sort of build on this, okay, so we've got the common characteristics, we've got the traits. Been on a conversation with Alex. My next question to him was then, okay, well, if I've done that, how can I really make sure that I uncover these? And what Alex shared was where he's found a lot of people slip up or not be on the ball with is they have the traits. It might be growth mindset, curiosity, and accountability, but then they don't map their interview process to uncovering those traits that are now non-negotiable to you, your business, your team that you look for. So this is a really common stumbling block. So we just put a few other examples here on like how can we go about looking for these traits? And if you have not got your interview process mapped to uncovering resilience, uncovering growth mindset, it's gonna be a lot more difficult to hire these people consistently and get it right. So again, this may sound really simple. How many of you actually do it? I don't know. But yeah, let's have a look at our interview process. Are we being consistent? Are we looking for the same things? And let's make sure our interview process maps to the traits that we're actually looking for in our people. Cool. So again, just to be sort of super practical people here. Not trying to teach suck eggs. A lot of your job is asking good quality questions. But let's say we're looking for the common traits that I sort of shared with you, the top 3. A bit of an example question here that we could use. Resilience. Something you might already ask. Give an example in your life when you have experienced a setback and how you overcame it. We can be really intentional with our questions in our interview process to uncover evidence that these people demonstrate resilience or more of these traits. Relationships. What sort of question can we ask there? What is the most important relationship you have built in your life so far? Again, we can be really intentional with our questions when trying to uncover why we should hire these people and looking for particular traits that we want in our people. And then a bit of an example here from a mindset perspective. Tell me about a time when something didn't go the way you wanted and at work and what you learned from it. Obviously, what we're trying to uncover there is I don't think many hires will work out in recruitment if you ask them a question like that and they go, "Yeah, it was always my colleague's fault, it was my manager's fault." Easy to pass the blame. Not sure how successful they're going to be in recruitment. Now, again, just another sort of actionable sort of interview tip here as we come towards the end here and go going to be more than welcome to answer some questions if you want to do that. But this came from Alex Elliott again, because obviously those questions that I just shared with you, fairly simple, fairly easy to implement. But I think what's going to give you even more confidence is looking for, as I put here, as much evidence of these traits being demonstrated as you can. Not just recent examples or in their last job, because we want as much evidence as possible to back up that this person throughout their life has demonstrated these traits that we're looking for. So I think something that a lot of people shared on the podcast is in their interviews, they like to peel back the onion. Charles, tell me about a time that you had a setback when you were younger and you overcome it. Just looking at you, Charles, I have to use your name. Like, let's, let's dig deeper. Let's find out who these people are. And can we find more and more evidence in their journey up until this point where they're sitting in front of you, potentially joining you on your journey in your business, to back up that they're people that have resilience, have a growth mindset, they're accountable, and these types of things. So yeah, dive into their past and collect as much evidence as possible during the interview process that will hopefully give you even more confidence. Now, of course, people still may not work out. But I think this is going to give you a better chance. So to recap then, we've gone through the importance of identifying the most common traits and characteristics of your top performers, which when we did this exercise for all of the people that we've interviewed was resilience, relationship builder, mindset. I'd really encourage you, if you're to do anything, to, yeah, commit to finding out what are your common traits, what are the common characteristics in your business and your teams. That you feel enables people to be successful in your environment. So the importance of identifying those. Then we've spoken about developing really practical strategies to discover these traits in potential hires, because of course, if we found the recipe, we're happy with what we believe makes a successful recruiter, then let's be really intentional about trying to uncover this in people that we hire. So as Alex put it, interview your consultants, interview your Highest performing consultants, and then most importantly, once you're happy with those, map your interview process, the journey you take people on before you decide to hire them, with the right questions, with the intentional questions to hopefully uncover, do they have these traits? That's what I wanted to go through with you today. You can scan that. You won't be asked for your email, I promise. You'll scan that and then you'll be able to download this, which will take up all of the key insights, key takeaways, actionable tips. That's everything I wanted to share with you today. Really appreciate you giving me the time. I wanted to make it hopefully as valuable as possible in a really short, focused way. We've got some time here for questions. The lovely man at the back is happy to run around with a microphone if anyone wants to ask a question. We've got, yeah, 5 or so minutes here. They're more than welcome on anything that I've just sort of gone through. Got a question at the front. Thanks for being the first. It's alright, no, it's okay.

Thank you for that.

What's your name?

Sorry, my name's Natalie. I do a lot of hiring. Yeah, I'm not familiar with your work, but I am now. Yeah, one thing that I look for when I'm hiring, which I think has helped me be successful is looking at the candidates and ascertaining their ability and willingness to learn. So all the resilience, all the relationship building, they need to learn that.

The willingness to learn. Yeah.

Did that come up in—

Yeah, absolutely. A common sentence that you'll hear from a top performer, you'll hear in your offices, The basically not being complacent. There's always things that I can learn. Top performers say that.

I was surprised that that wasn't one of your—

yeah, I mean, it's— the thing is, like, it's very easy when you get asked that question to go to, like, the common things. I mean, the resilience and these things. But absolutely, from all the conversations, the top performers, yeah, they don't get complacent. And the only way they don't get complacent is by always being willing to learn. Yeah, what can I learn from the person that's just gone through the door? And yet always be willing to —to learn.

You can learn mindset, you can learn relationships.

So how do you try and find that in people then?

By ascertaining where they've learned things, how much they do self-learning. Yeah, nice, perfect.

Yeah, great example. Then that's some good evidence there, right? Yeah. Cool. Anyone else have a question? Let's go. Oh, final round. Here you go, mate. What's your name?

Sorry, my name is Elym.

Elym, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Hishem. Great presentation. Thank you. So you mentioned resilience, relationships, and mindset are the key sort of traits for a top recruiter. But, you know, in terms of the transition of the recruiter, him or herself, where do you actually see the top performance actually taking place? Is it in their first early years? Would you say it's more in their mid sort of cap years, 2, 3 years? Would you say 5 years and above? And also on top of that question, do they also have a network of their own mentors to to be at peak performance in order to become a top biller or top recruiter?

So the first question there is, when do you believe what the top foot— when does that come in their career? How long? How long do you work in the time frame?

Like, which sort of area do they— how long does it take? Like, when do they actually become that type of performer? In their first few years? Yeah. In their mid-cap years or sort of at a later stage? What do you— what have you noticed with those people that you've interviewed? Well, let's be honest, like, we've all—

there's always been those success stories of, I came in here, I did my first deal, it's 50 grand. So like, for me, recruitment's a long game, and I think the most successful people have done it over a sustained period of time. Of course, you can go into recruitment, you can work in industry for 2 years, 3 years, could you potentially make 6 figures? Potentially. It just depends what game you're playing. Are you in it for the long run? And I think the most successful recruiters I've sat down with that I think that have done it over a long sustained period of time. So of course you can have people that achieve success quickly, but for me, I think when I speak to business owners, they'd love more people to stay in the business for the long run, and there's less people in their business that have done it for 5+ years. So I think it depends on how you're measuring success, but of course there's always those success stories, and it's why— part of the reason why I started the podcast, like why a lot of people love to sell recruitment, that you can earn 6 figures in your first year, which We all know it's absolute bollocks. And we don't tell them how hard it is, right? And then the other part on the mentorship, yeah, I think again, this comes back to the person's question at the front on these top performers are always willing to learn. And I think, yeah, they can be very intentional to get that learning. So it could be outside their organization, could be internal. But I think the smart people will try and find people that have been where they are and they're now a couple of steps ahead and ask those people advice. I think, yeah, some great recruiters will do that for sure. Cool. What time? What time? One more question. Charles, come on then, son. Here you go, mate. Thank you very much.

Talk to me. So I work in L&D now, but I still sometimes get involved in the interview process. Yeah. And the resilience question, for example, give us an example in your life where you've experienced a setback. We've heard so many people come back and say, said, you know, I tore my ACL and then I came back and I was able to play sport again. Relationship building, and then they give a great example of where they built relationships. And then the mindset: I've always been open to learning, I read books. But then a couple of months into the job, they flop.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, they don't live those truths. It's like, I've got all the evidence, and they're not resilient. That's right.

And, um, you know, I think it's a mixture of, you know, some rec to recs, you know, prepping them really well. Doing a good job.

ChatGPT as well now.

Well, now, yeah, I suppose. But I'm just, I'm curious from your perspective, from the people that you've interviewed, you know, what other things can we do in an interview process to test people on these 3 things if we're just getting great answers to those initial questions?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I think the thing that's sort of top of mind, I think it's back to Alex's point, Charles, is like sort of the goal here isn't to make every single person we hire a dead certain. I think it's let's stack the cards in our favor and have more of a science behind what we look for. And that should hopefully mean that we have more people that when they do get 3 months in the job and they need resilience, they actually have it. So I think you're always going to have people that don't quite live those truths. But I think if you do this, then you should obviously have more people that do it than don't. So I think something I guess maybe worth sharing, when I speak to a lot of recruitment owners, I do think it could be worth, if you're experiencing that or other things you could use, is like tools, psychometric stuff. Like, I think if you could introduce any sort of science or data points to back up, okay, from what they've shared, this should mean that they're someone that possesses resilience. But I think for me, it's then also like Alex said, like trying to get as much evidence as possible. So like, although you've asked that question, let's make sure that's not the only story they gave you and how can we find 2, 3, 4 more stories, which wasn't when their rec direct told them, look, you know that story you told me about when I qualified you? Use that one when Charles asks you that question. Do you know what I mean? So I think it's just digging deeper. Hope that's helpful. Cool. Thanks so much, everyone. Really appreciate your time. Awesome.