There’s a lot of talk among recruiters about being advisors to hiring managers — about their being equal partners in the hiring process. One can’t help but feel, however, that in most cases, this is more wishful thinking than reality.
In practice, things often look quite different, primarily due to intellectual, experiential, and positional realities.
Intellectual realities
The career paths of recruiters and hiring managers — particularly in technical domains — are generally not comparable. Hiring managers often have more rigorous academic backgrounds, and their professional progression typically demands a higher level of intellectual engagement than that of most recruiters. The selection pressure they face throughout their careers tends to be significantly more intense.
There are exceptions, of course — recruiters in executive search who were once CEOs after a career in technical, financial, or otherwise intellectually demanding fields (I’m not counting economics, marketing, MBAs and similar). But these cases remain rare, even in firms that position themselves precisely on that premium level.
I’ve personally encountered recruiters with brilliant minds (not only ex CEOs in executive search), as well who outshine many hiring managers (due to intellectual and other actual practices outside recruiting) — again, in exceptional cases. The average recruiter is far from this. For emphasis: this doesn’t mean that potentially they would not be able to tackle the same challenges a software engineering manager, a financial director, a plant manager, etc. have had to tackle up to the point of the briefing meeting when they face each other perhaps the first time! But, alas, this is irrelevant.
In all fields where numbers dominate, the average is below the norm — and by norm, I mean something aspirational, ideally brilliance, certainly not mediocrity. In such fields, this applies to hiring managers, too: only a minority are truly exceptional in terms of intellect or aptitude. But based on what I’ve seen, their average tends to be higher than that of recruiters.
It’s worth pausing here for a brief detour into management consulting, a field whose entire positioning is based on intellectual excellence: rigorous selection processes, high-impact assignments, etc. Yet even here, the average falls below the norm. And if you consider the outright criminal behavior often seen at the top levels of leadership, one might argue that both intellect and character are lacking across the board.
Yes, both recruiting and the business functions that require hiring can be highly mechanical, thus intellectually restrictive. However, the perspective of the hiring manager is necessarily broader than that of the recruiter. This point needs no explanation. If this should not be the case, the hiring manager is most likely a liability.
This brings us to POSITIONAL realities. Recruiters are not responsible for the hire. Period. In some organizsations they may have to take the blame if a new hire doesn’t work out, but this is non-sense. It’s possible that a recruiter has seen a thousand hires taking place, but besides his well-defined contributions, he has made none. They may have built recruiting teams — but unless they’ve also built and managed engineering, finance, manufacturing, IT and similar teams, they are not on equal footing with the hiring managers responsible for those domains.
Of course, seasoned recruiters have likely seen more hiring mistakes than most hiring managers ever will. From that standpoint, they can bring useful insights to the table. But does that make them equals? Even if the recruiter also brings more intellectual rigor to the selection process (more consistent application of the principles of critical thinking, more powerful reasoning, etc.) than the hiring manager, the HM may render all this irrelevant due to his positional superiority: he can say “I don’t care” and get away with it. (I am aware of exceptions, for example in big tech and other entities where OD is highly politicized, but let’s stay outside of that bubble for now.)
Less experienced recruiters, who mostly deal with data management, process documentation, and recruiting software, are even farther from being able to contribute meaningfully to the selection process. For them, claiming a seat at the “selection table” is wildly ambitious.
I’ve heard of hiring managers — perhaps after reading too many recruiter-authored articles — posing a question during executive search discussions: “Would you take responsibility for your recommendation?” The nuanced response should be: of course,
- If in case of conflict you take my recommendation over your own decision, and
- If you put me on your board
For internal recruiters, this kind of framing — either being asked to take responsibility or volunteering to do so — is simply absurd.
To elevate the quality of hiring, both recruiters and hiring managers need to raise their intellectual game. Additionally, companies should rethink the internal recruiting function by experimenting with new operational models that challenge traditional role definitions and qualification standards.
Let me know if you’d like to discuss either — or both — in more detail.
PRAKHSIS 