Recruiter Resumes & Writing Guide

As Recruiters, we are guru’s in the resume department, correct? Therefore crafting a Recruiter Resume should be “easy peasy” and not such a daunting activity?

Well, the pastor’s child is usually most misbehaved, the physician never goes for check-ups, and yes, the recruiter is typical without any historical information on work history apart from an average Linkedin profile.

Fear not, because our Recruiter Resume sample below will provide you with all the required inspiration and guidance to craft your own unique resume.

Call the job that you like: Talent Acquisition Specialist, Candidate Recruiter, 360 Recruiter, Virtual Applicant Sourcer, Recruitment Sales Consultant. There are thousands of opportunities advertised each week, but just as many candidates applying for Recruitment roles on a global scale.

Standing out from the competition is crucial and “flexible, dynamic and hardworking with the ability to network” as your sales pitch will take you straight into the decline folder.

12 Recruiter Resume Example Downloads

(Free sample downloads are at the bottom of this page)

The Recruiter Resume Writing Guide:

Resume Sections

A Recruiter resume consists of seven components, all vital to persuading a hiring manager or agency owner, or recruiter that you are the right fit for the role at hand. We have unpacked the purpose of each component below:

1. Contact Information:

• Name, Last Name
• Address
• Cell Number
• Email
• Be sure to include alternative contact channels like your LinkedIn profile or Facebook URL details.

2. Career Summary:
A career summary should contain 4-5 bullet points highlighting your most noteworthy skills, experience, and credentials relevant to the job opening. This serves as a teaser to the rest of your resume. You may use a paragraph format too, as long as it takes less than 30 seconds to read.

3. Qualifications Summary:
Provide accurate details about your qualifications completed and in process with the institution, qualification name, and dates.

4. Relevant Recruitment Experience:
Highlight your relevant job experience by using either a functional or chronological resume. Both work as long as your duties and skills are aligned to the job description and further emphasize other areas, such as accomplishments, education, and skills. Use brief sentences with bullet points to list the most important job functionalities.

5. Other Employment Experience:
No work experience yet? No problem. Use a functional format to amplify strengths and core skills, for instance, sales or research that could be applied to a recruiter’s role. Informal experience gained during vocational or temporary jobs is essential to jot down, especially if you are applying for an intern or junior recruiter position to showcase your work ethic and learning potential. Use the same strategy if you are making a career change, and this is the first recruiter role you are applying too. Often recruiters have many years of experience, but your resume should not be a memoir of working history accumulated since year turn of the millennium!. Only elaborate on the last five to 10 years with full job descriptions and merely list company duration of employment and title for any work history preceding ten years to avoid employment gaps in your resume.

6. Skills Summary/Key Skills:
Read through the job description more than once to identify the most important keywords. Then weave these keywords into your entire resume. This is called Resume SEO and will assist with beating the bots of ATS systems and ensure that a human actually gest to review your application.

7. Licenses/Certifications/Relevant Coursework/Training: 
Numerous opportunities exist for development and training in the recruitment field for example, short courses, certifications, workshops, video training, webinars, and learning programs. Make sure to list these accordingly in your education section.

What to Highlight in a Recruiter Resume

Recruiters will source, screen, and interview candidates before presenting them to the client or hiring manager. There are a few essential factors that you need to include in your resume to assist potential employers in determining whether you are a good fit for their team.

The purpose of a recruiter is to generate qualified candidates for open vacancies. Recruiters may work in-house for a specific company or be employed at a third-party agency where multiple clients are serviced. The responsibilities may differ depending on the environment they find themselves in. Recruiters can also work as freelancers for agencies or on a project basis for corporate organizations during certain times of the year, for instance, during graduate intakes or seasonal hiring like over the holidays. Some recruiters are based in an office, while others work remotely or virtually.

An important aspect to highlight is the type of recruitment service you have experience in. Recruitment services are divided into five primary areas:

• Contingency Recruiting: With this service offering the recruiter’s placement fee is contingent on whether the candidate they presented is hired. They charge the client a placement fee once the successful candidate has commenced employment.

• Retained Recruiting: Also called engaged recruiting, clients will pay a percentage of the placement fee upfront, upon which a recruiter would commence the sourcing process. The second part of the fee is paid when interviews are scheduled and the remainder when the candidate begins employment.

• Corporate Recruiters: These talent specialists are directly employed and work in-house at the organization, usually in the HR department. The purpose of their jobs is to find candidates for the open vacancies in the company either by sourcing the candidates themselves or using recruitment agencies and staffing firms.

• Temporary / Contract Staffing: Contract and temporary roles, as well as bulk positions where multiple numbers of the same role are available, are handled by staffing recruiters. They will find candidates to fill temp jobs, seasonal openings. Limited duration project position or substitute vacancies to fill in for another employee for a specific period.

• Outplacement Agency Recruiters: When a person loses their job due to retrenchments, redundancy or downsizing, they are referred by their company to an outplacement agency. The outplacement agency is hired by the firm to assist the workforce being laid off too find employment elsewhere and assist with job-seeking activities such as resume writing, career guidance, interviewing techniques, and job hunting.

Next, you have to explain the scope of your recruitment function. 360 Recruiters engage with both candidates and clients through the full cycle of the recruitment process from securing the vacancy, finding candidates, facilitating interviews, and negotiating for both parties during the offer process. You may also be involved in pure business development and responsible for securing new job orders via cold calling, marketing, and networking with clients upon which job orders will be given to your Candidate Recruiter. Candidate Recruiters or Sourcers are accountable for researching and name generation, presenting vacancies received to applicants, shortlisting, and interview potential prospects. They would then send these candidates to the Marketer who will, in turn, present candidates to the Client Hiring Manager. Be very specific here as not all recruiters are comfortable with cold calling and business development activities.

Now, move over to your specialty or niche. Recruiters can either specialize by industry or job function. For instance, your portfolio may include financial services and banking, or you could be making placements in the mining, military, or pharmaceutical sectors. If you specialize in a particular job function like management, engineering, accounting, legal, or sales elaborate by providing examples of job titles that you have placed previously.

Next on the agenda is your tenure in research and name generation activities. You need to show your ability to identify prospective clients or candidates. Knowledge of market intelligence and business analytics are the most valuable skills that hiring managers need to be aware of.

Recruiters should be experts at building relationships with potential clients or candidates. These relationships may continue for months (even years) before the prospect takes action and becomes fully engaged. Elaborate on your networking skills and the tools you use to stay in touch, promote your organization, and engage with potential business prospects.

Finally, its time for targets, metrics, and deliverables. Now, we will handle quantification later in this write-up, but you need to explain to the person reviewing your resume what your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly targets consist of. For example, are you required to make a specific number of phone calls per day, how many send outs are expected per week and what your sales target is per quarter?

Tools & Tech

Email scrapers, contact finders, name generators, ATS software, Boolean, x-ray searching, inContact applications, text recruiting….our point being that the new age recruiter needs to be tech savvy and tool competent. The more software applications and extensions you have under the belt, the better. Present them in a table format such as the one below:

Recruiter Career Summary

The main purpose of a career summary is to make your most unique skills and experiences immediately visible to hiring managers. Heads up – you probably skim through resumes of candidates in six seconds…well, so does the person reviewing your resume.

Pay attention to the format. If using a paragraph style, keep it to 3-4 punchy sentences at most. Bullet points packed with achievements, relevant keywords in line with the job description, and most important credentials is another approach to attract instant attention.

* Career Summary Hack: Write this section last after you have completed your entire resume.

How to guide:

• The first sentence or bullet point should include your job title and number of years’ experience
• Then follow up with snappy, impactful skills and competencies
• In your third sentence or bullet point add a wow factor (achievement, accomplishment, highly specialized skill)
• Finally, conclude with your most prestigious credentials and qualifications

Remember to align your career summary to the job you are applying to. This may entail writing more than one summary and customizing each one individually. More work initially, but well worth it in the end.

Recruiter Career Summary Examples:

Career Summary 1

“Results-oriented Engineering Recruiter with five years’ experience in sourcing talent for the Medical Device Manufacturing industry. Adept at identifying scarce skills and building pipelines of passive candidates for hard to fill openings in process and project engineering at remote geographic locations across the New England Area. Completed a Bachelor in Human Resource Management and is a pro at X-Ray and Boolean searching methodologies.“

Career Summary 2

“Deliverable focused Senior Recruiter offering tenure in 360 recruiting in an Executive Search Firm environment. Clients include major Fortune 500 companies with positions filled ranging from Director to Vice President Level averaging one successful hire per month for the last three years with placement fees of $100k per candidate. Holds a Certified Employee Retention Specialist (CERS) credential and currently completing a Bachelors Degree in Sales and Marketing. “

Career Summary 3

“Enthusiastic and proactive Corporate Recruiter with over a decade of experience in sourcing top talent within the financial services sector. Worked for top tier banks and stockbroking firms on Wall Street and has proven competencies in securing long term hires via diligent screening and vetting practices. Holds the commendable record of hiring professionals who remain with the company for a period of at least five years on average. Registered as a Senior HR Professional with the HR Certification Institute.“

Recruiter Job Descriptions, Responsibilities and Duty Examples

An employer would expect to see certain foundational job duties and skillsets within a Recruiter resume. Below, we have provided a few examples of Recruiter job descriptions in a variety of sectors and job categories

A Corporate Recruiter (In-house) may:

• Execute the company’s recruiting process which includes candidate awareness, engagement activities, sourcing and networking, resume mining and database searching
• Responsible for partnering with divisional managers to create a resource plan, compile job specifications and analyze short and long- term hiring needs
• Liaise between field locations and corporate headquarters, providing guidance on interviewing and negotiation tactics in the interpretation of company policies and practices
• Administer tests, questionnaires, and skill assessments
• Recruit, source, select, and interview qualified candidates for midlevel and senior roles
• Review and evaluate applications for employment and requests for internal transfers, along with
• Conduct phone screens and sit in on final candidate interviews with hiring managers
• Present final offers of employment to successful incumbents and decline candidates that were unsuccessful

A 360 Recruiter in Sales & Marketing Niche may:

• Responsible for all client and candidate engagement activities throughout the full recruitment life cycle
• Contact Sales and Marketing Directors on a daily basis to ascertain hiring needs and securing job orders.
• Do bulk presentations of available sales positions to candidate pipelines and networks every month
• Lead marketing and recruitment of mid-level sales professionals for the business
• Network with prospects during industry events, conventions, and conferences
• Negotiate terms of trade with clients and conduct face to face presentations at client premises regarding salary, candidate flow, and scarce skills within the sales environment
• Present Most Placeable Candidates to a list of 20 companies that the candidate would like to work for
• Facilitate the hiring process from beginning to end liaising with HR Managers, Sales Managers and Sales Advisors
• Successfully supervised the hiring process for hundreds of CRM candidates resulting in a total of 26 hires over 14 months.
• Publish weekly pipeline/staffing reports to Agency Owner at both companies
• Collaborate with territory sales leaders and hiring managers consistently to ensure positive candidate experience

A Candidate Recruiter with an IT focus may:

• Reach out, engage and secure candidates for developer and programmer roles
• Present job opportunities for passive and active candidates
• Review and screen applications in accordance with the open job orders
• Market and promote vacancies on social media platforms, via text and email blasts
• Conduct candidate interviews to compile a shortlist of maximum three suitable prospects per role
• Conduct briefing sessions to prepare candidates for interviews and assessments and debrief them afterward
• Build and maintain company database via the ATS system
• Hired approximately thirty-five technology professionals in a range of industry verticals.
• Compile job advertisements and post them onto job boards, career portals and the company’s Linkedin and Facebook pages as well as sharing job blurbs on Twitter and Instagram
• Conduct candidate feedback interviews for testimonial and referral purposes

A Business Development/Client Recruiter in a Staffing Firm may:

• Calling on new clients to form relationships and receive vacancies from working on and passing them over to the Candidate Sourcer
• Cultivate relationships with client prospects and develop them into key accounts
• Engage in direct marketing efforts to promote the agency via cold calling, newsletter blasts, and social media engagement blogs
• Qualify job orders in terms of urgency to secure exclusivity with clients
• Present shortlisted candidates to the hiring manager, schedule interviews and facilitate offer negotiations
• Follow up on leads derived from calling activities, referrals and networking with clients at events and conferences
• Negotiate service level agreements for contingency and retained search projects
• Advise clients regarding industry trends and suggest recruitment strategies in accordance with changes in client business needs and requirements
• Conduct client interviews for testimonial and referral purposes

Highlight Your Accomplishments

In a Recruiter Resume, the accomplishment section can make or break your application. Don’t take the easy way out by simply copying and pasting your list of duties from the experience section of your resume.

Your goal is to highlight those aspects that set you apart, what you are most proud of, or what you accomplished in your previous roles, present these through action-packed statements that are eye-catching and creates excitement to get you on board as soon as possible.

Uniquely present your accomplishment statements by using Princeton formula: (A+P+R=A)

This is how it works:
A+P+R=A

Action Verb (related to recruitment) PLUS Project (activity or action) PLUS Result (consequence) EQUALS Accomplishment (Valuable Outcome)

Now link these four parameters together in one statement.

* Accomplishment Hack: Quantify your statements by using numerical values, metrics, activity outputs, timelines, and monetary values. Remember a number is worth a thousand words and in recruitment measurable results are everything!

Examples:

• Placed approximately thirty-five full stack developers in California during the last six months with a placement fee of 20k each
• Reduced average vacancy fill time from 65 days to 28 days by implementing intelligent response handling automation, which reduced screening and shortlisting times by 30%.
• Review and screen 50 graduate resumes per day during the summer hiring season and conducted phone screens with 30 candidates during ten days
• Awarded “Top Recruitment Professional” after securing retained service level agreements with three premier investment banks resulting in annual revenue of 200k per client, significantly boosting the company’s cash flow resources
• Completed more than $150k in placements during the first year as a Rookie Recruiter in the Healthcare Space

Recruiter Education Section Example

The rule of relevancy is especially valid for your education section. Always highlight the most relevant qualifications first and, list them chronologically from the most recent to the least recent one.

Here are some examples of a Recruiter Resume in terms of education:

2019 – Certified Inside Sales Professional (CISP), American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP), Dallas, TX

2016 – 2018 Bachelor Degree in Human Resources, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY, United States

2016 Professional in Human Resources (PHR), HR Certification Institute, Alexandria, VA

2013-2014 Certified Internet Recruiter (CIR), Advanced Internet Recruitment Strategies (AIRS), Online

Cracking the ATS in a Recruiter Resume Skills Section

If you are an old hand at recruitment, you already know what an ATS is. For those perhaps applying for your first recruiter job – ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System aka automated screening via the ‘’Bots’’. Now you need to beat these bots by using words, phrases, and terminology aligned with the job spec for your resume to pass through the digital screening barrier and into the inbox of a human hiring authority. Failing to do this will result in declines, regrets, or often feedback radio silence.

Cracking the ATS is easier than you think. Just mirror the wording from the actual job advertisement and sprinkle the terms and phrases throughout your resume document. (obviously remaining truthful at all times). If the job description contains acronyms use the same abbreviations in your resume if the words are spelled out fully duplicate them likewise in your resume.

Instead of creating a long bulleted list of technical competencies and soft skills (we all know you can network on Linkedin and that you are flexible, dynamic and hardworking) pick the five most prominent technical skills in the job spec and link them to a personal trait/feature you have by using a strong action verb.

For Example:

1. Implementing innovative research strategies by utilizing X-Ray and Boolean sourcing methodologies.
2. Engaging in high-level retained service level agreement negotiations as a measure to qualify job order urgency and client commitment
3. Spearheading below the line market awareness within the process engineering talent pool by posting career advice blogs on Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin
4. Suggesting relocation package structures to clients in rural areas as a means to problem solve the lack of candidate flow for their specialist technical roles
5. Prioritize staffing projects per vacancy frequency and volume to meet all resourcing requirements 30 days before final implementation deadlines

Qualifications/Certifications associated with Recruiters

Professional information for Recruiters

Sectors: All
Career Type: Staffing, Contracting, Direct Hire, Project Recruitment, Contingency Recruitment, Retained Search, Executive Search, Remote Recruiting, Corporate Recruiting, In-house Talent Acquisition
Person type:  Marketer Networker, Influencer, Communicator, Persuader, Negotiator, Sourcer, Talent Attractor, Recruiter
Education levels: From High School Diploma to Post School Certifications
Salary indication: Corporate/In-house Recruiters $51,349k (*Glassdoor.com). Agency Recruiters $43, 619k (*Payscale) plus various commission structures of between 8% and 40% of placement fees
Labor market: Estimated 7% growth between 2016 – 2026 (*BLS)
Organizations: SME, Corporate, Commercial, Fortune 500, Multi-National, NPO’s, Federal, Government, Staffing Agencies, Outplacement Agencies, Executive Search Firms, Recruitment Companies.

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