What is a tech / IT recruiter?

The tech recruiter specializes in hiring IT profiles: developer, scrum master, data engineer, DevOps, and more. They speak their personas' language and can have a substantive conversation with a developer.

Which companies hire this profile? And why?

The ability to build a digital product that delivers value is the main goal of a tech company. All other teams therefore typically orbit the technical team.

It's made up of all sorts of technical profiles, who have become a rare resource because every company wants them. Hiring the right profiles — meaning those suited to the company's challenges — has become a crucial and critical skill. It sits at the heart of a tech company's strategy.

Some companies, attuned to this challenge, even create a recruitment department separate from HR.

The IT recruiter is the main player on this front, with a mission to find, contact, and hire the profiles requested by the technical leadership or by HR. Their ability to quickly hire the right profiles is a direct lever for company growth.

The IT recruiter's mission is to select the candidate who best matches the profile their company is looking for when an information-technology and/or computing role opens. They are in charge of crafting and posting job ads, screening resumes, and conducting interviews.

What are the tech recruiter's missions?

The IT recruiter must:

• Define, with their stakeholder, the missions of the role to fill and the candidate profile.
• Awareness of their company's tech and business stakes
• Understanding of technical issues
• Knowledge of the technologies and tools used by their company
• Write job ads and screen incoming resumes.
• Translate a hiring need into professional technical ambitions
• Master their employer brand
• Search for and contact qualified profiles
• Ability to source effectively with the right methods / tools
• Detect a profile's ambitions and interests before a call
• Master outreach and active-listening techniques
• Qualify a candidate and present a role's ambitions
• Understand a candidate's deeper ambitions through active listening
• Detect company stakes that match the candidate's expectations
• Pitch a role aligned with the candidate's ambitions
• Conduct interviews and contribute to candidate selection
• Coach a candidate throughout the recruitment process
• Support the teams taking part in interviews
• Bring value to internal discussions
• Close & onboard
• Have detected upstream the elements that matter to the candidate
• Make a compelling offer and close a candidate
• Support a new hire's arrival and onboarding into the company
• Represent their company at professional events (forums, trade shows, meetups, conferences, etc.)
• Pitch their company and its stakes.

What are the different types of IT recruiter roles?

Internal to the challenges

As an in-house employee, their objective is to hire the tech profiles capable of addressing the company's technical challenges. With strong fundamentals, they will develop deep knowledge of the tech stack and the technical division's strategic stakes.

They can grow hierarchically within the recruitment function and hire rarer, more technical profiles addressing more important stakes for the company. Managing more junior profiles is a possibility.

As an RPO, they can also provide a recruitment force that is independent of the company, on a fixed-period mission. This allows them to change environments often and develop a broader tech and recruitment culture.

External to the challenges

In recruitment firms or as a freelancer, they will need to address the various recruitment challenges of their client companies. Broad technical mastery and an understanding of all their clients' technical challenges are required.

They will also play a coaching role with their candidates and their clients to optimize how the recruitment process unfolds.

They specialize in a technical environment to develop sharp knowledge of their clients' and candidates' technical challenges. As an expert, they are tasked with sourcing niche profiles whose successful hire is critical to their clients.

How do you become a tech recruiter?

The tech recruiter role combines an HR challenge, technical knowledge, a sales mindset, and psychological experience. There is currently no degree program leading directly to the tech recruiter role.

Often coming from business, management, or HR schools, this role remains accessible to anyone. Those who succeed best are those who manage to train themselves on all four complementary skills in parallel.

→ Discover our tech recruitment training program

Career growth and salary of the tech / IT recruiter

Possible career paths after several years of successful experience:

• Lead Recruiter → managing, training, and leading a team
• Talent Manager → responsible for the quality of recruitment processes, from acquisition to retention
• Tech Recruiter Expert → specialist and expert in tech recruitment

Salary-wise, it's typically a fixed base plus a variable component. The balance between the two depends on the company's compensation system.

Either a low base, with a large variable that can be very substantial when targets are exceeded.

Or a high base, with a small variable, distributed as a bonus based on goal achievement.

Junior Tech Recruiter: 32 to 40K€

Mid-level Tech Recruiter: 38 to 50K€

Senior Tech Recruiter: 45 to 60K€+