The Ultimate Guide to Recruiting Coordination

Recruitment coordinators are the glue that binds everything together.

You connect your company, candidate, and recruiting team. You’re the public face of the recruiting process. You’re the ambassador for candidate experience.

When you operate at your best, you’re a huge asset to your company.

Competition for candidates is high — and two-thirds of candidates have rejected offers due to poor recruitment experience.

But you can make a difference. When you schedule interviews quickly, time-to-hire accelerates. Delivering an outstanding candidate experience buoys your company’s brand. And keeping everyone informed eliminates guesswork and minimizes mistakes. If you nail your day-to-day duties, you’ll make your line manager’s life a breeze and secure promotion opportunities.

In this guide, we'll share tips for:

To keep you at the top of your game, we’ve interviewed leading recruitment professionals, profiled high-performing teams, and consolidated best practices across various industries.

• Collect information about the job

• Add job information to your ATS

• Publish the job listing

• Slow information sharing from hiring manager

• Missing or inaccurate information from hiring manager

• Difficulty getting hiring manager’s time and attention

The preparation stage lays the foundation for your entire recruitment process. Your team (hiring manager, recruiter, and coordinator) defines who they want. Then you collect all the job req information and upload the job ad to your ATS.

But it can easily go wrong.

Hiring managers often underestimate the time and effort required. That’s not to put them on blast. They’re busy people and have a ton of work on their plates. Recruiting is 100% of your job, but only 10% of the hiring managers’ job. But the reality is, if they’re slow to provide information, you can’t publish the job ad. And if you can’t get the ad live, your time-to-hire slows down.

Speed is only half the battle, though.

Information quality is just as important. If you collect inaccurate information early on, the impact amplifies across the process. At best, you’re looking at unnecessary rework. At worst, you or your recruiter will have to reject applicants midway through the recruitment process. Neither’s a good option.

So how do you streamline this stage? Let’s take a look at some best practices.

Create a job intake form

Discovering a missing take-home exercise or a blank list of essential interview questions is a killer. Instead of sending a job live, suddenly you’re chasing hiring managers for more info.

But here’s the thing: No hiring manager is going to purposefully leave out information. Most times, they simply don’t know what you need or why. It’s the unknowns that get you.

Instead of relying on memory and guesswork, great coordinators rely on standardized information intake forms.

Here’s what Calendly’s intake form looks like:

(Copy the complete template from this Google Doc.)

If your recruiting team doesn’t have an intake form in place, use ours as a template, or craft your own with the basic requirements listed below.

• Background: Job title, location, level, line manager

• Job skills: Core responsibilities, required skills, desirable skills

• Sourcing criteria: Target companies, colleges, titles

• Compensation: Range, bonus, equity

• Interview process: Interview types, must-have interviewers, interviewing preferences

Although some forms integrate with ATS systems, your first version doesn’t need to be complex. You can set up a basic form on Google Forms or Typeform in minutes. Consider everything you need to input into your ATS to open a role, and work backward from there.

If you’re creating a brand new form, run drafts by your recruiter. They’ve probably spent time as a coordinator and will have helpful suggestions.

Once your intake form is live, treat it as a living document. If hiring managers keep asking for more fields, add them in. If they complain that a required field is only relevant half the time, mark it as optional. Customize it to your needs, goals, and processes.

Build job templates for common roles

Most coordinators assist one or two recruiters who support pre-defined teams. Because you work with the same teams, you’ll see the same job reqs come up again and again.

Here are a few example teams:

• Outbound sales: Business Development Representative (BDR), Account Executive (AE), Sales Engineer, Account Manager, Sales Manager

• Data science: Data Analyst, Data Architect, Data Engineer, Visualization Developer

• Finance: Controller, Internal Auditor, Managerial Accountant, Financial Accountant, Tax Accountant

Instead of starting from scratch when a new job req comes in, save filled reqs as templates. Have the job description, interview process, and take-home exercises ready to go. That way, you can shortcut the prep stage and get ads live in a fraction of the time.

Suggest a feedback system

Who’s the most interconnected member of your recruiting team? It’s probably you, right? You work with every stakeholder. You spend the most time with candidates. You deal with the nitty-gritty of processes and policies.

Although recruiting coordination roles tend to be junior, you’re perfectly placed to spot opportunities for improvement. But teams can only benefit from your insight if you speak up.

If your team doesn’t have formal feedback systems in place, here’s a simple way to get started: Add a repeating agenda item to your one-on-one meeting with your manager. Something like “Review ideas” or “Suggest improvements.” Whenever you spot an opportunity or have an idea, add it as an agenda sub-item so you don’t forget it. Then pitch your manager during your one-on-ones.

Remember that managers love empowered and intelligent direct reports. Don’t just turn up with problems. Instead, brainstorm potential solutions. For example, if you spend 70% of your day checking your hiring managers’ calendar availability, suggest adopting an interview scheduling tool.

Or if you’ve noticed it takes two days to get interview feedback, suggest scheduling interview debriefs immediately after the candidate is done interviewing. That debrief could help facilitate quicker decision making and close roles faster. 

If your team is receptive to feedback, suggest more formal systems. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Skip-level meetings: In a lot of teams, senior leaders become disconnected from day-to-day work. That’s a huge missed opportunity. Suggest skip-level meetings (that’s a meeting with your manager’s manager) so you both can hear a fresh perspective and gather new ideas.

• Retrospectives: Ad hoc reflections can only take you so far. If you have the time, schedule quick retrospectives after each successful hire. Think about what went well, what was challenging, and how you’ll improve next time.

• Gather information for HR records

• Welcoming the employee to the company and managing the handover to HR

• Coordinating next steps for internal stakeholders

• Unclear expectations between HR and recruiting

• Manual, time-consuming admin tasks

• Applicant uncertainty

The final stage in the recruiting process is a tricky one. During onboarding, the recruiting team steps back, and HR or People takes over. But when, where, and how the changeover takes place varies between companies. Some even suggest that recruiting shouldn’t be involved at all.

However, we all know that processes evolve over time and can be a little messy. It’s not unusual for recruiting professionals (and recruitment coordinators specifically) to own parts of the process.

Here’s how you can take control of the situation and optimize whatever parts of the process you inherit.

Clarify the partnership between recruiting and HR

There’s a management saying that when everyone’s responsible, no one’s responsible. It’s twice as true for cross-functional work. If you think HR is handling something and they think you’re handling it, nothing will get done.

Ask your recruiting manager if they have a copy of HR’s onboarding process and see what you’re responsible for. If they don’t have one (or it’s out-of-date), grab a new version from HR. If there’s any uncertainty around who owns what, ask your manager to clarify. Because if you’re confused, others will be, too.

Most tasks will naturally fall to HR. But some things, like starting background checks or migrating data from your ATS to your human resources information system (HRIS), may get assigned to recruitment coordinators.

Act as the applicant’s “safety net”

Regardless of your company’s specific onboarding process, one simple way you can continue to help is just by being present.

Remember, you’re the person a candidate knows best. You’re impartial, too. You’re not their new boss, and you didn’t interview them. When a candidate has a problem, they’re going to reach out to their most familiar contact — you.

• “I’m due to start in two days and haven’t got my laptop yet!”

• “Random question: What’s the dress code in the office?”

• “Do you know if I can get a head start on my onboarding?”

Do your best to help. Share information and give them advice, but always connect them to their next point of contact. For example, if they ask about onboarding, copy someone in HR. If they ask about tech, copy your IT team.

In other words, be supportive, but connect them to the right people, too.