Tech Recruitment Team Leaders Should Keep Their Industry Focus

One of the biggest motivations for many technology recruiters is the feeling of playing a part in some of the most innovative developments that are rocking our world.

At Next Ventures, we are proud to deploy an award-winning team of recruiters who are obsessive about industry knowledge and forensic in their appreciation of how their candidates make their difference.

You can’t be a great tech recruiter without living the industry. Even when you become a manager of recruiters (and especially when you become a manager of recruiters).

When a recruiter has mastered their skills, it often makes sense to pass them on to the next generation and become a team leader. You might not necessarily stop billing yourself, but your activity does tend to change significantly.

In certain recruitment companies, you might find yourself focusing so much on the activity and behaviours of your team that you can lose touch with the essence of the industry that you recruit for. When you lose sight of the product, you lose the ability to understand your candidate base (or the candidate base of your team).

Technology Team lead

At Next Ventures, we encourage our recruitment team leaders to retain their passion for technology. Tech is so fast-moving that they can’t afford to allow their experience to become redundant, and while they are not on the front line of recruitment, the benefits of actually understanding the requirements of the role are undeniable.

The moment you take your finger off the pulse, it is hard to find again.

Part of the challenge lies in how a recruiter measures success, and, by extension, how a team leader manages their teams. We are not a KPI heavy environment, we allow our people flexibility in terms of how they work, and we believe that the closer we are with our candidates and clients, the more successful we will be. This is impossible without deep industry knowledge, and although it is hard to measure, you certainly can’t do a fantastic job without it.

We are currently expanding our mid-tier management team and an integral part of the interview process is getting a sense of how passionate and knowledgeable potential new hires are about the industry. Our clients would expect no less and neither would our recruiters! No one appreciates being managed by someone who doesn’t understand the detail of your assignments. It is hard to offer advice when you don’t appreciate the nuance.

With the advance of technology in the fields of sourcing and selection, I believe that developing an advanced level of industry knowledge will be crucial for recruiters to keep adding value. We talk a lot about valuing human interactions – recruiters (and their managers) simply have to be able to talk the industry talk.

An important part of this is investing in training, but when it comes down to it, you simply have to create a team that loves their industry and that never wants to stop learning.

If you are a technology recruitment manager with a few years of success behind you (but you want to work for a technology-obsessed employer), please get in touch.

Find out more here next-ventures.com/workforus