Roy Ripper – How to recruit superstars for your recruitment business

This is part of a series of blog posts written for UK Recruiter by the team at BlueSky PR. If you didnt make the event (or this particular session) it’s a smashing summary of the key points and well worth a read.

Next up at the UK Recruiter conference was a talk by Roy Ripper on the 7 biggest recruiting mistakes he’s made and the 9 killer questions you must ask when interviewing recruiters.

Roy’s engaging delivery and hilarious content meant this was an excellent presentation detailing the bad experiences he’d had in the past when hiring recruiters. I was sat amongst the budding recruitment business heads frantically taking notes on who they shouldn’t employ, and I’ve picked out a few of my highlights from Roy’s presentation.

One of the people we were warned about was The Backstabber. This is the recruiter who ticks all the boxes, their numbers are great, they’re popular in the office and they make everyone else more productive from their drive alone. So what can go wrong? If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. We were told how this person stole the company’s clients and made off into the distance to start their own business off the back of Roy’s hard work. He won’t make the same mistake again and neither should you – don’t hire The Backstabber.

The other person you really shouldn’t be hiring is The Criminal. Similar to The Backstabber in many ways, The Criminal may outwardly seem normal; they’re personable, committed and an able recruiter, but lurking in the shadows is a dark backstory. Roy outlined how a recruiter he’d hired on behalf of another agency had later turned out to be wanted by Interpol. The lesson from this being – always carry out background checks.

Of particular interest to many of the guests at the presentation was the next section, ‘9 killer questions you must ask when interviewing recruiters’. 

My particular highlights included: 

• If you could have any job you wanted, what would it be?

I initially thought the answer for this would be something in sales, but Roy explained how any answer that indicates a desire for power, money and excitement is generally a good indicator of a potential recruiter.

• Why do you want to come into this business?

Avoid like the plague anyone who replies ‘I want to work with people’ or incredibly ‘I don’t want to work nights or weekends’. From this question you should be looking for an answer that suggests a need to be successful, ‘to make a lot of money’ or ‘to achieve my goals’ were two of the best answers for this.

• Describe your greatest success and failure

On the surface this may seem like you’re looking for the candidate to describe how successful they’ve been in their career so far, but we were told that their answer to the failure side of the question is much more important. You should beware of the person who says they’ve never failed and look out for the candidate who can detail their greatest failure and what they’ve learnt from it.

Roy also gave us his special bonus tip that all recruiters should know…but I won’t give that away now, you have to go and see his next presentation!