By Tory Giguere, Search Consultant at Anderson Recruiting
Key takeaways:
- Get new recruiters into the ATS/CRM and one or two live job orders fast. Skip marathon training sessions. Let them source, screen, and reach out with support close by.
- Treat 90 days as a milestone benchmark, not a guarantee. Break it into measurable goals instead of a vague “get up to speed” timeline.
- Pair new recruiters with a mentor on a shadow-then-do rhythm: half the day watching, half the day doing, every day, until they don’t need it anymore.
When I onboard a new recruiter, the first priority is making sure they understand the tools and resources they’ll be using every day, especially the ATS/CRM, and that they know they have people to go to with questions. Early on, that might mean shadowing client calls, candidate screens, offer negotiations, or just listening in on how more experienced recruiters handle different conversations.
Ninety-day retention among staffing firms fell to 84.6% in 2025, down from 93.9% the year before, even though time-to-fill improved industrywide, according to Employ’s 2025-2026 benchmarks.
What should a recruiter onboarding checklist include?
Once a new recruiter has a foundation in the tools, I like to get them working on actual job orders fairly quickly. Rather than throwing a huge number of requisitions at them, I’d start with one or two roles and have them work through the full process, from sourcing candidates to conducting initial screens to moving qualified candidates through the interview process. That gives them a chance to learn by doing while still having support around them.
The biggest thing is recognizing that onboarding doesn’t end after the first few weeks. A recruiter can learn the systems quickly, but learning how to source effectively, qualify candidates, manage a process, communicate with clients, and ultimately close a placement takes time and repetition.
How long should recruiter onboarding take?
I typically think 90 days is a realistic benchmark for a new recruiter’s first placement, not a guarantee. Some recruiters come in hot and move very quickly through the process, while others need more time to learn the market, build confidence, and develop their pipeline. I wouldn’t necessarily expect everyone to have a placement in their first 30 days, but I would expect to see meaningful progress toward one.
How to train a new recruiter on sourcing
The first skill I focus on with a brand-new recruiter is sourcing candidates. Recruiting is competitive, and if you can’t quickly identify and reach the right candidates, there’s a good chance another agency will fill the role before you do.
The first step is making sure they really understand the position they’re recruiting for. I’ll work with them to identify the key skills, job titles, keywords, industry experience, and years of experience we should be targeting. Then I’ll sit alongside them while they build their first search so they can see how those pieces translate into actual search criteria.
From there, I’ll have them work through the results and we’ll review the first group of candidates together. I want them to understand not just who is a good fit, but why someone is or isn’t a good fit. That helps them start developing their own recruiting instincts rather than just relying on a checklist.
Once they have a list of potential candidates, we’ll work on outreach. I’ll show them how to personalize their messaging, where to look for additional contact information such as personal email addresses and phone numbers, and how to use multiple ways of reaching a candidate when appropriate.
That first week is really about learning by doing. I’d rather have a new recruiter build searches, review candidates, and practice outreach with me than spend the entire week sitting through training sessions. The goal is to get them comfortable enough to start sourcing independently while knowing they have someone they can come to with questions.
What tools should a new recruiter learn first?
The ATS/CRM comes first. It’s how the whole team manages candidates, clients, and activity, and every other part of the job runs through it. After that, it’s the sourcing tools tied directly to building a search: the platforms where they’ll actually identify the skills, titles, and experience they’re targeting. Outreach tools, like anything that surfaces additional contact information, come once there’s a real candidate list to work.
How to get a new recruiter their first placement faster
One of the best examples I can point to was a recruiter who came to us with absolutely no recruiting experience, coming from a completely different industry. My team was also very short-staffed at the time, so I needed this person to become productive quickly, not just for their own development, but to take some pressure off the rest of the team.
I took a very hands-on approach with their onboarding. We worked together on candidate sourcing, prescreening, and interviews, but I also had them spend the first half of each day shadowing some of my more experienced team members. The second half of the day was about taking what they’d learned and immediately putting it into practice.
I also broke the recruiting process down into small, measurable goals rather than giving them a broad expectation to “start recruiting.” Their first goal might be to find 15 candidates they believed were qualified for a particular role and add them to a pipeline. We’d review those candidates together and then send outreach that same day. From there, the next goal might be to schedule five prescreen calls, followed by getting three qualified candidates submitted to the client.
That approach helped them see the entire recruiting process in smaller, manageable steps while giving me an opportunity to coach them along the way. What really stood out was how quickly they went from needing a lot of guidance to making their own decisions about candidates. They weren’t just following the process anymore. They were starting to understand why we were doing each step and could explain why a candidate was or wasn’t a fit.
They ultimately became a contributing member of the team much faster than we typically saw with a new hire. I think the biggest difference was that we didn’t separate training from actually doing the job. They were learning, practicing, getting feedback, and doing it again every single day.
One of the biggest mistakes I see new recruiters make is spending too much time trying to make everything perfect before they actually start talking to people. They can spend hours refining a search, reading through profiles, or crafting the perfect outreach message when they could have already picked up the phone and started having conversations.
I always tell new recruiters that recruiting is a numbers game, but it’s also a people business. You can have the perfect search and the perfect message, but if you’re not actually reaching out and talking to candidates, you’re not going to get very far. I also think new recruiters sometimes put too much pressure on themselves to know everything right away. You aren’t going to understand every role, every candidate, or every part of the recruiting process in your first few months. Ask questions, make the call, learn from the conversation, and keep moving.
How to pair a new recruiter with a mentor
The recruiter I mentioned above is the clearest example I have of what pairing actually looks like day to day: half the day shadowing, half the day doing, every day, until the shadowing naturally falls away. Training and doing weren’t separate phases for them. They were the same thing, repeated daily, with someone available to coach through it in real time.
Tory rose from Staffing Manager to director of a $14-million-a-year operation at a large international staffing firm, growing her team from one direct report to 14, a top-10 company-wide group three years running, every recruiter sourced and hired by her. She now places recruiters into staffing firms with Anderson Recruiting.
