The Complete Recruiter: Building T-Shaped TA Professionals

Being excellent at sourcing, screening, and closing will always be impactful. But as hiring has become more complex and strategic, these core skills need to be complemented by broader capabilities… And the bar for what a recruiter needs to to learn and take responsibility for has only crept upwards.

Specialist sourcers are still experts in their field. But the hiring landscape increasingly favours all-rounders who can adapt across different functions and challenges, including specialist roles within AI and tech. That’s why recruiters with broader context tend to be the ones trusted with the harder problems.

They’ve gone deep in their core recruiting specialisms: Sourcing, screening, stakeholder management, and offer negotiation. Then they’ve built breadth in complementary areas like data analysis, copywriting, marketing, product understanding, and business strategy.

That kind of shape gives recruiters flexibility, credibility, and impact.

We call it being T-shaped.

What being a T-shaped recruiter means

When you’re a T-shaped recruiter, essentially, you go deep in your core recruiting skills that you’ve built confidence in, whilst building breadth to stay effective across everything else the job throws at you.

The vertical part of the T is where your depth lives, your core recruiting expertise across sourcing, screening, stakeholder management, and closing. This is your foundation as a recruiting professional.

The horizontal part is where your range starts to show. These might be skills such as:

• How to interpret pipeline data and act on it
• What makes a hiring process clean, consistent, and fair
• How to adapt your approach depending on the role, the team, or the pace of hiring
• What drives decisions behind the brief, not just inside it

This gives you enough range to move with confidence, even when things aren’t neatly scoped.

In fact, LinkedIn data reveals how recruiters are extending their skills and moving beyond silos. The top skills for different recruiting roles used to be fairly unique, but now there’s significantly more overlap between skills. According to LinkedIn, increasingly, TA’s are expected to be “full-stack” recruiters who can work seamlessly across different functions and stages of the hiring process.

Here’s one of the clearest ways we’ve seen the T-shape concept mapped. It’s from the team at McKinsey and gives a simple view of how deep expertise and broad capabilities work together. 

[Credit: McKinsey & Company, adapted from “Ops 4.0: The Human Factor”]

The vertical stroke represents functional depth. Your specialist and leadership skills. The horizontal axis shows the broader business skills that allow you to work effectively across functions and teams.

Why being a T-shaped recruiter matters in fast-growth environments

As you’re probably well aware, start-up and scale-up hiring is rarely straightforward. You’re often figuring things out mid-flight. Job specs aren’t fully scoped. Stakeholders are stretched. Priorities shift. Sometimes the company itself is still finding its footing.

And in the middle of that, you’re expected to help build teams that work, quickly, sometimes with a shrinking budget. 

The recruiters who tend to thrive in these environments can operate in ambiguity. But that kind of judgment doesn’t come from only years in a role. It comes from seeing more. Learning more. And joining the dots between your own expertise and everything it connects to.

That’s why T-shaped thinking works so well in this context. It gives recruiters enough breadth to stay useful when things get messy, and enough depth to actually deliver.

How to build that T-shape

The recruiters who grow fastest tend to go deep first, then build outwards. That’s what gives the T-shape its strength. A solid core, with enough surrounding knowledge to stay effective across different situations.

Here’s how to approach t-shaped recruiting:

🧱 Start with depth
This is your specialist track.

• Get sharp on sourcing
• Run cleaner screening calls
• Learn how to manage offers properly
• Own something and iterate until you know it works

📐 Then build the breadth
Once the core feels steady, start stretching sideways.

• Understand what hiring managers are really optimising for
• Learn how to improve copywriting and outreach emails
• Ask better questions in intake sessions
• Spot where processes are slowing things down (and know how to fix them)

The shape usually tends to build naturally over time, as new challenges show up and you take the time to work through them properly.

That’s why Purpl keeps things light and modular. Short courses. Focused topics. Delivered by recruiters who’ve been in the thick of it. You learn what you need. You try it. Then you move on to the next thing when you’re ready.

Different shapes at different stages

Of course, the T-shape evolves with you. What matters early in your career might not be the same things that matter once you’re leading a team. And trying to build it all at once tends to just create overwhelm.

Here’s how we usually see it play out:

👣 Early career: Build your core

• Develop competency across the full recruiting process
• Learn through repetition and refinement
• Try different approaches and see what actually works

🧠 Mid-level: Widen your view

• Start joining the dots between your work and the rest of the business
• Get curious about the problems other functions are solving
• Begin owning more of the process, not just your part in it

🚀 Senior: Use your skills to level others up

• Spot gaps in the team and help close them
• Share patterns, not just opinions
• Influence without needing to control everything

Of course, this isn’t a linear journey. You’ll likely revisit parts of the T as your role shifts or your team evolves. But thinking this way can help you focus your development without getting stuck in the weeds.

 Lessons from people who’ve already done it

The shape sounds neat on paper. But in reality, it’s built through chaos, context-switching, and a hundred tiny decisions you’re not sure matter until later. That’s why Purpl leans so heavily on people who’ve actually done the work.

The course on sourcing? It’s led by someone who filled hundreds of engineering roles at Meta.

The video series on candidate pre-closing? Taught by a recruiter who worked in AI at Google and Klarna.

Stakeholder alignment, offer management and interview design are all led by practitioners who’ve sat in your chair, felt the pressure, and figured out what works.

You learn something real. You apply it in your own messy hiring environment. And if it works, great, you’ve added a new line to your shape. If not, you come back, tweak it, and try again.

Learning from practitioners respects the fact that most recruiters don’t need theory. They need something they can try this week.

That’s what Purpl was built for.

Continuous learning > one-off training

Recruitment changes too quickly for once-a-year training to keep up. New tools pop up. Candidate expectations change. Hiring priorities get rewritten overnight. The new skills you learned last quarter might already feel slightly off.

So the best recruiters build habits that keep their skills moving.

🧭 What that looks like:

• Picking up small, targeted techniques and testing them in live roles
• Sharing what works with peers (and being honest about what doesn’t)
• Staying close to people solving similar problems, even if they’re in different companies or markets
• Revisiting your approach when something starts to feel clunky or out of step

Bottom line: Instead of frameworks or training decks, you need access to collective knowledge. People who’ve faced the same blockers you’re dealing with now, and have found a way through.

Ultimately, the shape doesn’t stay still, and neither should your learning.

Final thoughts

T-shaped thinking gives you a way to reflect on what you’re good at, what’s holding you back, and where you might want to stretch next.

Whether you’re early in your career or shaping a whole team, the goal’s the same: keep learning, keep experimenting, and build a shape that works for the work you’re doing.

That’s what Purpl’s here to support. No fluff. No filler. Just practical learning from people who’ve done it before, giving you the tools and space to make it your own.

🟣 Ready to build your own T? You can sign up to Purpl for free and take a look around.

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