Recruiting is an easy job: you post job advertisements, people respond, you conduct interviews, arrange orientation, and then your staff pick up their expected number of shifts every month. At least that’s what I used to think.

When I first started with Plan A as a student, I’ll be honest… I had no idea what I was walking in to. I knew that I was going to complete an eight-week placement at a health care staffing agency that focuses on long-term care, but I had no idea what that entailed. I didn’t know that I would receive ten resumes every night on average and, in order to schedule interviews for all of them, it would sometimes take four or five phone calls and a few emails. I also didn’t realize how often it would happen that all of that work is done, just to result in the candidate’s resume being placed in the “No Show” file.

There are many tips and pieces of advice that I could write about, but I’m going to focus on three today:

1. Learn to Multi-task. There has never been a day that I’ve walked into the office and said, “Today I’m going to call out to schedule interviews and complete reference checks and that’s it”. There are always a million and one other things that come up. If I have twenty-seven emails in my inbox, those need to be addressed. While I’m responding to those, phone calls always seem to come through regarding scheduling an interview or completing a reference check. Once that’s done, they’re filed accordingly and I go back to responding to emails. But then my 10 o’clock interview walks in. Everything else gets put on hold. Once they head out, I then have an additional five reference checks to complete. Once again, my emails get put on hold. You can see how multi-tasking is crucial to the success of being a Recruiter. If you don’t learn to multi-task, you will sink. You will drown in the amount of work that is piling up on your desk. To start, if you have trouble deciding which tasks are most important, create a list or chart with your superior. Always have it on hand to refer back to should you find yourself with a million different things to do.

2. Practice patience. Everything takes time. Being a Recruiter means that you are dealing with people who do not make you their first priority, even though they are yours. It may take hours, days or even weeks for them to get back to you with required information, and it’s your job to wait for it. You can put timelines and policies into place, but if you hold them to that timeline and they haven’t gotten back to you, doesn’t all of the other work seem like a waste of time? If they’ve expressed an interest, submitted a resume or scheduled an interview, your hard work as far as job advertisements and calling to schedule is proving to be effective; just be patient.

3. Keep Record of Everything. If there is ANYTHING that I have learned over these past few weeks, it’s to keep a paper trail of EVERYTHING. I communicate heavily over email to new candidates coming through the doors as well as to older staff. Our Recruitment department interviews approximately thirty candidates in one week and we have such a large staff pool that calling every time an issue arises or a new policy is put into place would take too much time. I have learned that keeping a paper trail of all communication is important when it comes to dealing with people. If someone were to say that you said one thing, but you know that you didn’t, you could simply pull out the paper trail and have your proof. If the communication happens to occur through phone call, I like to follow up with an email. Again, always have the proof!

I hope these three tips help you in your own world of Recruitment. It’s a busy world, but so rewarding! Thanks for reading!