The difference between hiring and recruiting

Bob wonders if there’s a difference. I’m pretty sure there is.

Hiring is what you do when you let the world know that you’re accepting applications from people looking for a job.

Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they’re doing and come join you.

Hiring is easy and fast and is basically a retail operation.

Recruiting is artful and slow and is essentially a direct marketing effort.

Recruiting raises the bar because it demands you have a job worth quitting for. The recruiter doesn’t solve an urgent problem for the person being recruited, in fact, they create one. That person already has a job (hence no problem). The problem being created is that until they change over to your job, they’ll be unhappy. That’s a huge hurdle for a job to overcome, which leads to this key question:

Is your job opening so good you could recruit great people for it?

If not, perhaps you need to work on that.