A recruiter finds, screens, and delivers candidates for open roles: they source people who are not applying anywhere, run the first interviews, coordinate the process, and manage the offer. Agency recruiters do this for client employers and are paid by the employer on a successful hire; internal recruiters do it as employees of one company. Candidates pay nothing either way.
What are the duties of a recruiter?
Day to day, the job is a pipeline: writing and calibrating the role brief with the hiring manager, sourcing (searching, headhunting, and working a network), screening résumés and running first-round interviews, scheduling and shepherding candidates through the client’s process, checking references, and negotiating the offer so it actually closes. The parts candidates see, the calls and interviews, are a fraction of it; most of the work is the unglamorous coordination that keeps a search from stalling. In Canada, recruitment specialists are classified as a distinct occupation under the National Occupational Classification, and in Ontario agency recruiters must additionally hold a provincial licence.
How a recruited search actually runs
A typical agency search compresses into a predictable arc. Days one to three: the intake call, where a good recruiter pushes back on the brief, on the salary band, on the must-have list, on which requirements are actually negotiable, because a miscalibrated brief wastes everyone’s next month. Days three to ten: sourcing and screening, ending in a shortlist of two or three people the recruiter has personally interviewed and tested. From there the client’s own interview process sets the pace, with the recruiter managing scheduling, expectations, and the offer. When a search runs long, it is almost always the brief or the band that was wrong, not the market.
Agency recruiters vs internal recruiters
Internal recruiters own their company’s hiring end to end and juggle every open role at once, from finance to field sales. Agency recruiters specialize, in our case exclusively in technology roles, and live in the candidate market full-time, which is why employers bring one in when a role is specialized, urgent, or stubbornly unfilled. The two are complements more than rivals: strong internal teams use agencies for the searches where reach beats process. We covered when that trade is worth it in what a recruitment agency is and how they work.
What skills are needed for a recruiter?
The visible skills are interviewing, negotiation, and organization. The differentiating ones are domain depth and market fluency: a tech recruiter who cannot tell a platform engineer from a backend engineer will screen the wrong people politely and quickly. Salary fluency matters just as much, because pricing a role wrong is one of the quietest reasons searches stall. The best recruiters also carry a skill nobody lists: the willingness to tell a client something they don’t want to hear about their role, their band, or their process.
How are recruiters paid?
Agency recruiters typically earn a base salary plus commission tied to placements, which is worth understanding as an employer because it explains incentives: a contingency recruiter racing five other agencies is paid for speed, while a success-based recruiter with the search to themselves is paid for the placement sticking. Internal recruiters are salaried. In every model the fee comes from the employer; a recruiter charging candidates is a red flag everywhere in Canada and illegal in Ontario.
What should you not say to a recruiter?
For candidates: don’t misstate your current compensation, your notice period, or competing offers, because good recruiters verify, and a caught exaggeration ends the relationship, quietly and permanently. For employers: don’t withhold the real reason the last person left or the real budget, since the recruiter finds out mid-search anyway and the mismatch costs you the strongest candidates in the pipeline at exactly the wrong moment.
What a good recruiter does differently
The bar is simple to state: a good recruiter has met the person they’re submitting, has tested the skills the role needs, and can defend the shortlist in one conversation. Résumés arriving within the hour mean spraying, not screening. That’s the standard behind our IT recruitment process, and it’s why we send two or three vetted candidates instead of twenty résumés.