Why Finding a Worthy IT Recruiter is a Challenging Task?

Finding and hiring an IT recruiter is a task that is not inferior in complexity to finding IT specialists: with a growing shortage of personnel in the IT market, the need for professionals who can competently search for IT candidates is also growing.

Therefore, more and more online universities are launching courses designed to train future recruiters, while others are trying to lure already working specialists. For example, our colleagues constantly receive emails in which recruiters offer them to consider a new job opening :)

What is going on in the labour market right now? How to find an IT recruiter for your team? What to focus on when selecting IT recruiters? Find the answers in our new article.

The situation on Labor market

The labour market in the tech recruiting sphere today is characterized by a high demand for specialists. The market is trying to fill the shortage of IT recruiters in various ways, and the most popular among them is the launch of IT recruiting courses on the base of popular online universities.
However, this approach doesn't always produce the desired result. Many IT recruiters who have completed the courses are too stiff to handle the complexities of the profession because hardly anybody talks about them during education.
Among the key difficulties of IT recruiting let's highlight the stress, not always stable salaries, and the specifics of the profession.

Stress

The job of an IT recruiter is stressful in large part because 99% of the work is connected to communication with people. Recruiters send hundreds of emails every day, conduct dozens of interviews and calls with candidates. Not every IT candidate is ready to receive new job offers and is not always able to respond "softly" to yet another email from a recruiter.
Keeping an icy intelligence and being able to respond politely to quite not the most polite emails is not an easy task, even for a very calm person.
Today, due to the increasing demand for IT professionals and real hunger games in the struggle for each candidate, the level of stress in IT recruiting has increased even more. Therefore, not everyone is able to cope with such stress, especially the one who has just started their career in recruiting.

Unstable wages

In most cases, the salary of an IT recruiter is formed from the salary and bonuses for a vacancy filling. Moreover, the vacancy is considered to be filled only when the candidate starts working. It may happen in two weeks, or in two months.

This specificity of work is also not suitable for everyone, and not everyone, especially a novice IT recruiter, is able to adapt to this work format.

The specifics of the profession

It turns out that if a candidate quit for various reasons, the IT recruiter will have to find another specialist. Such stories are always stressful and can often lead to burnout.
Let's keep silent of the lack of a fixed work schedule, night-time messages from candidates, unexpected cancellations of interviews and breakdowns of offers :)
These factors lead to the fact that many IT recruiters run the risk of becoming disillusioned with the profession. The risk of burnout and further change of specialization in IT recruiting is high also because IT recruiters work quite closely with IT specialists.

Attractive working conditions, high salaries and stability motivate many IT recruiters to look towards the tech sphere. Moreover, it's quite real for an IT recruiter to become a tech specialist because they are already immersed in the specifics of the industry. So, for example, in Lucky Hunter, two IT recruiters at once subsequently retrained and today they work in the positions of QA and Frontend developer.

Don't get us wrong:


IT recruiting is not "hard labour" at all :) This is a wonderful, inspiring profession, in which there are much more advantages than disadvantages. We adore our business and are passionate about it no less than Elon Musk about space :) It's just that this time we decided to focus on the difficulties because they determine the state of the market.

Thus, the demand for personnel in the IT recruiting sphere is only growing: the market is not quickly replenished with new specialists and those who are not ready for the specifics of IT recruiting run the risk of burnout and a further change of their specialization. Therefore, when hiring new employees, many IT companies pay attention to experienced IT recruiters, but this also causes a number of challenges.

Difficulties in hiring IT recruiters

1. Recruiters see the pros and cons of your vacancies

It makes sense that an experienced IT recruiter is "a wheelbarrow with a wheel." Therefore, the specialist will immediately pay attention to how the vacancy is formed, whether the conditions correspond to the market realities, the salary relevance.
You must admit that a good IT recruiter is unlikely to work for a company when they see the flaws in your recruiting processes from the very beginning.
This also applies to messages that recruiters send to colleagues in an attempt to lure them to their team. Receiving a lot of job offers from other recruiters, we ourselves often look at how the offer was built, the recruiting channel it was sent, and in 99% of cases we become a bit proud of the quality of our work :)

2. Recruiters may know too much about your company

And this is not always good :) Working in a very narrow tech field and communicating with a large number of IT candidates, many IT recruiters may know all the ins and outs of work in your team.

A well-built HR brand is a story about the successful hiring of any specialist, but recruiters often have an advantage, and if your reputation is somewhat smeared (even very locally), there is a risk that the recruiter knows about it and is unlikely to be interested in working for your company.

3. Not every IT recruiter is ready to work in an agency

If you have an IT recruiting agency, you probably know: working in an IT recruiting company is many times more difficult than working as an in-house recruiter. IT recruiters are, of course, aware of this specifity :)
Working in a stressful, difficult mode, many recruiters are not ready for even greater difficulties, so they would rather refuse to work in an agency, choosing a more streamlined path.

How to hire IT recruiters?

At Lucky Hunter, we initially hired specialists with no work experience. This is difficult, but if there are resources, a very effective way: most of the girls who came to our team as inexperienced specialists today take Lead positions in the agency and are already training new employees.

We understand that not every company can afford to educate new employees, and, in truth, we ourselves do not have enough time for this. In this case, we recommend you to show all your skills and professionalism already at the stage of creating a vacancy.
There is a good chance that the recruiter will note your professionalism and be interested in the offer.
And we definitely recommend handling the candidates' "pains". For example, in our vacancies, we highlight the fact that the employee will not have to work with non-market stories: we fill only cool, inspiring, ambitious vacancies.

And if you are looking for an IT specialist, please contact us, because we have the best IT recruiters in our team :) P.S. Don't hope, we won't give them to you :)

Polina Barabanova
Content Manager at Lucky Hunter
Specializes in tech staff recruitment, startups, tech research, career, HR, and news topics. With her expertise, she provides valuable insights and practical advice to navigate the ever-evolving tech industry.

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