In Part 1 of How To Hire Great Recruiters we laid out some framework around why hiring great recruiting talent is so important and began to share the 8 behavioral competencies Bearing Fruit Consulting finds necessary to succeed as a recruiter today. Recruiting leaders and companies need to do a better job of identifying, recruiting, interviewing and selecting recruiting talent in order to succeed in such a challenging talent economy. In Part 1 we identified Interaction as a key behavioral competency for great recruiters.
Identifying the competency model that is linked to superior performance is the first step to achieving greatness in your recruiting team followed by designing and executing a scored behavioral interview based on the competency model. One of the finest books on this topic, in my humble opinion is Competence At Work: Models For Superior Performance by Dr. Lyle M. Spencer, Jr. and Signe M. Spencer. A premier work in this space I can not recommend it highly enough. I also have to thank and recognize Chris Hallier, one of the high performing recruiters and key thought leaders from the award winning FirstMerit Talent Acquisition team I led, for introducing me to this book some 8 years ago or so. Chris is a phenomenal HR and recruiting talent and if he is not in your network he should be.
Let's take a look at the second of the eight competencies.
Spoken Communication: The great recruiter is able to present information clearly through the spoken word. He or she listens well and influences others through oral presentation in either positive or negative circumstances. 
Listens well? How is listening a part of spoken communication? In order to communicate effectively using spoken word great recruiters understand how vital it is to listen. What people say matters. How they say it matters. The words they choose matter. When candidates are speaking a great recruiter picks up on social cues, word cues, tonality cues and, if meeting in person, physiology cues. All of these cues provide valuable insight into what a candidates values, what is most importance to them, what kind of pain they are having in their current career and personal situations etc. Prospects and candidates give up so much information about these important variables through these cues but few recruiters are savvy enough or trained well enough to pick up on these cues.
Great recruiters then use these cues to appropriately modify or adjust their style and form of spoken communication with the prospect or candidate. Neuro-linguistic programming, as it is called, while not specific to our industry certain has huge value for great recruiters. While one does not have to be an expert in NLP, using some of the thoughts and tactics found in NLP is advantageous to great recruiters. Peter Leffkowitz trains at length in this area.
Listening well is a dying art in the recruiting world. One needs only spend a few minutes on the phone with most recruiters to know this. Most recruiters sound like auctioneers when they call me. I think they are afraid if they take a breath or pause I might hang up the phone on them or say no. I hear this from so many candidates as well. As we will see in our discussion of a later competency, Insight and Needs Analysis, too many recruiters spend way too much time talking and very little listening. With all the focus on scripting, overcoming objections and getting the attention of candidates an clients, many recruiters neglect this critical listening skill.
Though this competency is called spoken communication, and there really is an art to how a recruiter communicates, the emphasis is on listening well first and then communicating in a format and style that is congruent with the person you are speaking with. Decision influencing happens as a result of understanding the decision making criteria in the first place and one can't accomplish that without listening first.
Our next discussion will introduce the competency of Commitment to Task.
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