How To Become A Senior Recruiting Specialist: What It Is and Career Path

What is a senior recruiting specialist and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

4 min read

A Senior Recruiting Specialist is responsible for managing hiring processes and programs, from advertising for open positions to sourcing qualified candidates and hiring and training new personnel.

Amongst their other duties are such tasks as creating and modifying hiring plans and goals for the year, publishing ads, creating and maintaining relationships with other recruiters and potentially qualified candidates via business events, online groups, and other business networks and pools, and may even host events and job fairs of their own. Thus they'll need to have excellent interpersonal, communications, and analytical skills and should have basic computer and social media literacy.

A person looking to work as a Senior Recruiting Specialist generally needs to have a Bachelor's in HR Management, Business Administration, or Psychology, or a related field of study, as well as a few years of experience working as a recruitment agent or in a similar position. On average, the Senior Recruiting Specialist earns $35.11 per hour.

ScoreSenior Recruiting SpecialistUS Average

Salary

6.5

Avg. Salary $83,749

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

8.0

Growth rate 8%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

6.7

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.67%

Asian 8.13%

Black or African American 10.77%

Hispanic or Latino 17.23%

Unknown 5.54%

White 57.66%

Gender

female 61.54%

male 38.46%

Age - 40

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 40

Stress level

8.0

Stress level is high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

8.3

Complexity level is challenging

7 - challenging

Work life balance

7.0

Work life balance is good

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a senior recruiting specialist

Explore senior recruiting specialist education requirements

Most common senior recruiting specialist degrees

Bachelor's

73.4 %

Master's

14.1 %

Associate

9.6 %

Start to develop specific senior recruiting specialist skills

Skills	Percentages
Applicant Tracking Systems	10.27%
HR	8.92%
Recruitment Strategies	8.43%
Recruitment Efforts	8.36%
SR	6.33%

Complete relevant senior recruiting specialist training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 6-12 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New senior recruiting specialists learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a senior recruiting specialist based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real senior recruiting specialist resumes.

Research senior recruiting specialist duties and responsibilities

Develop business case, secure senior leadership buy-in, and lead implementation of site's first ATS (PeopleSoft).
Utilize ATS on a daily basis to manage job requisition process and candidate pool, perform searches and create recruitment reports.
Manage the scheduling and logistics of all interviews between candidates and hiring managers including post-interview calibration/feedback with interview teams.
Manage scheduling database for healthcare aides and organize timely in-service training.

Get senior recruiting specialist experience

Generally, it takes 4-6 years to become a senior recruiting specialist. The most common roles before becoming a senior recruiting specialist include recruiter, senior recruiter team lead and technical recruiter.

Prepare your senior recruiting specialist resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your senior recruiting specialist resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on a senior recruiting specialist resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

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