What Makes a Good Recruiter? Part 1: What's Good?

A Good Recruiter? Probably the same thing that makes a great doctor, lawyer, or politician. What makes you good at anything is based in your reason for pursuing that thing in the first place? Any other success elements might cause others to consider you as more successful, in whatever arbitrary metric one would choose to measure success. But those metrics for success are not necessarily goodness….are they?

What makes a good recruiter in my book, and why I chose to be a recruiter, are the results of a long and catastrophic journey that brought me to a place of freedom to choose what I wanted to do with my life. But, when I say, “Freedom to Choose”, I don’t mean what you probably think I mean. When your average person considers their freedom of choice, they think in terms of their internal dreams and desires and the constraints in which those desires may or may not be fulfilled. For most, freedom is a careful balance of abilities and circumstances.  Freedom, as I am describing it, is the shimmering remains of what is left after fear, bitterness, and social ordinance are removed from the equation. Freedom is what remains when a person has been shattered, has nothing left to lose, nothing to prove, and only an unmitigated void from which to answer the beckoning call: “So what are you going to do about it?” 

For me, it was a basic understanding of what I wanted to do and be in this world. I wanted to help as many people as possible and be a person that people come to when they need advice, assistance, or a well-intended kick in the pants. After several career failures, a bout of career counseling, and a baseline desire to do whatever it takes and not let any measure of pride or material need get in my way, that turned out to be recruiting. But recruiting, like any other profession, has it ethical temptations, and like most professions out there, many are not doing it with any regard for ethics beyond those it takes to maintain their reputation enough to get paid. 

Most recruiters you meet, are not good recruiters. The best of them may be “good enough” and even as much combined with a certain measure of being "successful". But they are not “good”. To be a good recruiter, one must be intimately equated with what it is to have been recruited by a bad recruiter. One must have chosen to become a recruiter and not only learned what made a bad recruiter bad, but to have come to the place of genuine temptation in becoming that bad recruiter, and to have, at great expense, chosen to forsake that temptation in order to make the choice that they sincerely knew to have been the most honorable, most equitable, and most effective, in meeting the needs of their client, their candidate, and their own conscience. After this, they would have to make that choice a pattern for every choice thereafter, and discipline themselves to make that choice every time, no matter how big the payout, or how big the loss.

Recruiting is a pattern of life. In everything we do involving other people, we are either recruiting or recruited. We are either selling, or being sold. We are either gaining or losing trust, persuading, or being persuaded, convincing, or being convinced. We are either giving or taking. But to be truly “Good” at what we are doing is to have help from outside. To have a vision of what mutual benefit truly looks like from someone outside of the deal and to let that One govern the decision. It is to make that choice whether the end result involves praise or reproach from your employer, coworkers, candidates, and clients.

Recruiting is a high turnover business because most recruiters do not know how to recruit with the integrity they wish to employ. The monetary rewards are soon fleeting, and the intellectual pursuits inevitably become tedious. They do not feel free to do their best work, and they wander from place to place seeking an imaginary opportunity to feel less compromised, or worse, to gain a greater market share to make up for that hollow feeling in their soul, or worse still, to climb the pyramid and learn to exploit the efforts of other recruiters, to distance themselves from the pain of compromise like a worn out surgeon retreating to the classroom, no longer willing to feel the pain of the last patient he could not save. They stop believing in what they do, yet lack the courage to leave it all behind. Whether it’s for a pure love of money or a fear that they are not good at anything else, they miss the mark, and are enslaved to the thing they hate. So they sell it to someone else, and fix their eyes on their next distraction.

What do you think? Cynical or realistic? Feel free to criticize, but please ask the question, rather than make the assumption. Maybe the better question is: What is the remedy? I have a couple of ideas, but I'll see if the thought resonates before giving out any more unsolicited opinions.