Recruiting in China

When you first start recruiting, the world is your oyster. You get the opportunity to help people find jobs, a noble way to earn your bread and one that promises a good living if you work hard.

Making phone calls, meeting with candidates, and finding new ways to uncover resumes is all part of the fun. Most people enjoy taking your calls, and in terms of respectability, most people really do like recruiters. Ask any parent, and the job of recruiter is a very respectable one. You may not be a doctor, but you help people and you make money.

But very soon, the recruiter runs into the hard facts about employment. The control of the process is all in your mind. The real task of recruiting is not finding candidates or finding job orders, but rather making a connection between an employer and a job-seeker. And at the end of the day, working with people is infinitely harder than working with widgets.

After 3 months or so of getting battered and bruised and quite honestly, failing to place people, as many recruiters do, most newbies start to wish for a job that is less sales oriented and more creative. Recruiting is hard work, but it's not always smart work.

Maybe this is why so many experienced recruiters are jaded. Having seen the employment process up close, they know that is is unpredictable, and that keeping your word is not a valued commodity for hiring managers or jobseekers when their job is on the line.

It's a results-driven business. If you want to eat, you do what you can to survive, and that hardens you. You can't afford to let emotion get into your decision-making process, but emotion is exactly the right selling technique you need to be successful.

So the question this leads to are what are your responsibilities as a recruiter? The client pays you, and so perhaps your responsibility lies in helping them? The problem is you have many clients, and so who gets your best effort? How do you manage your time?

And what about the candidate? Surely they are a client, too? But they don't pay you, and you can't afford to be their career counselor in any meaningful way, especially when their job is to get a job, not make you money.

There is no single answer to this question - there is no should here that can be defended. There is no "one right way" that protects all parties and leads to a gleaming city on the hill of profit, respectability, and happy clients. Every situation is different, and in the end, everyone gets burned at some time.

So the real question is not, what is your responsibility as a recruiter, but rather, what is your responsibility to yourself.