What Does the Recruiter Career Path Look Like in 2024?

Recruitment is such a vast and varied career path that you can go in a number of different directions with it.

And to really keep us all on our toes, a rapidly-changing job market and major advancements in AI technology mean the role of the recruiter within modern organizations is changing every single day.

But with so much choice on the table, how do you know which path to choose?

In this guide, I’m going to explore the stages of a common recruitment career path as well as some alternative routes you can go down too. That way, you can start thinking strategically about where you see your career heading, wherever you currently are in your journey.

Please note: I’ve chosen not to include salaries in this guide, because compensation in a recruitment role varies so widely depending on the country you live in, the sector you recruit in and whether your in-house or agency-side.

In-house vs. agency recruitment: What’s the difference?

Before we start taking a dive into your career path options as a recruiter, it’s worth clarifying the difference between an in-house recruitment career and one as an external recruiter at an agency.

As an in-house recruiter, you’re hired by an organization to manage the process of hiring candidates internally into that organization. As an external recruiter, you either work for a recruitment agency (or independently for yourself) sourcing and hiring candidates on behalf of your clients.

This means that if you’re working as an external recruiter, you have a whole other side to your job that involves sourcing and managing clients, not just candidates.  

If you’re thinking this sounds like more work, that’s because it is!

But it potentially means more money in your pocket too. Like salespeople, agency recruiters work on commission (on top of a base salary), so the more placements you make, the more income you’ll earn each month.

If you’re really good at the job, this can easily work out doubling or even tripling your monthly salary.

The recruitment career path in 2024

Here’s a quick overview of the six most common steps up the recruitment ladder and what those steps look like day-to-day.

1. Entry-level: Junior Recruiter / Recruiting Coordinator

Recruitment job type: In-house or agency side

If you’re taking your first step onto the recruitment ladder, it’s likely your first role will be as a Junior Recruiter. Some businesses will call their Junior Recruiters ‘Recruitment Coordinators,’ because not everyone likes the word ‘junior’, but it’s essentially the same role.

The great thing about getting into recruitment is that there’s no formal qualification necessary to be considered for a role.

Some will ask for a Bachelor’s degree, but most businesses are used to taking on juniors with no previous experience, and will instead assess you for the skills necessary to be good at the job.

The skills that an employer will look for when hiring a rookie recruiter are:

• People skills - Essentially, your job is to have positive conversations all day every day with candidates, so you’ll need to be a confident communicator and a great active listener too.
• Solid organizational skills - It’s like you’ll be recruiting for a variety of roles, so you need to be comfortable managing multiple projects simultaneously.
• Confidence with technology - As with most roles nowadays, being a good recruiter relies on you having a level of competency with technology. Recruitment technology has come far in recent years and any recruiter who doesn’t know how to leverage the right tools to make their job easier will struggle to compete.  
• Resilience - Anyone who’s worked in recruitment will probably agree that, as fun and rewarding as this job can be, it’s also a bit of a rollercoaster. The nature of being a people business is that things don’t always go according to plan. Having the strength to pull yourself back up when a placement falls through and keep going is essential to this job.

Day-to-day responsibilities:

And what about the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of being a junior recruiter? Here are a few things you’ll get your teeth sunk into from the offset.

• Sourcing - proactively sourcing candidates across social media, job boards, etc.
• Candidate communication/management - reviewing job applications, taking screening calls, managing rejections.
• Applicant Tracking System management - keeping the ATS up-to-date, ensuring candidates in the pipeline are communicated with.
• Interview scheduling - syncing hiring manager and candidate diaries to find the right interview slots.

For external recruiter / agency roles:

• Business development - looking for hiring businesses in your recruitment niche to see if you can support them to find the right candidates.
• Client communication/management - taking job specs from clients and keeping them updated throughout the hiring process.

Understanding 180 vs. 360 recruitment

It’s also worth mentioning at this point that there are two types of recruitment cycles for recruiters who work at an agency: 180 and 360. As the term suggests, 180 recruitment - otherwise known as ‘delivery recruitment’ - involves focusing on one half of the recruitment cycle.

As a 180 recruiter, you’d focus your daily activities on handling job specs, sourcing and shortlisting candidates, managing interviews and delivering these candidates to your clients. So there’s still a bit of client management involved, but you’re primarily focused on candidates.

As a 360 recruiter, on the other hand, you take control of the full recruitment cycle. So you’d manage everything mentioned above as well as canvassing for new clients and building lasting relationships with them.

Some junior recruiters will start off as a 180 recruiter and then, once they’ve built confidence working with candidates will move towards 360-cycle recruitment, bringing business development into their role too.

2. Climbing the ladder: Recruiter - Individual Contributor

Recruitment job type: In-house or agency side

Getting onto the next rung of the ladder in your career as an operational recruiter won’t necessarily mean a higher workload (if you use the right technology to work smarter) but it does of course involve some additional responsibilities.

Day-to-day responsibilities:

• Developing full-cycle recruitment expertise - While it’s common for juniors to focus more on the sourcing and screening side of the hiring process (or 180 recruitment for agency recruiters), a more experienced recruiter will have a few more responsibilities. For in-house recruiters, this might involve making hiring decisions and assisting with onboarding practices. For external recruiters, it will mean shifting to the 360 model, where they begin canvassing for new business and working closely with corporate clients.
• Specializing in specific industries or roles - Once you’ve dipped your toe in the water as a more generalist recruiter, you might also start thinking about a specific niche you’re interested in. If you’re an in-house recruiter, you might move into a specific division within the organization, like tech or sales, for example. If you work for a recruitment agency, specialization can be much broader, as you’re not limited by what the organization does. You might choose to move into finance, IT or healthcare recruitment, or you might choose to specialise in staffing companies with temporary workers instead of placing permanent candidates (which involves an entirely different type of recruitment).
• Honing interview and assessment skills - At this level, it’s likely you’d be expected to have more responsibilities where candidate interviews are involved: Assisting hiring managers with interview questions, assessing candidates and supporting hiring decisions. And with AI tools like Carv being able to generate interview questions and summarise candidate performance for you, you won’t even need to get bogged down with the admin.

3. Broadening horizons: Senior Recruiter

Recruitment job type: In-house or agency side

When you move into a senior position as a recruiter, your role becomes a lot more strategic and your responsibilities go well beyond what’s expected of you as a typical recruiter.

Once you reach this point in your career path, you’ll have lots of fresh hands-on experience and knowledge of the market that is invaluable to management. You’re able to advise the company on how and where to implement change that will support growth and make junior recruiters in the company more efficient.

Day-to-day responsibilities:

• Managing complex hiring projects - You might be trusted with managing all hiring for a business that’s in an aggressive growth phase, or put in charge of developing a whole new department for an organization.
• Advising hiring managers on talent strategies - Your experience in hiring and growing teams is invaluable to hiring managers at this stage of your career as you know first-hand what channels and strategies work in the current landscape.
• Recruitment process optimisation - Again, as someone who knows how the recruitment process currently works and what its challenges are, you’re best positioned to assess and improve how the company currently recruits. This can also involve you bringing in new recruitment software, like a new Applicant Tracking System or AI-powered interview software.
• Developing employer branding initiatives - Ensuring a company looks like an attractive employer to work for is crucial to the recruitment process as this is what helps a business stand out to candidates. As a senior recruiter, you might be involved in creating an employer branding strategy, and working closely with other departments (e.g. marketing) in order to track and measure the impact of your branding on hiring.

4. Leading the team: Recruitment Manager

Recruitment job type: In-house or agency

Unlike a Senior Recruiter, which is more strategy-heavy, becoming a Recruitment Manager is more of a leadership role that involves managing and training other recruiters.

If you work for an agency rather than in-house, the management side of your role takes up a lot of the time you would normally be spending on making placements (and earning commission). To ensure you’re still compensated well, it’s likely your base salary would be increased, or your commission percentage lifted. Otherwise, you might receive bonuses based on the performance of your team as well as your own performance.

Day-to-day responsibilities:

• Setting recruitment KPIs and strategies - There are a whole variety of recruitment Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that your success is measured on when you’re a recruiter. As a recruitment manager, you’ll likely be in charge of not only setting these KPIs but ensuring your team reaches them too.
• Team leadership and training junior recruiters - Leading and developing less senior recruiters in their journey, training them and coaching them towards their assigned KPIs.

• Budgeting and resource allocation - As a manager, it’s likely you’ll be given the responsibility of managing budget and resources. This might include reassessing recruitment technology spend and even reassigning recruiters to new hiring projects.

5. Strategic impact: Head of Talent Acquisition

Recruitment job type: In-house only

Head of Talent Acquisition is a senior internal role that involves overseeing a company’s entire recruitment and TA strategy. It’s a role that comes with a lot of responsibility (but kudos too!), and you have the opportunity to make a real impact on company growth.

As Head of TA, you’re the lynchpin that ensures the high-level business goals are always reflected in the company’s talent strategy.

Day-to-day responsibilities:

• Shaping company-wide talent acquisition strategies - Identifying company-wide hiring needs and developing large-scale TA strategies to support it.
• Integrating recruitment with broader HR and business goals - It’s imperative that recruitment strategies align with the company’s goals and vision, and the Head of TA is responsible for ensuring this.
• Vendor management and technology adoption - Head of TA will work with Recruitment Managers to assess new recruitment technology options and decide on new areas that need to be automated to increase efficiency within the team.

6. Pinnacle of the profession: Chief People Officer/CHRO

Recruitment job type: In-house only

Becoming a Chief People Officer (CPO), Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) or HR Director is the most senior role you can get in an in-house team. In these executive-level roles, you’re responsible for overseeing the company’s HR and Talent functions.

You look more holistically at the hiring and management of people within an organization, so this requires a lot of experience and knowledge of how the business works and what the job market looks like.

Day-to-day responsibilities

• Overseeing all HR and Talent functions - You’re not just responsible for overseeing recruitment within the company, but also human resource management, employee progression, training, restructuring and redundancies too.
• Driving organizational design and culture - With your wealth of knowledge and years of experience in growing people in businesses, as a CPO you’re given full reign of designing company culture, including the establishment of company benefits.
• C-suite collaboration and board reporting - A director-level role in recruitment will normally involve working closely with company founders, CEOs, investors and other senior stakeholders to connect people management with board-level decisions. You’re also responsible for reporting these decisions to senior HR staff and advising on strategic planning (and vice versa, reporting the impact of your people strategy back to the board).

Alternative recruitment paths

While the above career path is the most common route recruiters will take, there are a whole load of other directions you can go too. This is one of the best things about getting into recruitment: the possibilities are endless!

Every bit of experience you gain in this industry will set you up for your next step, no matter which way you choose to go. Here are a few alternative paths you might consider at any point in your recruitment career.

From in-house to agency (and vice versa)

It’s not uncommon for recruiters to make the switch between internal and external recruitment at some point in their careers. The jury is out on which type is ‘better’ but every recruiter you speak to will likely have an opinion to share.

Here are the main differences you’ll notice when making the leap from one to the other:

From in-house to agency:

The pace of agency recruitment tends to be faster. This is because you’re normally competing with various other agencies to place a candidate for your clients first, so you can win that commission. You’re also managing multiple hiring projects for different clients at once, so the job involves spinning a few plates.

If you’re motivated by sales, you’ll love working agency-side as there’s lots of opportunity to be rewarded for the hard work that you do.

From agency to in-house:

The biggest transition you’ll need to adapt to in moving from an agency to in-house recruitment is the pace. Agencies tend to have a fast-paced sales floor-style environment, which you won’t experience as an in-house recruiter.

You’ll have some new ropes to learn when it comes to internal HR practices, legal and people policies too. With a background recruiting on behalf of clients, you won’t be used to having the responsibility of onboarding and retaining candidates once they’re placed, and this takes some getting used to.

The specialist tracks

Sometimes, opportunities can arise for you to go down a hyper-specialized path as a recruiter too. For example:

Technical Recruiter to Engineering Talent Leader

Technical recruiters are those hired in-house by an organization that needs recruiters who have a deep understanding of the technical skills needed to be a successful employee for them. When the requirements are so specialized, a generalist recruiter won’t do, and recruiting engineers is a good example of this.

If you’re a technical recruiter that specializes in engineering, there’s scope for you to move up in the ranks within an organization where you become a Talent Leader. The only other route to becoming an Engineering Talent Leader is to have a long career history as an engineer yourself, so this can be a great opportunity to reach a senior position in a future-proof industry without doing years of engineering training.

Campus Recruiter to University Relations Director  

Campus recruiters work in-house for universities, recruiting students for internships and entry-level positions at partnership organizations. This job also involves scouting and hiring graduate talent for the university itself.

As a Campus Recruiter, there’s scope to move into more senior positions where you focus on establishing new and nurturing partnerships with hiring organizations. A University Relations Director is an executive-level position that comes with a great salary, so it’s an excellent career path to take if the opportunity arises.

Executive Recruiter to Leadership Talent Strategist

Executive search is a particular branch of external recruitment where you focus solely on helping clients hire for senior-level positions. This sort of hiring requires a different set of skills, as these candidates are rarely active on the market and need to be proactively approached by a headhunter.

Recruiters who work for executive search firms will sometimes make the transition to an in-house corporate environment as the next step in their career. Working internally for an organization, you’d transfer your extensive knowledge of organizational talent structures to help the business with their own strategic planning, and be responsible for building and implementing their leadership hiring strategies.

Executive recruiters can bring a lot of external knowledge of the job market to an organization, so Founders are often keen to bring in someone with an agency background rather than hire internally for this sort of role.

D,E & I Specialist to Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) Consultant

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Specialists are HR professionals who help organizations become fairer and more inclusive workplaces. They will normally work in-house at a company, promoting and implementing policies, programs, and practices that foster diversity and inclusivity in both hiring and people management too.

It’s not unusual for a D,E & I Specialist to go into consulting as the next step in their career, and this would normally be as a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) Consultant. RPO consultants work externally as an extension of the HR department at a company, working on long-term hiring strategy and implementation.

Going it alone: Self-employed recruiter

It’s not uncommon for agency recruiters to go it alone at some point in their career. Here are two potential ways you might do this:

Building a recruitment consulting practice

Agency recruitment sets you up well for starting your own recruitment agency. As agency recruitment is heavily commission-based, running your recruitment desk feels like running your own business. You’re responsible for generating your own placement opportunities, making your commission, and promoting your personal brand to bring in more work.  

Often, high-billing recruiters will decide they’d rather go it alone and start up their own agency so that any income they generate goes straight to them. Which is evident in the fact that hundreds of new recruitment agencies emerge every year!

Independent TA Advisor

Unlike in-house or agency recruiters, independent advisors work on a project or retainer basis, providing flexible, expert support tailored to the client’s specific needs. They also train and support in-house teams, ensuring a positive candidate experience. By offering specialized expertise and flexible support, these advisors can vastly improve an organization's talent acquisition efforts, and can adapt to suit specific hiring needs and market conditions.

Contracted Talent Acquisition Advisors can bring in a meaty freelance income, but to do this job you need to have extensive experience recruiting in various sectors (so likely this will involve a history recruiting at an agency) and thorough knowledge of HR practices too (which requires experience in-house too).

Embracing technology: The Digital Recruitment Expert

If you’ve spent some time in recruitment and you’re particularly tech-savvy, there are a couple extra potential options open to you.

Recruitment Software Sales/Customer Support

If you’ve spent years using all the lastest technology to work smarter as a recruiter, you’re perfectly positioned to work for a recruitment software company. You are a recruitment tech company’s best customer, and you know first hand the challenges that their technology can overcome.

This is why a lot of recruitment software businesses only hire ex-recruiters into their sales and customer service departments. They need people who really understand the challenges of the job and how to show recruiters how the technology can solve them.

Recruitment Marketing Manager

Recruiters often say that half the job of being an agency recruiter is being a marketer. It’s up to you to market your roles to candidates, market your agency to clients and market yourself to both parties as a recruiter they want to work with.

If marketing is a side of the job you enjoy, a move into becoming a Recruitment Marketing Manager would be a great potential next step. Businesses usually prefer to recruit ex-recruiters for these positions rather than marketing generalists because they understand the different audiences better.

People Analytics Leader

If data is your thing, a step towards people analytics could be a great side step in your recruitment career.

People Analytics Leaders use data to improve human resource practices, enhance employee experience, and support strategic decision-making within an organization. It’s a role that’s really invaluable to larger organizations who rely heavily on hard data for decision-making when building their TA strategy.

To be successful in a role like this, you’d of course need to have sound knowledge of analytics programs as well as a strong background in HR.

Find your own recruitment path

Whatever recruitment path you end up taking (and you might even take more than one!), the key to a good career in this industry is to stay adaptable and committed to learning. Because who knows where you might end up next?

Recruitment is so varied that you can never truly ‘know it all’, and the more you learn, the more employable you are and the wider your opportunities for growth will be.

A big part of the learning process as a recruiter is to keep one eye on what’s coming next. The industry moves fast, so you need to be sure that whatever the future of recruitment looks like, you’re ready for it.

Whatever recruitment journey you take, Carv can act as your AI workmate, managing the boring admin tasks so you can focus on what you do best: Hiring candidates.