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The value of a recruiter

Some things aren't easy.

There isn't an easy way to lose weight and maintain it. Companies can’t be built without hard work. And you can't hire good people solely through an app or a database. You need people to make decisions and sort through the haze that is tens, hundreds, possibly thousands of people. Sifting it down to pure skills is like saying you only want a partner who has blonde hair and blue eyes. You may be missing out on the person who you connect with the most, and eliminating the personality.

I love technology. My company uses technology. It allows us to work more efficiently. However, the moment you think you can build culture in a company based on a resume profile and skills listed on paper is the moment arranged marriages overtake true love. Culture is what creates long-term stability in any relationship.

We don't let computers solely audit our operational and financial data. In fact, we spend more on manpower post Sarbanes-Oxley than ever before on financial audits. Why--because people get it.

People lie on resumes. People have personalities. People create culture. It isn't always about a great culture making a company great. A bad culture can kill a company faster than a great culture can create a great company.

Companies want to find a digital application for hiring because they don't like doing it themselves. It's too hard. In that case, we might as well see if we can have people fill out surveys and questionnaires and hire based on that. It’s not as easy as matching a resume with a job description.

Look at sports: teams allocate more to testing, surveys, questionnaires, background checks -- and first round picks are failures time and again, and late-round picks become Hall of Famers. It's not what we know...it's what we don't know. And data can't tell us that about people.

Why don't executives hire CFOs and VPs of sales based on an algorithm and a survey? Because the positions are too important. A computer can't tell us at that level. It's the value we place on people. But the $50k salesperson could one day become the VP. It's time to stop looking for the easy solution and start celebrating the hard work and raw manpower of real recruiting.

The people part of business is the business. There won’t be strong results when the right idea carried out by the wrong people, or when the wrong idea is carried out by the right people. The best companies get the right ideas and the right people. Then they fire the bad people when they make a mistake. Sometimes it's luck. More often than not, it's strong management, clear communication and instincts on people over skillsets listed on paper.

Almost 20 years ago, the talk was that the technology of job boards would eliminate recruiters. How does advertising eliminate expertise? Job boards ruined newspapers because they eliminated their profits. For hiring it's different. When it's cheaper and easier to advertise, it doesn't create more needles...it creates more hay.

Databases, job boards and technology have made recruiting easier. The same way technology has made being a lawyer easier. To find case law, you don't need volumes of book and libraries--it's all accessible online. You can be a trader on the exchanges from home now. Technology makes it "easier" to practice, but it doesn't make it easier to be great.

So when I hear about companies that want to save money on recruiting, or that recruiting firms need a technology play and that hiring can be simplified, it makes me wonder why companies care so little about their brand. The people are the brand. Invest the time in getting to know potential employees not looking for ways to get around it.

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