Why Recruiting Looks Easy

The rich man pays the famous painter to paint his favorite horse. Years go by, and the painter won’t finish. The rich man finally shows up demanding the painting. The painter obligingly whips out a piece of parchment, dashes off a horse in black ink, and hands it over — all in less time than 20 heartbeats.

The rich man is aghast and storms after the painter to demand his money back. But as he walks after him, he sees what’s been taking so long — hundreds and hundreds of painted horses lining the walls. The painter wasn’t procrastinating. He was practicing. Looking again at the painting in his hands, the rich man sees a horse so real, he whistles to it.

Every art form takes discipline and practice to look easy — every kind of work takes years of diligence to perfect. Recruiting is no different, but few professions look so simple. You can almost hear hiring managers thinking, “I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging resumes into an email. Real hard work.” Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate.

The end product of recruiting is someone else’s work — their talent, their ability to interview, everything that gets them hired. It’s hard to pinpoint the recruiter’s exact role in that. Did they identify the talent? Spot them? Assess them? Understand the job, the culture, the hiring manager’s psychology? Make the right calls, know the right search strings? Because it’s hard to say exactly what a recruiter does, it’s easy to discount their role entirely.

A recruiter’s value can’t be found within the process of a single hire — it can’t be found in the space that sometimes spans twenty heartbeats between talking to a manager about a job and identifying a possible talent. You have to look at everything that comes before that identification to see the value of a good recruiter.

A great recruiter creates the conditions for that magic luck to strike. They don’t talk to a lot of different people — they talk to everyone. They don’t want to know just their clients or competitors — they want to know everything happening at every company in their area. It’s a massive amount of work, full of constant rejection, failure, and stress, compounded by the minutiae of job offers and the uncertainty of human emotion.