Summary

At CFI, we help Christians discern meaningful, impactful careers tackling pressing problems. We think that one of the most impactful roles you could do is work in recruiting. While getting this role at a high impact organization can be competitive, we believe that becoming a recruiter at a high-impact organization can greatly change the trajectory of impact for an organization.

This in-depth guide explains recruiting roles.

It includes expert interviews and extensive research.

Introduction

Being a recruiter has great potential to be an impactful career as you will be responsible for finding, assessing, managing and ideally, finding the optimal candidate. A good recruiter can be the difference between an impactful organization and a very impactful organization. An organization is nothing without qualified staff. Working in recruiting for a high-impact employer or agency has the potential to exponentially improve the impact of said organization. With few people looking for work in recruiting, it is a field under-filled with qualified candidates that are seeking to have a highly-impactful role.

Although the work of a recruiter can be highly impactful when done for the right organization, it is crucial to vet the organization you are considering working for and to ensure the work they do is truly impactful, both in light of the Gospel and their measurable outcomes.

What do we mean by recruiting?

Recruiting can be found in a wide variety of titles, including but not limited to hiring manager, talent acquisition partner, or HR manager. It can also be hidden in roles like community building.

This career path consists primarily of one goal: finding and assessing candidates to find the best candidate possible for an organization. Examples of this kind of work can include:

Researching potential candidates: Recruiting professionals may use tools such as Linkedin and other recruiting softwares to find outstanding candidates.

Assessing materials: When candidates submit their materials, recruiters at an organization are often the first to view their materials. You would likely be the first person to read applications and assess organizational fit for the particular position.
Interviewing: When assessing a candidate’s fit, you will likely conduct a series of virtual or in-person interviews. You will often be responsible for structuring these interviews and coordinating any associated software used for the interviewing process (for example, an online interviewing software that records an asynchronous interview). You will also likely be responsible for administering test tasks, and, especially for entry-level roles, creating these test tasks. For more advanced positions, you will likely partner with the hiring manager to create the test tasks.
Administration: You will also be the first point of contact for an organization when you are recruiting or coordinating interviews. This means coordinating schedules, corresponding with candidates regarding their progress, and owning the hiring process.

How promising is a career in fundraising?

At an impactful organization, recruiting can make all the difference in the world for an organization’s success. As a recruiter for an organization, you will be the face of the organization to interested candidates, you will be ruling out certain candidates, and coordinating efforts with potential candidates. You have the potential to draw in the best candidates and can make the work of an organization all the more effective by hiring the right staff. If you are particularly good at your job, your comparative advantage could add as much value to an organization as 6-figure donations. Recruiting, while not frequently discussed as a high-impact role, can radically transform the culture and impact of an organization. Here are some ways that you could contribute to a highly impactful organization:

Representing the organization

As recruiters are the first staff to interact with a candidate, it is your responsibility to make a good impression and to represent the organization well. It is important to remember that while you will spend a lot of your time as a recruiter evaluating people, they are evaluating you and your organization based on those first interactions. This means you need to respond promptly, kindly, and communicate clearly with candidates.

Sourcing candidates

Using Linkedin, GitHub, and other candidate sourcing tools, recruiters are responsible for finding excellent candidates. This can involve searching on Linkedin using specific cue words including former employers, skills, and interests. This can also include advertising positions online, i.e. LinkedIn, or within networks of people connected to potential candidates. This could also include building networks likely to attract qualified candidates, including universities, programs, and organizations that train ambitious young people.

Internal and External Communications

As a recruiter, a large part of your job is communicating. You will often be communicating with the president, executive team, or anyone on your team that is hiring. This means you need to have great people skills and comfortability interacting with colleagues of all levels of seniority. Additionally, you will be responsible for communicating with candidates throughout the hiring process, including rejections, scheduling interviews, asking follow-up questions, and conducting reference checks.

Owning the Hiring Rounds

One of your primary obligations as a recruiter will be owning the hiring rounds. You will be the point of contact for the candidates and the hiring manager. It’s your job to facilitate an efficient process where the candidates are informed quickly on decisions you keep hiring managers accountable to make decisions.

Designing the Evaluation Instruments

A lot of recruiting is being a master of psychology. That means designing questions and interviews with intentionality. Many aspects of the interview process are not as simple as recounting tasks in a job description. A well-crafted job description is a tool to recruit and sign the best candidate. Your word choice and writing matter tremendously.

Calum Richards, a recruiter at Givewell for a year and a half comments on his favorite part of the role–

“I think it is designing the evaluation instruments that is the part of the role that I love most. And designing the public-facing job materials. If you think about it, when you’re writing the ideal job description, what you also want to do is really incentivize your star candidates. You also want to disincentivize candidates who are not a good fit. You would also not want to exclude your wild card candidates. Writing a job description that does all of that can be really hard. Then when you get into the evaluation part you get to ask questions like, “How can I ask a question that gets a sincere answer from the candidate? How can I avoid getting a canned answer and genuinely assess the candidate? How can I create a feeling within the interview that candidates can be their authentic selves?

I think a lot of this comes down to good writing. I just love that part of this role.”

Negotiating

In the final stages of a hiring round, it is your responsibility to negotiate things such as salary, benefits, start date, and location. This can be one of the most important steps because you want to ensure that you’re providing fair compensation based on the candidate's qualifications and also not sacrificing company culture for the sake of a candidate. You will also need to keep tabs on if a candidate has received other job offers or has additional life constraints (location, schooling, children, etc.)

Advantages

Can increase the productivity of an organization – Recruiters can greatly increase the productivity of an organization by hiring the right people. An organization can be bogged down by unproductive, ill-fitting employees, but thorough work on the frontend can eliminate a lot of challenges later. You can also have the satisfaction of finding a great match for both the employee and the employer when you find a great candidate for an organization.

Anya, a recruiter at Open Philanthropy for over 5 years says–

“I think that the times I had the most impact were when I would get someone through the door that was not in our immediate networks and they ended up being a really important addition. There have also been times when I could draw on my own experience over time to pattern match and discern a star candidate.”

Relevant for a wide variety of cause areas – Nearly every larger organization has a role in HR or recruiting. This means you can get a position at an organization that does work that is meaningful to you and also deeply impactful! You can get a position in recruiting at a global health organization, a grantor organization, or a position that fills roles in government. The opportunity to do work at an organization that aligns with your passions means you will likely be much more impactful and more likely to progress in your career.

Specific training is not required – You do not need a particular degree to go into recruiting, and it is fairly easy to pivot into. Potential majors that might equip you to go into this field are business, psychology, sociology, and organizational management, but you can enter the field with nearly any degree. If you are people-savvy and passionate about filling positions with qualified people, this could be a great role for you. Calum Richards, from GiveWell comments that the field is “very amenable for generalists” meaning that people with a wide variety of backgrounds can enter the field and have a meaningful impact.

Disadvantages

Managing differing preferences –As the coordinator for the hiring process, you may be managing the preferences of the hiring manager, possibly their manager, your own preferences, and additional preferences of colleagues that may be offering their opinions. People have different priorities when they are evaluating candidates. For some people, flexibility is crucial, for others creativity and big-picture thinking, for others, they want a candidate that will take care of all the little details and free them from administrative tasks. Still others may prioritize location and be thinking primarily about office culture and equity when making a hiring decision (i.e. prioritizing an in-person candidate for the sake of company culture while prioritizing background a little less). Facilitating a group decision can often be a difficult process, especially if you are conflict avoidant. Additionally, there is often a tension between the wants of hiring managers, who may want to delay the decision-making process as long as possible for fear of making the wrong decision, and the candidates who want a response as quickly as possible so that they can either take a different offer or continue their search.

Rejecting candidates – One of the most consistent answers to the question “What is most challenging about your job?” that I received when interviewing recruiters was, “Rejecting people”. No one wants to reject people. Every recruiter I spoke with me mentioned the dread of delivering bad news to a candidate.
Emotionally Taxing – Work as a recruiter can be very emotionally taxing if you let it. A large bulk of your work is managing group decision-making, negotiating with potential employees, being the face of the organization, and rejecting candidates. You may also find yourself rejecting your preferred candidates and extending offers to candidates you would rather reject. You are the coordinator and often not the decision maker. This can wear on people over time and make working as a recruiter exhausting.

Is it a good fit for you?

What makes you tick? If it’s cultivating a well-oiled machine and interacting with people frequently, then recruiting could be a great option for you! You may also excel as a recruiter if you’re comfortable engaging in difficult conversations and managing groups efficiently, even through high stakes decisions.

In answer to the question, “What makes recruiting fun for you?” Calum comments–

“I want to be careful about the things that are fun for me versus the things I think would be fun for other people. In the recruiting environment where I work, I am typically responsible for managing roles from the very earliest stages of thinking about the role. From thinking about the capacity need that the role is designed to fill, what we think are the most important qualities in a role, how we would even go about structuring an evaluation instrument, sourcing candidates, interviewing them, talking constantly with hiring managers about edits to the hiring process all the way to getting a signed offer and onboarding the candidate. I like that I get to own that whole thing. I enjoy getting exposure to a lot of senior leaders and really being a strategic partner on filling import needs that they have on their teams.”

Calum also added that this will not characterize every recruiter role, but may be particularly true on a small or growing team. As organizations grow, recruiter roles will likely take on more narrow and specialized responsibilities.

Would you be a good recruiter?

You are a great communicator – Much of recruiting is communicating. It is convincing candidates that your organization would be a great place to work. It’s convincing candidates to apply and to do so within a specific timeframe. It’s convincing hiring managers to take the time to look at applicants. You will also be communicating the organization’s needs and discerning qualified candidates through screener interviews. All of this requires excellent communication, not only in form, but in efficiency.
You are people savvy and patient – As stated previously, you have to manage a lot of people in the hiring process. While it’s your responsibility to ensure that people are on top of their work regarding the hiring process, there is only so much you can do to make sure others are completing their work. You must be patient with your hiring manager and patient with candidates, recognizing that both the hiring manager and likely your candidates are also doing their other full-time jobs. Your ability to discern disinterest from a busy schedule will be crucial as you are weeding out candidates and holding your hiring manager accountable.

Calum offers two kinds of candidates he think would be well-suited for recruiting–

I think there are two profiles of people that I think would enjoy recruiting, the first kind is the kind that really enjoys working with people and spending time with them. These are the empaths, those that enjoy assessing people and thinking about where they could fit into an organization. The other profile is the person that can really geek out about personal qualities and psychological testing. They can get really nerdy about the job design. For instance, what are the qualities we think we need in this job? How can we assess these qualities? Why do we know that we need this thing? These abstract kinds of questions can be really exciting to some people. I think it’s important to have both kinds of people on a recruiting team. I’m definitely more of the second type, and it is good to have both types of heads in the room. You can really get a lot from both perspectives.

You are intuitive and exceptionally organized – One of the worst things you can do as a recruiter is be poorly organized. If you do not reply to a candidate in a timely manner, they may accept another position. You will likely have several candidates in different stages of the hiring process. Many recruiters use candidate tracking software as a way to keep track of everyone.

Anya comments–

I would say the same things that make people good at operations make them good at recruiting, but dialed up a little bit. You need to be really organized, really responsive, and quick. I think that one way I look at recruiting candidates differently than operations candidates is that, with recruiting candidates, adherence to timelines and a organization are more important. You will lose candidates if you are not super organized and that was always something that I was afraid of. You may have hundreds of candidates for several jobs and you have to be super on top of it.

The better you can intuit what the hiring manager is looking for, the more successful you will be in recruiting.

They may also use CRM softwares as a way to manage their candidates. Whatever you use, the most important thing is that you are extremely organized or you risk valuable candidates choosing a different position or losing respect for your organization. Additionally, because recruiting involves a lot of people skills, it is important to use your intuition when assessing candidates. While many human attributes can be measured scientifically, a lot of communication is done subconsciously or through body language. Being attuned to this can be a great advantage for you if you are interested in this role.

Priorities for an impactful career

Vet the organization

Recruiting has a lot of power to improve the impact of an organization, but not to make an organization impactful. If having an impact is important to you, you must ensure the organization you’re working for is measuring their impact and holding themselves accountable to quality work.

One of the main ways we recommend doing this is using the ITN framework which provides a broad framework for considering impact considering 3 factors. Namely, is it 1) Important, 2) Tractable, and 3) Neglected. If an intervention makes a substantial change in the world for other people or animals, can be measured as doing what it hopes to accomplish, and is not oversaturated by talent. In less saturated areas that are still doing great good for the world, there is a lot of potential to have an impact!

You can read more about this framework on 80000 Hours’ Website here!

Be honest with yourself

No matter how impactful an organization or a career may be on paper, if you have no interest in it or do not enjoy it, you will not be impactful! At least not for long. It’s important to be really candid with yourself when you’re thinking about potentially impactful careers. The most impactful career for you has to ALSO be something you enjoy. You also will likely grow in your ability to have an impact in a field over time, and the best way to be in a position of influence in the long run is to think critically about your decision upfront so that you choose something you can stick with!

So now what?

Becoming a recruiter

Recruiting is a great field for anyone because it is incredibly accessible from a wide variety of starting points.

Education – Because being a recruiter requires a fairly general skillset, you can major in almost anything beforehand! However, some majors that were recommended by current recruiters are business, organizational management or social sciences. These can all be a good springboard to enter a career as a recruiter.
Leadership and writing experience – Being a recruiter involves managing a lot of people of various levels and with various degrees of involvement (think of a passive applicant vs the hiring manager). Comfortability taking initiative with all kinds of people and communicating both verbally and through writing is crucial. If you have the opportunity to lead a club or a sports team at your university, this could be a great way to build comfortability in this arena.
Other work experience – In addition to leadership skills and excellent communication skills, if you are able to gain experience using Salesforce or another CRM at your workplace, you will be better prepared to engage with the technology needed at your workplace and may be a more standout applicant. This can be easily accomplished in many kinds of business internships.

Know your story – As being a recruiter involves a fairly general set of skills, one of the most important things you can do when interviewing is to share a convincing story about your interest in the role. While the role is accessible from a variety of backgrounds, demonstrating a vested interest in the organization’s success can set you apart as a stellar candidate.

Summing Up

If you’re considering an impactful career in recruitment, here are some great ways to prepare yourself:

Vet the organization
Choose a cause area/organization/team that is working on an impactful area that resonates with you
Get experience in business, management, and CRM software usage through internships or work experience
Build wide networks in college and the workforce–this will make connecting with people to find the best candidates much easier.
Hone your communication skills through writing and through having challenging conversations
To read more about a career in recruiting, check out these resources!
For job opportunities at impact organizations, check out these job boards!
- 80000 Hours
- Probably Good
- You can also join your local Slack group hosted by your community builder in your area to hear about job opportunities directly!

Should you be a Christian in Recruiting?