Recruiter

How to hire a Recruiter for your SMB

Before you write the job posting, settle three questions. They decide which profile you actually need and help you avoid the most common seniority or scope mistakes in the German SMB.

Question 1: Recruiter or HR generalist? These two roles are often confused at hiring, with expensive consequences. The Recruiter (Talent Acquisition Specialist) owns the entire recruiting funnel: the intake session with the hiring manager, the job posting, sourcing, screening, structuring the selection rounds, negotiation and the onboarding handover. The HR generalist (Personalreferent:in) runs the HR function independently (recruiting plus administration, training, labor law, co-determination) with a typical 30-40 % recruiting share. If your recruiting volume is below 12-15 hires per year, the HR generalist with a recruiting focus is often the more economical solution; from 15+ hires per year the full-time recruiter role becomes relevant. Specify seniority and scope in the ad title: Recruiter:in (m/w/d), not a vague HR all-rounder that says nothing.

Question 2: A tech-recruiting focus or a generalist profile? At an SMB the recruiting mix varies strongly: a software house with 80 employees has 60-70 % tech hires (software development, data, DevOps, product), where Boolean logic on LinkedIn, GitHub sourcing and a basic technical understanding are a must. A classic industrial SMB has 70-80 % non-tech hires (sales, operations, office, accounting), where industry knowledge, an understanding of the collective agreement and Stepstone routine matter more than tech-sourcing skills. A tech recruiter in an industrial setting is bored and underperforms; a generalist recruiter in a tech setting fails at the Boolean complexity and the competitive dynamics of tech profiles. List the expected hiring volume per role type in the ad.

Question 3: First recruiter or reinforcing an existing team? The first in-house recruiter role is a build role: create job-ad templates, introduce or optimize the ATS, build the sourcing stack, initialize stakeholder relationships with hiring managers, introduce recruiting metrics. You need a profile with 4-7 years of experience who has lived this structuring before and does not come from a large corporation where all tools and processes already existed. Reinforcing an existing 2-3-person recruiting team is a ride-along role: integrate into existing processes, own roles from day 1, deliver sourcing volume. Here a profile with 2-4 years of experience also fits. You recognize both profiles through different questions in the interview (see the Evaluation section).

If the three answers converge on a generalist, full-time recruiter at an SMB with 30 to 200 employees, see the ready-to-use template on the Job description tab.