Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Hiring or Recruiting

In one of his classic posts, Seth Godin highlighted the difference between hiring and recruiting. He said,
"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."
I really like this. I had to ask myself, "was I recruited or hired into the job I am in now?"
I know the answer and I am glad for it.

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