Everything You Thought You Knew About Recruiters is Wrong

The brutal truth may surprise you.

Nobody dreams about becoming a recruiter when they’re young. It’s not the kind of thing you fantasize about, like wanting to grow up and become a professional basketball player or an astronaut or even a schoolteacher.

I would venture to guess that most kids don’t even know what a recruiter is or what they do. I know I certainly didn’t, I was too busy thinking about a career as a writer or an artist to ever imagine you could make money by placing people in jobs (though I was insightful enough to know that it’s pretty damn hard to make a good living as an artist).

Most people working in the recruiting field got there by happenstance; it’s an opportunity that found them versus the other way around, sort of like a struggling actor in Los Angeles who decides to open up a coffee shop to subsidize his income, and soon his plan B becomes plan A.

I remember the first time I thought about becoming a recruiter. I’d been working in sales for about five years and was introduced to a headhunter who helped set me up for some job interviews with medical device companies, including one where I would be selling breast implants to surgeons. None of those opportunities panned out but I did start to think about the work this woman was…