Recruiter

Hiring was a line item inside human resources (HR) work for a long time. Post the opening, tidy up the applications that arrive, hand them to the manager — that fits alongside payroll and contracts easily enough. The arrangement holds on exactly one condition: people have to show up when you post.

At a company nobody has heard of, that condition fails. One engineering opening stays live for two months, seven applications arrive, and none of them overlaps with what the posting asked for. Meanwhile the team runs without the person, and the work that role was meant to carry gets distributed across everyone who is already there.

The problem of doing hiring as a side duty compounds it. When one person holds both hiring and the work with hard dates on it — payroll runs, contract renewals — hiring is always what slips. Delaying it by a day produces no consequence that day. It produces an empty seat three months later.

A recruiter is the seat that split off because of those two problems. Instead of waiting for applications, the job is to go find people and write to them, and doing only hiring means it can't be pushed aside by something with a deadline. Among HR roles it's usually the first one to separate out, typically once a company starts hiring more than twenty people a year.

A day divides between pushing candidates already in the process to their next step and finding new ones. Five to eight openings at once is typical, so the morning starts by scanning which candidate on which opening has been stalled and for how many days. Anything untouched for more than four days gets treated as a problem with the process rather than with the candidate.

Five things recur.

1. Sourcing — finding candidates and writing to them instead of waiting for applications. Each message is written individually against that person's background. Twenty messages producing two or three replies is normal, so filling one opening means reviewing close to a hundred people at this stage alone.
2. The first call. Twenty to thirty minutes to check whether the person is in a position to consider a move at all, and whether their current pay and expectations overlap with the range for the role. Skip this call and you learn after four interview rounds that the numbers are twice apart.
3. Scheduling. Lining up three interviewers and a candidate. Two days lost here is often enough for another company's offer to land first.
4. Keeping the candidate side warm. How many days a reply took, and whether a rejection was actually sent, decides whether that person applies again in six months. Someone who waited three weeks for an answer remembers the wait, not the role.
5. Offer negotiation. Presenting salary, level and start date, then staying with it through the point where the candidate's current employer counters.

Two numbers get watched: time to hire, the span from posting to a signed start, and the share of offers accepted. A long span on its own usually means candidates aren't collecting at the front. A low acceptance rate alongside it points at the posting and the salary range being out of step with the market rather than at anything in the interviews.

The closest counterpart is the hiring manager, the person who actually needs the role. When an opening starts, the first task is sitting down together and cutting the requirements to three lines. Ten lines means every interviewer evaluates something different, and after a hire nobody agrees on why that person was chosen. Those three lines become the must-haves in the job description and, at the same time, the checklist for the interviews.

With interviewers, the work is dividing up who covers what. Three people asking the same question means it got asked once, and whatever nobody covered comes back as a problem after the hire. What the screening stage used as its basis for cutting also goes to the interviewers, so they aren't starting from zero.

With the HR side, the work is aligning on conditions. Knowing how far the salary range for a level goes and how many positions the budget actually holds is what makes it possible to state a range on the first call. People operations is usually the function that sets those ranges.

And then the candidates themselves. This is the only role here where the counterpart is outside the company, which means how the company looks throughout the process is largely decided by one person's habits about replying. Candidates who were turned down also turn up later as customers or colleagues often enough to matter.

"Inbound won't fill this one. I'm going to source for it."

Rather than waiting on the posting, the plan is to find and contact people directly.

"Leave me three must-haves. I'll move the rest into nice-to-have."

Cutting the requirements so interviewers end up using the same bar.

"Offer acceptance dropped to 50 percent. We should look at the posting before the interviews."

Reading a low acceptance rate as a problem with the original terms rather than the later stages.

Pagedeck brought in its first recruiter to fill three engineering openings. The roles had been live for two quarters and fewer than ten applications had arrived per opening. What Grace checked was not the quality of the applicants but the fact that applications weren't arriving at all.

The new recruiter's first month was 120 sourcing messages and a kickoff with Theo. Out of the ten requirement lines Theo had written, they picked the three that would actually screen anyone out and moved the other seven into nice-to-have. The second month brought nine candidates into interviews, and two of them joined.

The most common reading is that this is the person who filters incoming résumés. From a candidate's side the visible contact starts after applying, so it reads that way. But most of the hours go to people who never applied. Finding someone who isn't currently looking, writing to them, and keeping a conversation open is the core of the role. Left uncorrected, a company keeps only the wait-for-applications channel and meets exactly as many people as its name already reaches.

The other reading is that a good recruiter is one who hires a lot. Filling empty seats is the assignment, so the assumption is natural. But optimize for volume and lowering the bar is always the fastest route. That's why the number watched is not seats filled but offer acceptance rate together with how many hires are still there a year later. Left uncorrected, a team fills three seats this quarter and has four open next year.