What is a Technical Recruiter? (2024 Recruiting Guide)

Technical recruiters are responsible for sourcing, screening, interviewing, and extending job offers to engineers and other tech workers. At Brightwing, we go a step further by building inroads with passive talent to provide a passive pool of successful, top-tier technical talent.

If you’re looking to hire a technical recruiter, read this article to know what to look for in both candidates and your professional hiring agency partner.

What is a technical recruiter?

Technical recruiters find and fill open technical positions, including engineering, software, and product roles. Examples of these roles include software engineers, network architects, QA specialists, technical writers, and more.

When you hire a technical recruiter, you’re not just hiring someone to post job descriptions, review resumés, and schedule interviews. You’re hiring someone with experience and industry knowledge. What’s more, technical recruiters have insights and connections that can help accelerate your hiring process.

Some day-to-day responsibilities of a technical recruiter include:

Brightwing has always had a strong bench of technical recruiters. Over the years, we’ve found the skills needed to succeed as a technical recruiter include networking and relationship building, high curiosity and eagerness to learn and grow, and a strong work ethic to take the initiative to expand their talent base.

Brightwing’s career pagehere

What roles does a technical recruiter hire for?

A number of roles fall within the broad umbrella of “technical” positions. While some technical recruiters may specialize in particular roles, most have experience placing the following positions and more.

Software engineers

Software engineers spend their days using programming languages, architectures, and platforms to develop applications and systems. They also maintain, test, and improve existing software.

Generally speaking, software engineers fall into one of two categories: systems engineers and application developers. Systems engineers built the networks and computer systems applications need to function. Application developers, naturally, build the applications that run on both those systems.

Network architects

Network architects are responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining computer networks across an organization, vertical, or department. This role often involves collaboration with other IT professionals—network engineers, system administrators, security experts, etc.—as well as a clear understanding of business requirements and network performance KPIs.

Product managers

Product managers are always in demand, both as part of IT and engineering organizations. Growing product complexity, larger buying units with more decision-makers and stakeholders, and accelerated project timelines all require more hands-on management.

Product managers are responsible for the strategic planning and execution of projects. This includes defining the product vision, developing roadmaps, communicating requirements to team members and stakeholders, managing production schedules, and tracking progress to ensure the team meets all required benchmarks, KPIs, and deadlines.

QA specialists

Quality assurance (QA) is a critical part of the technical product development lifecycle. QA specialists help to ensure all systems meet their stated functional and technical requirements through a combination of testing, analyzing, and troubleshooting.

Mechanical engineers

Whether you’re building automotive (we’re based in the metro Detroit area, after all), robotics, electrics, or other machines, mechanical engineers can be hard to come by.

Part of the reason for this is the combination of diverse skills mechanical engineers need to be successful. These include mathematical and analytical skills, problem solving, materials knowledge, knowledge of manufacturing processes, and more.

Technical writers

Complex systems, whether hardware or software, require in-depth explanation for people to understand how they work. Technical writers, then, are critical to ensure widespread, successful user adoption across all customer segments. Technical writers are responsible for creating:

The challenge in finding a technical writer is that the role requires the best of both worlds: good communication and writing skills, and deep technical knowledge of the product in question. That’s one of the reasons they can be so hard to place—because good technical writers are often well-incentivized to stay in their current roles.

Data engineers

We live in a data-first world, which means having data engineers or some other form of in-house data expert is a must-have for most companies. Data engineers are responsible for building and maintaining the organization’s data infrastructure.

These key responsibilities include designing data systems, building pipelines, maintaining data quality, implementing security best practices, analyzing trends, and surfacing relevant insights to help inform business decisions.

One of the challenges in hiring top-notch data engineers is the sheer breadth of knowledge needed to be successful. SQL and NoSQL databases are a must. They must also be familiar with tools like BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, and more.

Why should you hire a technical recruiter? Where’s the value?

As you can see from our descriptions above, hiring technical roles is easier said than done. These roles are all highly in-demand, which means getting callbacks is hard enough, let alone finding quality placements.

Some of the challenges hiring these roles include:

Whether you’re looking for a full-time, in-house technical recruiter or partnering with an agency like Brightwing, here are some reasons why that’s a good decision.

Passive talent

When hiring a technical recruiter, the first question you should ask is about passive talent. Namely, do they have a strategy for finding and landing passive talent? If not, you’d be hard pressed to find they bring much value to your organization.

But the truth of the matter is that passive talent is far more valuable than active talent:

A typical employment staffing agency with a transactional recruitment process (basically a clearing house for resumés) won’t have taken the time and energy to build these inroads.

Skills assessment

It’s one thing to cross-reference a resumé with a job description. Anyone can do that. In fact, AI resumé screening is the norm in 2024.

But when it comes to technical recruiting, skills assessment is about more than checking boxes. It requires the ability to suss out whether the candidate actually knows what they’re talking about, as well as their general problem solving, systems thinking, and creative thinking abilities.

Market insights & trends

Technical recruiters spend their days talking to candidates, employers, and other people in the market. They know the key trends inside and out. They know which hiring strategies are working and which one’s aren’t.

Perhaps most importantly, they know how you, as an employer, can best position yourself to be competitive in today’s job market. Given how in-demand the roles mentioned above are, this strategic intelligence and insight is table stakes for an effective hiring strategy.

Supplement internal & HR-drive recruitment efforts

Within many organizations, technical recruiters don’t compete with internal HR teams. In fact, when you structure the partnership in the right way, they can become HR’s best friend.

The main reason for this is that while HR personnel are the experts in people management, they’re not as well-versed with technical work. Sure, they can read a resumé and check it for key terminology, but it’s hard to know whether someone will actually be successful in a technical role without that key experience.

This is where the technical recruiter can provide significant value. By working with HR as a true partner—rather than a transactional vendor—technical recruiters can fill the gap in HR’s knowledge and help them more quickly and effectively identify and qualify key talent.

Technical recruiter FAQs

Why do tech companies use recruiters?

Tech companies use recruiters to find engineering, software, and product talent that a traditional agency or HR team can’t find themselves. One advantage of choosing a high quality recruiter is access to passive candidates. This can expand the size and quality of your talent pool.

How do you find a recruiter for a software engineer?

The best way to find a recruiter for a software engineer is to find a professional recruitment agency with a track record in finding and placing software engineers.

Is it hard to recruit software engineers?

Recruiting software engineers requires a unique blend of skills, both on the recruiting and technical side. If you want to increase your chances of success in the hiring process, an experienced technical recruiter can definitely be worth it.

Are technical recruiters worth it?

Absolutely, technical recruiters are worth it. You may pay a higher rate than a transactional agency, but the speed to hire and candidate quality will be dramatically higher if you hire a technical recruiter.

Final thoughts on technical recruiters

If you’re hiring any IT or engineering talent, technical recruiters are a must have. Without them, you’ll be hard-pressed to get in the door with high quality candidates. Worse, you may end up mishiring, which comes with its own costs.

Brightwing is proud to be a Top Rated IT & Engineering staffing firm with experience going back 50 years. We know our markets—whether the automotive scene in Detroit or the growing tech scene in Dallas-Fort Worth—and we can get you on the phone with some pretty stellar technical personnel.

Ready to fill those niche positions with candidates who actually fill all your qualifications? Reach out to Brightwing to start working with us today.

What is a Technical Recruiter & How Do You Hire One in 2024?