Is Creativity the Biggest Skill Needed by Recruiters Today?
#Creativity #WieczorRekrutera
Recruiters have a very important role in the job market. One of the key competencies that recruiters both look out for, as well as possess, is creativity. Interestingly, recruiters are often treated as judge and jury when it comes to the analysis of creativity amongst candidates. But when it comes to the recruiters themselves, who are the judge and jury who help them to succeed?
Life was different before the Internet and all this confusing Social Media and now ChatGPT. Recruitment was a relatively straightforward career in the past. Maybe you remember hearing from Recruitment Leaders that “Recruitment isn’t Rocket Science”? Set up some goals and personal objectives, review these with your manager on a regular basis, don’t be shy on the phone and work hard and generally you could succeed pretty well in Recruitment. Or at least you could, in the past.
Can you be truly ‘creative’ when working from home?
When we used to sit together in the office it was all very different. One recruiter worked out a new way to search on LinkedIn and would share it within moments with the rest of the team. When the recruitment team started to work from home, these moments became far less frequent.
Of course, candidates were working from home too. But, unlike with recruiters, they didn’t have to brush up their skills for when the next LinkedIn message appeared asking them if they wanted a new job. Recruiters had to work harder. Come up with better content online. Better ways to grow their network online. Most importantly, more creative ways to stay engaged with candidates now that face-to-face meetings became less feasible.
This is one of the things that was replaced. Face-to-face meetings. We have all heard the saying: “People buy from people”. Have you heard people say that people buy from figures online? You have when it comes to home shopping channels, but those are run by actors trained in the mastery of manipulation. Not quite the same context.
There will always be a small group who have managed to overcome the challenge of buying from online figures. But this cannot be more than a handful of people in the market today. What about the rest?
Creativity within a Recruitment Team
When recruiters are in various parts of the country, it can be a huge challenge for recruitment leaders to manage performance. Focusing on competencies like creativity can often fall by the wayside when performance management is being used. And managing home workers can feel like a constant performance management exercise. Often without any end in sight, unless you have a particularly good team.
In Poland there are a few competitions that have awarded HR or Recruitment teams in the past. Consider Pracuj.pl’s HR Dream Team as an example:
It doesn’t appear that Pracuj.pl are running the event in 2023. Their website only covers the latest event in 2022. Importantly, in the past, many of their jurors, like Andrzej Borczyk, have featured elsewhere in a jury capacity.
There is still OLX I hear you say. With its OLXKnowHow event focusing on Leaders in Recruitment there is also a chance to showcase your teams successes here. However, apart from Anna Macnar, who heads up the Jury, we at Magazyn Rekruter are not familiar with the other jury members or their successes.
Digital Recruitment and Creativity
To truly be able to embrace creativity a slogan called “Digital Recruitment” appeared a few years ago. This is because the type of recruiter we are working with today has changed since the 90s. In the 90s it was enough to be good on the phone and have a very organized methodical approach to work, now… Well, let’s just look at it objectively:
Candidates like to have some comfort about who they are dealing with, both the company and the recruiter and perhaps the level of quality of the company’s and recruiters content online. This means that the digital footprint of a recruiter today is far more important than it ever was before. Just like employers have been checking potential employees Facebook accounts for several years now. Candidates will often rigorously check the internet profiles of the company / agency and recruiters they come into contact with. This means that todays’ recruiter needs to be creative, be internet savvy and have the confidence to post their work priorities on their personal profiles regularly and not worry about the quality being ridiculed or commented on negatively by their friends and work colleagues, or their candidates for that matter.
This means that the recruiter of today, the one who is good at TikTok and has probably heard of Medium or Twitter or some such, is different than before. The phone confidence might not be as good as it was in the past, but the internet presence and level of confidence that the new recruiters of today show online is a skill that was never called upon before. To be able to post content online and be able to be confident enough to take the knocks and remarks that might come with it, is not a given for everyone. With the rise of the “keyboard warrior” and hating online become prevalent, it’s a tough place to be visible and ensure you get the “right” kind of attention. Some say any press is good press, but there is press and there is press… and our recruiters are often very young too.
Now take this new talent of creativity, the young generation of recruiter, and put them in a situation where multiple candidates drop out of recruitment processes they are running in their first few months in the recruitment industry. Dropouts are never easy to cope with, and can often happen as a result of something the recruiter has no power to influence – the Hiring Manager, the image of the company, a Counter-offer, the spouse at home, many things. And its’ only once you get past your first 20 or so Dropouts that you get the ability to move forward without letting this affect your confidence too much.
As a Recruitment Leader your role will be to help nurture the Creative talents in your business, funnelling the energy expended because of their defeats into their creative skills instead and helping them to create an even better Employer Brand for themselves and the company.
With the IT and Digital markets growing through roles such as Front-End Developers and Prompt Engineers, the new recruitment landscape is slowly evolving around us. This is bringing with itself a new need to find newer and newer channels on Social Media in order to get access to the brightest talent. Github, Glassdoor, Angel, Xing, Bullhorn, Meetup and many other portals keep appearing all the time. All with their own networks of candidates that recruiters need. Meaning that it’s essential to have recruiters working these online sites, and its’ the role of the Recruitment Leaders to facilitate and encourage this new talent amongst the new recruiters of our time.
Those who shout loudest get the attention
In the past, the culture of “The Squeaky Wheel gets the Grease” has often proved that our loudest most extrovert recruiters get all the attention. Not necessarily the highest billers. Whether this is because “salesy” people are generally louder than others may confuse things, but it’s a recurring problem. Loud employees often take too much management time deflecting Recruitment Leaders from spending time on the high performers or the new ‘digital’ recruiters.
With it being clear that the best performers in Recruitment are usually those who work for a minimum of 12 months in one role, ideally 18 months. Not only because they develop their network successfully by this point, and understand the internal procedures of their company. But also, because by this point they gain a thorough understanding of the needs of the business or their Client and can start to recruit “intuitively” per se. New starters take time, mentoring and training takes time, but are we rewarding our most loyal recruiters and our best ‘digital’ recruiters enough? Can we do more for them?
The evolution of the Creative Recruiter
With the evolution of the Creative Recruiter and the changing face of the employment market, it is the role of the Recruitment Leader to have a better understanding of the conflicting priorities that present themselves on a daily basis. From StartUp environment, to online hate, to building creativity, to balancing the time spent with each recruiter, the role of the Recruitment Leader of today is also changing.
Since 2010, the PerlyHR and Nagrody Rekrutera competitions organized by Magazyn Rekruter have also had to evolve and change. Today, the Social Media footprint and the team loyalty of a Recruitment Business or In-house Recruitment Team is pivotal in establishing how good that team is to work for. Across Central Eastern Europe, there is no other industry awards ceremony that encourages both recruiters and their leaders to follow the trends demanded by the evolving market around us. If you haven’t taken part before then this year you should seriously consider getting more involved in #WieczorRekrutera than ever before, it might be the reason your next Recruiter joins or leaves your organization. Be ready for change, and tell the world that you are embracing it with open arms.
This is the First Part of a Series of Articles celebrating the History of the Polish Recruitment Industry Awards Ceremony – #WieczorRekrutera. They first appeared on LinkedIn in 2017 and have now been refreshed.
PerlyHR and Wieczor Rekrutera return in 2023 on the 16th November in Warsaw. For more information make sure you get in touch with the team at Magazyn Rekruter or check www.perlyhr.com where nominations and categories for In-house Recruiter, In-house Recruitment Team, Agency Recruiter and Freelance Recruiter of the Year are all open now.
See Also:
Who are Poland’s recruitment influencers? (magazynrekruter.pl)
Who Are Poland’s Best Employers 2022? (magazynrekruter.pl)
Author: Andy Samu
