The Day in the Life of an ALTA IT Recruiter
There’s so much more to IT recruiting than just the many calls, texts, and emails that you receive from our recruiting team. Join me, Melissa McNally, for a quick tour of a typical day in the life of an ALTA IT recruiter.
IT recruiters wear many hats and keep numerous plates spinning day in and day out. The typical day starts early and ends late! There is always something to be done, between meetings, conversations, prep work, and follow-up happening. ALTA’s recruiters truly care about finding the very best talent to solve our customer’s problems and must balance helping candidates find fulfillment in the role. Here are just a few of the tasks that we take on each day:
Helping our clients understand what they want
More often than not, when we talk to our clients about new roles they are asking us to recruit, they have just as many questions as they do answers. We provide up up-to-date market intelligence and info to help them better define their actual needs and budget.
Finding candidates
The core of our day needs to be spent sourcing and connecting with excellent technical talent. For some openings it’s a quick search under a very tight deadline. For other openings it’s a deep dig for a rare skill that can take days or weeks to find the perfect candidate, all while our competition is racing to source equally qualified candidates; we need to be as fast and efficient as possible.
Negotiating
As mentioned above, ALTA recruiters work hard to balance the needs of both our clients and candidates. A placement must mutually benefit all parties involved and we want everyone to succeed and feel satisfied with the outcome. Many times, though, our recruiters must work with all parties to arrange a deal that pleases everyone, even if it can mean that sometimes not everyone gets everything that they originally wanted.
Scheduling and Preparing candidates for interviews
When it comes time for the candidate to interview with the customer, we are on hand and happy to coordinate. We arrange interviews, send a confirmation, and prepare the candidate with all of the information that they could need. Post interview we discuss interview feedback with the candidate.
Balance ever-changing priorities
Our priorities shift constantly and it’s vital that a recruiter be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice to focus on the most important business.
Coach jobseekers on resume formatting and content
Not everyone knows how to craft a clear, concise, and informative resume. ALTA recruiters do. We coach candidates on appropriate content and make edits for grammar, spelling, and uniformity in style.
Present Offers
One of the most gratifying duties for us is to extend offers when our candidate is selected by the customer. We always deliver the good news personally, over the phone, generate the offer documentation and help the candidate through the offer process. Once they have accepted, we set the candidate’s onboarding up in our system and coordinate the processing of their background check.
Coach consultants through challenging work situations
Once a candidate is placed at our client, the job of a recruiter is still not finished. As with any employee, our consultants still face challenging work situations from time to time. We are invested in their success, and we regularly help them through these situations. Our recruiters are great sounding boards and career coaches.
Researching new technologies
Recruiters are experts in finding excellent candidates for our clients – we are not typically an expert in a specific technical area (though sometimes technical individuals jump the fence into recruiting). One of the ways that we do this is by keeping up to date with current technologies, platforms, and industry trends on our own time – It’s important that we have a broad understanding of what we are looking for to find the best candidates.
Educating jobseekers
We talk to jobseekers and find people jobs daily. Very few people understand the current IT job market like our recruiters. While we want to be the ones to help jobseekers find new jobs, we also know we can’t make the placement every time. However, we can provide market intelligence and coaching to every single candidate we work with.
As you can see, our recruiters do a HUGE number of things every day. It’s our pleasure to keep those plates spinning and prepare for new recruiting adventures daily! Thanks for joining me for a quick glimpse of our day!