“You’re only as good as your last deal” was a common phrase during my agency days. I didn’t just view it as a deal; this was a person’s livelihood by placing a candidate in a new opportunity. But when “deals” are associated with your income, people are commodities.

There’s a perception that productivity equals a good recruiter. We don’t consider the candidate experience, the relationship that the recruiter develops with their client groups, or how well the recruiter represents a client or company to a candidate. After all, the recruiter is the face of the company, and that’s the first impression a candidate will have.

While we need a metric to measure a recruiter’s performance, it would be prudent to avoid the “warm body” notion. That is, do we present and hire just anyone to meet our goals, therefore appearing as productive, or do we focus on the quality of candidates and the candidate experience? After all, candidates could be future clients.

In the corporate recruiter’s case, you may want the candidate to keep using your company’s products. People aren’t just commodities. When we hire, these are individuals who have to contemplate the stress of resigning, possibly relocating, and making decisions among more than one offer.

We all know of recruiters who are very productive but have an unsavory professional reputation. Some of them are known to be unethical, crass, and often considered used car salesmen. During my agency experience, I had a manager who told me to inform a candidate that the candidate should accept an offer because it would “make my numbers” for the month. How embarrassing! Why would this candidate care about my numbers?

Neutral Advocates

Professional recruiters are like Switzerland with a twist. They remain neutral yet gingerly advocate for their client, and have honest discussions with the candidate about their career path and expectations instead of giving them false hope and pushing them into a position that is destined to not be a fit.

I’m not saying that we’re social workers. After all, we do have to be productive. But the recruiters who maintain a professional reputation are not known as body-bagging; instead, they balance the needs of the candidate with the priorities of the client.

Candidates and client groups remember and appreciate this level of candor and professionalism more than a bad hire remembers having been strong-armed into a position that ended up being a mismatched disaster.

While hiring managers are ultimately responsible for bad hires, somehow the finger is always pointed at the recruiter.

The agencies will always focus on metrics. Organizations with corporate recruiters do so as well to some degree. Agencies tend to hire salespeople from all walks of life, and it is a commissioned-based environment.

Occasionally, there are agency recruiters who believe in the customer-service aspects of recruiting and want to “cross over” to corporate recruiting to take a different approach to recruiting that better addresses their values and interests.

Within corporate recruiting, there is a novel but not widespread thought of a requisition-less environment, encouraging professionalism, quality, and team collaboration, and decreasing the focus on metrics. I was once in an environment that was requisition-less, and hiring committees, not hiring managers, made the hiring decisions. It was a relief to not have hiring managers chase me for candidates and to focus on one profile instead of many.

It was also refreshing to be able to manage candidates better, since I wasn’t overwhelmed by a variety of requisitions. I was providing a positive candidate experience. The downside to this was that I became bored with just one or two profiles and I had no influence over who was hired. I felt like a transactional babysitter, not a true recruiting consultant.

It was also unclear how I was measured. It wasn’t about productivity as much as managing the process and assuring the candidate had a positive experience along the way. However, there was always the background judgment of how productive one was even though one didn’t have influence over the hiring. Thinking about metrics never really stopped.

While I think there will always be a focus on metrics, since it seems to be the one comfortable and conventional measurement used to evaluate recruiters, I think we need to consider other factors besides what our last deal was.

It only takes one unprofessional recruiter to ruin the reputation of those who strive to be professional. Perhaps this means changing the overall recruiting model as far as how we hire and how we are measured.

Let’s figure out how we can be professional recruiters without compromising the quality of service that we are providing candidates and our client groups.

In the late 1990s, companies just needed bodies to help recruit, regardless of background or competency. A few years beforehand, companies would not even fathom hiring a corporate recruiter who only had contingency experience. What makes a recruiter valuable so that he or she can survive throughout the volatility of a market? What makes an enduring recruiting career so that it simply isn’t something that anyone can dabble in? What separates the good from the bad, the strong from the weak? Some recruiters argue that recruiting is just about sales. While this is an important aspect of recruiting, staffing goes beyond sales, whether it’s contingency or corporate recruiting. Recruiting is about understanding that overall fit between a candidate and a corporate culture. We must exercise our analytical and critical-thinking skills on several levels. The most basic skill that we use is to fully comprehend a particular function and how that impacts the company and its business. We can’t just view a position as a job order or qualifications that are quantified into “five years of experience or skills.” We have to read between the lines. This applies to how we evaluate candidates. I have seen recruiters assume that an individual is smart because he is a Mensa member or has a Harvard MBA or high GPA. Or, recruiters assume the candidate is a job-hopper without discussing the circumstances with the candidate. Recruiters miss out on strong candidates as a result of these shallow assumptions.

Arguably, with the 10 seconds that we exert on reviewing each resume due to time constraints and fire drills, it is easy to find yourself in a position where you do categorize people into a caste system. But how would recruiters feel if we were evaluated in the same way that we evaluate candidates? How many recruiters do we know who have a Harvard MBA or have a high college GPA, let alone a Bachelor’s degree from a “ranked” college? Who are we to evaluate supposedly high-caliber candidates if we haven’t achieved similar goals? Where is our credibility as recruiters if we aren’t high-caliber ourselves?

If recruiters were required to reach a certain education level, there wouldn’t be so many recruiters. If an educational foundation was a requirement, we would have more compassion about what goes into the competitive application process, which can oftentimes be subjective. Recruiters overlook, for instance, that schools are businesses. Getting in can be contingent upon intangible factors beyond test scores and GPAs, such as a family legacy, economics, or state-representation statistics. These circumstances are beyond a candidate’s control. GPAs are relative because they depend on the specific school and major. MIT and Caltech do not issue grades during the students’ first year because of how rigorous their academic programs are. Depending on the student and the school, a GPA in Physics could be significantly lower than a GPA in Communications. If recruiters are in a position of power to pick and choose from which academic programs we select to recruit, we better be prepared to justify why we are selecting these schools and how we will interact with these individuals. Are we going by word of mouth or by what the U.S. News & World Report dictates as the top schools? Do we question this methodology and source in ranking schools, or do we simply assume that people who attend these schools are better than everyone else?

We represent our clients, and candidates are banking on us to give them an opportunity with our clients. If candidates can’t respect us because we can’t match their intellects to some degree due to the fact that we lack the backgrounds to do so, then we need to set our standards higher for recruiters. We must have the foundation to be able to evaluate a candidate beyond the resume in order to assess him or her for a corporate culture. I am not advocating that recruiters must have an engineering degree to hire engineers or possess an MBA to fill business roles. But what steps can recruiters take to understand the candidate’s perspective? How does a recruiter become a better frontline partner and challenge the myopic assumptions of many clients? If our standards are higher for recruiters, then we must place more value in the recruiting role as a business partner. This will augment our credibility.

Recruiters are no longer phone jockeys who field resumes to see which ones will stick. While we do have to sell an opportunity to a candidate and a candidate to a client, we also have to be intuitive enough to appeal to what motivates a candidate while convincing a client what is truly important in a candidate’s background. In this day and age in which Internet recruiting tools are commonplace, the role of the recruiter has obviously evolved, sometimes to the point of misperception. The Web has enhanced research efforts, and we scour resumes online. However, the experienced recruiters know the value of cold-calling companies to capture those passive candidates, build an org chart from these calls, and gather intelligence.

We must scrutinize and challenge job requirements and candidate qualifications in order to have an abstract and intricate understanding of the opportunity. We must engage in complex, high-level negotiations. We must constantly exercise diplomacy skills, whether we are rejecting a candidate’s qualifications within legal parameters or explaining circumstances that have affected the company’s ability to move forward with an offer, without making the company look bad. Our roles are deeper than sales or that of the messenger. We must expect the caliber of recruiter to equal the caliber of professionals that we seek. Then, perhaps one day, the accidental career won’t seem so accidental.