What are you actually buying from a recruiter?

It’s not a list of names.

One question comes up in every new client call and illustrates how most buyers don’t understand the value of modern recruiting services (through no fault of their own).

👉“Where do you get your candidates?”

To the buyer’s credit, most recruiting agencies are still running their business like it’s 2003.

I’ll back up and illustrate.

Once upon a time, there was no LinkedIn. No ZoomInfo. Or Apollo. Or Seamless. Or Lusha.

I mean, people didn’t even use their real names on the internet until Facebook turned everyone into oversharing, look-at-me monsters. Now it’s weird not to have a LinkedIn profile.

So how did recruiting firms function? Blood, sweat, and referral gathering.

I’m serious. Believe it or not, this entire business was built on 1:1 relationships. Getting ingrained in a niche community. Earning enough trust for someone to introduce you to their friends. Then storing that information in the most archaic database you can imagine.

Oh. And randomly calling company directories and dialing until you got someone. No youngsters, I’m not making this up.

Back in those days, having access to a list of names was half the value of recruiting firms. Which, for the most part, is now gone.

Save for a few niche industries, damn near everyone is publicly accessible via some tool. Which literally everyone has. Not just agencies, but hiring companies themselves.

So why isn’t hiring the easiest thing in the world for companies to do themselves? And why does the recruiting industry still exist?

👉 The entire value of a recruiter isn’t in their ability to use a tool to find a bunch of names. It’s in their ability to drive the important parts of the hiring process to offer and acceptance.

Vetting. Qualifying. Positioning. Messaging. Nurturing. Objection handling. Relationship building.

Those are just the table stakes to stay in business. The truly great recruiters?

Interview process design. Interviewer training. Role calibration. Market feedback. Compensation guidance. Candidate experience. Timeline management. Closing strategy. Stakeholder alignment. Offer negotiation.

That’s the actual job nowadays. Those are the things you should dig into.

Every firm you’ve had a great experience with? They did this stuff well.

Every firm whose contact info you deleted because they were so bad? They didn’t.

If you don’t feel your recruiter has the chops to do all that, you shouldn’t be working with them.

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.