Recruiting
Sourcing, evaluating, and hiring candidates — a specialized skill set that spans sourcing, interviewing, assessment, and offer negotiation.
Recruiting encompasses the full hiring lifecycle: writing job descriptions, sourcing candidates through job boards and direct outreach, conducting screens and structured interviews, assessing candidates against role criteria, managing offer negotiations, and closing candidates. At companies without dedicated HR, hiring managers are expected to run substantial portions of this process themselves.
Typical time to job-readiness: ~2 months.
Learning Recruiting
Beginner
Write a clear job description, source candidates via LinkedIn Recruiter, and run a structured phone screen using prepared questions.
Intermediate
Design a full interview process (scorecard, structured questions, debrief protocol), manage candidate experience end-to-end, and handle offer negotiations.
Advanced
Build a recruiting function from scratch, measure pipeline health (funnel conversion, time-to-fill, quality of hire), and develop employer brand and sourcing strategy.
Key concepts
- Funnel stages: sourced → screened → interviewed → offered → accepted — measure conversion at each step
- Structured interviewing — standardized questions and scorecards reduce bias and improve hiring decisions
- Job leveling — calibrating experience and responsibility expectations before writing the job description
- Boolean search — advanced LinkedIn/sourcing syntax to find candidates who aren't actively applying
- Candidate experience — how the hiring process feels to candidates; bad experience damages employer brand
- Time-to-fill and quality of hire — the two metrics that matter most for evaluating recruiting effectiveness
Common interview topics
- How do you source passive candidates who aren't on job boards
- Walk me through how you'd design an interview process for a senior engineering role
- How do you reduce bias in your hiring process
- How do you handle a candidate who is negotiating an offer you can't fully meet
- What metrics do you use to evaluate recruiting performance