What steps can I take to transition from a Senior Software Engineer role to becoming a Technical Recruiter?

Interesting move to go from engineer to recruiter! I don't know people making this career transition very often -- I'm curious what is your motivation?

I wonder if a role like Sales Engineering may be a better, less dramatic change for you?

I do agree with the premise that recruiting is a more "human" job trying to evaluate things like cultural fit or compatibility, so it's safe from AI. In terms of prep, I'd say:

• build out your network
• figure out where good developers live on the Internet (hint: you're in one of those spots already!)

I'd also look at recruiters who you respect and ask them about their background. Interesting reddit post about this.

Here's the Taro perspective on how we view recruiters during interviews: Recruiter Screen

In general, my advice when looking into a transition is to talk with folks at your current company to learn more about it, ideally collaborating with them on their work and hybridizing yourself.

At Course Hero, I owned almost the entire hiring pipeline for Android recruiting:

1. I wrote the job description
2. I reviewed resumes
3. I designed the interview process (both phone screen and onsite)
4. I gave the interviews
5. I decided offer/no-offer

Course Hero was an early-stage startup, so it offered an unusually high amount of scope as startups do, but maybe you can replicate some of that in your current role. Talk to the sourcer in particular for your team/org (sourcers focus on just finding the talent, not coordinating the interview process) and learn as much as you can from them. If you have spare time, offer to help them source candidates!

From there, you can decide if the work is fulfilling for you (and if you're any good at it, haha) and make a call from there.

What I will say though is that recruiting is a very congested and crowded space, especially with 3rd party headhunters. Yes, the placement fees are large, but placing people is way harder than people think. There are far more bad engineers out there than good ones.