Key takeaways
- Every recruiter has two customers: the hiring company and the candidate.
- In-house recruiters fill one employer's roles; agency recruiters must also win client companies.
- Technical recruiters need enough understanding of the work to judge candidates' skills.
- Recruiter business development is B2B selling with hiring news as the trigger.
The recruitment process from brief to offer
The recruitment process runs from a hiring brief to an accepted offer, with the recruiter managing both sides along the way. A strong brief at the start, agreed with the hiring manager, saves weeks of mismatched interviews later.
- Agree the role, must-have skills, salary range and timeline with the hiring manager.
- Search for candidates, advertise and approach people who are not actively looking.
- Screen candidates and present a shortlist with notes on each.
- Arrange interviews and gather feedback from both sides.
- Manage the offer, references and the candidate's notice period.
In-house vs agency recruiter
An in-house recruiter is employed by the company that is hiring; an agency recruiter works for a firm that fills roles for many clients in return for a fee. The in-house recruiter knows one organisation deeply and works closely with its managers; the agency recruiter knows a market of candidates and employers.
Agency recruiters are often split by what they own. Some run the whole desk, winning clients and finding candidates; others focus on one side while a colleague handles the other. Either way, agency income depends on placements, so winning good clients is as important as finding good candidates.
What a technical recruiter does differently
A technical recruiter hires for engineering, data and other specialist roles, which means understanding the work well enough to judge a candidate's skills. They need to tell one programming language or framework from another, read a portfolio and know which questions separate real experience from keywords on a CV.
They also work closely with engineering managers on assessments and interview design, and they often compete hard for a small pool of candidates, so their outreach has to be specific about the team, the problems and the technology.
Recruiter business development: winning client companies
Recruiter business development is the work of winning companies that will pay an agency to fill their roles. The usual triggers are public signs of hiring: job adverts, new funding, a new office or a new leader building a team.
The best approaches are specific. A recruiter who writes to a hiring manager about the roles they are struggling to fill, and shows they already know candidates in that field, is taken more seriously than one sending a general offer to every HR inbox.
Selling to a recruiter or a talent team
Selling to a recruiter or a talent team means understanding that their time is split between candidates and hiring managers. The buyer is usually a head of talent in-house, or an agency owner or director, and they care about time saved, candidate experience and data protection.
Candidate data is personal data, so questions about consent, storage and deletion come early. Be precise about what your product does with it, and say plainly what it does not do.
Where Pebbles Ai fits
- CapabilityProspecting & customer recordsAsk for companies that match the sectors and sizes an agency serves; an assistant finds them, up to 50 a search, then hiring managers or HR leads at up to ten of them. It finds client contacts, not candidates.
- CapabilityOutreach contentOutreach drafts emails to hiring managers from your company context and the role you specialise in, saved as drafts in the connected Gmail or Outlook mailbox.
Common questions
Do recruiters work for the candidate or the employer?
The employer pays, so the recruiter formally works for them, but good recruiters look after candidates too because their reputation depends on both sides.
Is recruitment a sales job?
Agency recruitment largely is: recruiters sell the role to candidates and the agency to client companies. In-house recruitment involves persuasion but no client selling.
What does a 360 recruiter mean?
A 360 recruiter handles both sides of agency work, winning and managing client companies as well as finding and placing candidates.
About this page. Written by the Pebbles Ai team for people who run sales, marketing and growth. Last updated .
