Hiring a recruiter
A hundred and eighty applications from people who screen CVs for a living — which makes this the one role where every applicant knows precisely how their own application will be read.
Placement numbers describe a market, not a recruiter. Roles filled and time-to-hire are the metrics recruiters put forward, and both are dominated by things the recruiter did not control: how in-demand the roles were, what the salary bands looked like, how fast the hiring managers moved. A recruiter who filled forty warehouse roles in a year and one who filled six senior engineers have incomparable numbers and the second job is usually harder. Layered on this is a genuine distinction the CVs blur: agency recruiters are trained to sell and to move fast, internal recruiters have to say no to their own colleagues and live with them afterwards, and the transition between the two fails often enough to be worth screening for deliberately.
What they will actually be filling
Selene asks what roles this person will recruit for and how the business currently behaves, since recruiter effectiveness is mostly about the second thing.
Role mix, volume, and how your managers behave
Two things shape a recruiter hire: the difficulty mix of what they are filling, and how disciplined the hiring managers are. A recruiter joining a business whose managers do not turn up to interviews is being hired for a different job than the ad describes.
One sentence changes the guide
It is the sharpest possible question for this role because it selects against the training most of the pile received. Agency recruitment rewards taking the brief and working it; in-house recruitment, done well, starts by establishing that the brief is wrong — the salary is below market, the requirement list is eleven items long, the manager wants a unicorn. A recruiter who cannot have that conversation will faithfully fill your roles with the wrong people.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who tells the hiring manager they are wrong. Most of them just take the brief and go.”
→ Challenging a brief became a must-have; placement volume and time-to-hire dropped to context.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, and the two numbers every recruiter CV leads with — roles filled and time-to-hire — appear in none of them. That is the deliberate consequence of one sentence about hiring managers.
No gates, and a note about the obvious irony
There is nothing to ask up front. It is worth being direct about the situation, though: every applicant for this role screens applications professionally, so they will recognise a weighted guide when they see one — which is an argument for the criteria being defensible rather than for hiding them. A recruiter who reads your process and thinks it is sound has learned something useful about you too.
Scored past a professionally optimised CV
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads for described interventions in the hiring process itself — the part of the job that cannot be optimised into a bullet point because it involves disagreeing with someone.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Getting the role mix and your managers’ actual behaviour on the record
- Reading all 180 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist that does not simply reward the best-optimised CVs
- An interview brief that asks each candidate for the brief they pushed back on
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or source candidates
- Any sourcing exercise or intake-meeting role-play, with her brief in hand
- The interview, with her brief in hand
- The offer, and every call that matters
Nearby roles
The first HR hire: enormous breadth expected, and specialist CVs applying.
Every CV claims quota. The number and its source are the whole story.
The largest ungated pile on the site, for a job whose value is invisible by design.
Be honest about your managers
How your hiring managers behave decides which recruiter succeeds here — say it and the guide will follow.