Why Recruiting Looks Easy

There is an absolutely wonderful children’s book called 20 Heartbeats about a painter who paints a horse for a very wealthy man. I hate to ruin it for you¸ but I have to say what happens.

The rich man pays this famous painter to paint his favorite horse. But years go by and the painter won’t finish the painting. The rich man finally shows up at the painter’s house and demands the painting. The painter obligingly whips out a piece of parchment¸ dashes off a horse in black ink with his brush¸ and then hands the painting to the rich man. All this takes less than the time of 20 heartbeats.

The rich man is¸ of course¸ aghast. He storms after the painter to demand his money back. However¸ as he walks after the painter¸ he sees what has been taking so long.

All along the walls are hundreds and hundreds of painted horses. The painter wasn’t procrastinating¸ he was practicing. The rich man then finally takes a look at the painting that he purchased so long ago¸ now in his hands. It’s a perfect horse¸ a horse so real that he whistles to it.

As 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. It’s really hard to pass along a piece of paper¸ right? You can almost hear hiring managers thinking to themselves¸ “Yeah¸ I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging all those resumes from a folder into an email. Real hard work.” Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate.

The end product of recruiting¸ for one thing¸ is someone’s else’s work – it is someone else’s talent¸ ability to interview¸ and everything else they have that gets them hired that is the end product of the recruiter’s process. It’s hard to pinpoint the recruiter’s exact role in this pseudo-science. Did they identify the talent? Spot them? Find them? Assess them? Understand the job? The culture? Have the right database? The right connections? The right insight into the department or hiring manager psychology? Did they make a lot of calls or know some secret strings to search for in Google? It’s hard to say what it is exactly that the recruiter does and so it’s easy to discount the recruiter’s role entirely.

However¸ we might be looking at it wrong. A recruiter’s value can’t be found within the process of a single hire. It can’t be found in that space that sometimes spans twenty heartbeats between talking to a manager about a job to the identification of a possible talent.