It must seem pointless or comical to ask, “Why do we need
recruiters?” Ask any recruiter and, after the laughing stops, you’ll
hear all the reasons you—or at least that recruiter—could possibly
imagine.
Yet, even though the list of reasons will be compelling, anyone who is the stubbornly curious type will still want to know
the reason, the main reason and the real “prime mover”.
That’s the nature of human curiosity: What was the
real (or main)
reason for the Civil War, the 2008 economic meltdown, the tangling of
my phone cord and, of course, (the Biggest Question of All) why does the
physical universe or anything at all exist rather than nothing?
As for needs: What is the real or main reason we need vitamin C, why
does the Fed rather than the Treasury control the money supply, why do
we need recruiters? Do we?
The Need for Gods and Recruiters
Somehow, we can’t help believing that there has to be
one reason that is more important or that is the “real reason” for whatever we want explained.
That’s what has made many religions so attractive and durable (with
exceptions like the now defunct ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian
polytheistic religions. Like modern science, they insisted that,
whatever happens, there is no single explanation or factor accounting
for it—in their instances, because of the maneuverings of squabbling,
multiple gods as the multiple causes of everything, including why one’s
well or goat has gone dry).
We are tempted to look for one reason or cause even when we know that what is to be explained is
1.
“over-determined”—there are multiple independent
causes, each of which is sufficient as an explanation, e.g., the sad
fate of a chicken that tried to cross the road but that was
simultaneously hit by both lightning and a truck;
2.
“multiply-determined”—there are factors, like the
quarreling Greek gods, individually insufficient as explanations, that
together are the reasons, e.g., the presence of gasoline plus the
presence of a match plus the presence of someone dumb enough to have lit
that match jointly explain the predictable explosion.
Viewed this way, looking for
the reason recruiters are necessary may seem fruitless, in the same way as looking for
the reason someone else has been hired to do a job. But notice how persistently tempting it is to ask for
the reason when somebody else got the job or the client company you were hoping to get.
Then there is the even more probing pair of questions, suggested
above: After dropping the question “What is the real reason we have
recruiters?”, it is just a matter of time before the most inquisitive
among us will drop the other shoe and ask, “Do we really need them?”
Reasons Why We Need Recruiters
So, let’s take a look at some of the (un)usual reasons why we need recruiters,
if we indeed do need them, and see whether there really is what
deserves to be called “the reason”—a number #1 reason why recruiters are
necessary.
Division of labor in obtaining labor:
Perhaps the most obvious reason why we seem to need recruiters is that
their specialized skills and resources (including networks) make
finding, vetting and placing talent a much more efficient process. We
can thank Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations for this explanation:
Basically, specialization creates efficiencies that create wealth. Being
a recruiter is merely just another form of facilitator specialization.
Moreover, the employers that recruiters serve are subject to the same
laws of efficiency: A project manager or CEO also has to specialize in
his job to compete and succeed. Hence, because there aren’t enough
minutes in an hour and no hours in a minute, the delegation of hiring to
an HR specialist is advisable and generally unavoidable. It’s that
simple.
Swelling ranks of the employable and of employers:
In a tribal village of 200 people, recruiters are completely
unnecessary. The small labor pool means that extensive and elaborate
sorting and sifting of job applications is not required at all. Not only
are the labor pool and applicant numbers small, but also the applicants
will certainly be well known to the C.E.C.—the Chief Executive Chief.
This reduces the sourcing and screening time to virtually zero. On top
of that, compensation package negotiations will be streamlined in a
tribal village, since there will be few, if any, opportunity costs for
either the C.E.C. or the applicant, inasmuch as there will be very few
applicants or jobs to choose from.
The modern world of work on a crowded planet is completely different.
First, the huge numbers of employable people, applicants and companies
create innumerable mathematically possible combinations of employers and
applicants as matches to be checked out.
Second, the kind of tribal firsthand knowledge of both the employer
and the prospective employee is, apart from cases of nepotism,
pre-existing acquaintanceship and in-house hiring, virtually
non-existent.
Third, the existence of countless competitors for both those hiring
and those to be hired makes shopping around, vetting and negotiating in
the world’s huge modern economies more protracted, costly and complex
processes.
The need for human buffers in a vast, impersonal bottom-line-oriented marketplace: We’ve
all heard, “This isn’t personal; it’s business.” That sums up the
massive transformation of the close-knit tribal village into the modern
urban faceless-bee beehive, of simple, friendly bartering with neighbors
and friends into complex, remote, money-denominated, automated and
highly impersonal marketplace transactions. That’s the transformation of
“Gemeinschaft” (personal, community-based) interactions into
“Gesellschaft” (formal, impersonal, commerce-based) interactions that is
one of the most important transformations in all of human history.
Yet, despite the fact that recruiters are part of this modern
gargantuan system of formalized business relations, they somehow are
expected to and do manage to maintain a human face and to provide a
“human touch”—especially because they are the helping hand that makes
the employer-new employee deal-sealing handshake possible.
Because the recruiter’s defining function is to help employer and
job-seeker achieve their goals, his or her role is special in the domain
of hardcore business: Recruiters, like caregivers, exist to help and
only to help, including helping those who may be motivated to help
themselves (to what they desire).
In contrast, employers and prospective employees will always, or at
least initially, be tempted to play a “zero-sum” game, e.g., with
respect to salary, in which gains for the candidate mean losses for the
prospective employer and vice versa, and where maximizing satisfaction
on one side means reducing it on the other.
Recruiters, however, are readily perceived as trying to maximize satisfaction for
both
the employer and the candidate (even though this is in practice, if not
logically, impossible). More reasonably, what the recruiter actually
does is to maximize such respective satisfactions
subject to unavoidable constraints (that manifest themselves in the negotiations the recruiter helpfully facilitates).
To put this point in terms that Adam Smith might approve, recruiters
supplement the cold, impersonal, often merciless “invisible hand” of the
Gesellschaft marketplace with their own Gemeinschaft warm “helping
hand”. In this way, a recruiter serves as not only a catalyst of
employment, but also as a personalizing buffer between conflicting
expectations of the hiring and the hired, and between the impersonal
forces of job supply and job-seeker demand.
The Main Reason We Need Recruiters
Being only examples of the reasons we need recruiters, these cited
explanations are, nonetheless, at least sufficient to answer the second
question, “Do we need recruiters?” In terms of the framework outlined
here, we can say that the need for recruiters is “over-determined”:
There is, in our modern world, more than one reason why recruiters are
necessary.
Still, the temptation to ask for
the reason stubbornly tugs
on the mind. Habits die hard and slowly; such an intellectual instinct
as this one dies even harder and more slowly. So, as a concession to
this reductionist urge to know
the reason, the single most important reason we (still) need recruiters, and on deep reflection, I will try to offer one.
We all need to eat.
