The best way to recruit is by serving others

I often tell my team that I love recruiting but often don't love recruiters. It's primarily because of the power dynamics I have seen by people who consider themselves a 'company's gatekeeper'. I have never agreed with that.

I've built a stable career and reputation for being an action-oriented, get-things-done recruiter. For most of my career, I was a contract recruiter, with companies hiring me to work on their most demanding assignments and hard to fill roles.

Most of my career was as a contractor. I was often on the outside looking in, even when I was inside working side by side with the team. I liked that I did not have to participate in company politics. It also allowed me to work for various companies and gain quite a bit of insight into what works and what doesn't work in recruiting. 

I grew up in Chicago's suburbs, not far from several giant corporations, including Motorola and Sears. The vast campuses of gleaming buildings and parking lots full of their employees' beautiful cars seemed like the embodiment of the American dream.

I didn't excel in school and hadn't finished my degree when I became a recruiter. I began by trying to get any corporate job I could and (you might have guessed it) ended up in the mailroom. After a couple of years, I moved into collections and then sales, dabbled in customer service, none of these roles felt like the right fit.

All through this period, I was searching for what I wanted my permanent career to be. I decided to go to a job fair (in these emerging internet days, job fairs were still an excellent place to find a real job), and that's where I met Majid.

Majid liked my voice and asked if I had ever thought of being a recruiter. I told him I hadn't, but I would be interested in the role. I joined the company he worked for in Schaumburg, IL, and started my first recruiting job.

It's been 21 years since Majid offered me that recruiting job, and I owe everything I have to the profession. During that time, I have seen and experienced quite a bit. I have ultimately concluded that what makes a good recruiter comes down to your work attitude and how you define your place in it. 

I've had people ask me how I managed to fill challenging roles or bring in top talent to a company (where others couldn't), and for a long time, I didn't have a good answer. Over the past year of building my own company, I've realized that ultimately the difference came down to the worldview I have and its impact on the work I do.

Being a recruiter has allowed me to build a career of service to my fellow human beings. It has been the ultimate win-win career for me. I get to help people attain opportunities that improve their lives while assisting companies in finding and hiring the talent they need to be successful. 

The best part is that I've also had the opportunity to make an enormous difference in people's lives along the way. 

Back in 2006, I worked for a large corporation during a massive sales expansion. I was part of building a robust and efficient recruiting machine that came in successfully under time and budget. I had become a gatekeeper.

Fortunately, another senior recruiter working on the project, Scott Tallman, became a mentor. Scott is one of the best recruiters I've ever worked with, and he encouraged me to take ownership and action where I saw it was appropriate.

In 2007, right before Christmas, I saw the impact my role could have in the most direct way possible. I had several candidates in the final stages of hiring and received the bad news that one of them had flags pop up on a background check.

The policy was that the background check should go over the last seven years of the candidate's life. In this case, the service found a judicial notice that the candidate had been in legal trouble eight or nine years previously.

Since I was hiring a large volume of people, the processes were cut and dry. In this case, I was supposed to call the candidate, rescind the offer, and disposition them in the system, which I did. 

Making a rescinded offer call is the last call any recruiter wants to make, and that any excited candidate wants to get. Getting someone to the offer stage can be a bit of a haul, so any fallout at that point sets you off your goal and the company's goals. Even worse is the effect on the candidate. Nothing is more defeating than finding out the new job you are about to start is no longer available. 

I steeled myself, made the call, and went through my script. I can still remember the stunned silence on the line as the man started to grasp at straws and see if there was any way we could fix this. He explained that he had made mistakes in his past, but that was all behind him. He had a family now, and people who were depending on him to support them. He needed the job, was there please any way we could reconsider? 

I had to say no, per the policy and wished him well.

I can still remember sitting in my cubicle after the call. My gut told me this was wrong, and suddenly it dawned on me that I could do something about it!

At this point, empowerment as a concept at work was not really in the zeitgeist - you did as instructed, and that was that. However, I knew who the legal department attorney for recruiting was. We had worked together in the past and were friendly. Generally, the legal department had the final say on hiring, so I knew there was a chance.

I immediately drafted an email to him. I laid out the situation and noted that what we had found was outside of our standard 7-year window. I pointed out that the candidate had great recommendations throughout the interview process. I also added what the man had shared with me and how calm and professional he was as I rescinded his offer.

I pressed send and said a prayer. It took a few days to get a response, but it was the response I wanted. I could re-extend the offer! 

I was excited to make the call but wasn't anticipating what was to come. I got the candidate on the phone, and I could tell he was confused about my call. I quickly went through everything and rushed to the conclusion, letting him know he had the job and when he could start. 

All I heard was silence, and after a few seconds, I heard him try to talk through what I could tell were heavy tears. He asked me how quickly I could get him a letter, on company letterhead, that outlined what I had just told him. He told me that he and his family were about to be evicted from their apartment the next day and how this couldn't have come at a better moment. 

 Until this point, I looked at being a recruiter as my day job but had always aspired to do other things. Once that happened, I knew that recruiting was my career. I got him the letter, his family could stay in their home, and I realized that any power being a recruiter gave was best used to serve other people. At that moment, I vowed always to try and help other people as often as I could, whenever I could. 

Looking back, I believe that as a result of that decision, I was able to go much further and do much more than I could have ever dreamed of when I started working. I began to stop looking at my career as a job and started looking at it as my way to serve others.

I already had 13 years of corporate recruiting experience when I moved my family to Silicon Valley to join Google on a year-long contract. I learned quite a bit during my time there and decided to stay in the Bay Area after it ended to see if I could establish myself here.

It has not been the easiest path, but I'm glad that I took the chance because it has been rewarding. Since then, I have worked with several startups and scaleups. Those experiences gave me the confidence to build Sourced with my wife and two partners in Argentina.

As we mapped out our business and our products, we started with one thought: How could we help? Was there a way to help our clients find and engage with talent more efficiently AND more affordably? How can we help the people doing the most challenging part of the job to do their job better and make it more exciting and fun?

Over the last couple of years, we have built a successful services business. I also wanted to give something back to the community and the profession that has given me so much.

We are now happy to announce that our new platform, TeamSourced, will be released early next year. We are excited to give the recruiting community a fantastic free tool to help solve one of the most challenging parts of the recruiting process. Organization while sourcing talent at the top of the funnel. We can't wait to see what 2021 has in store for all of us.