Are you operating like a contractor or a consultant, or something else?

This post first appeared on John’s Try Harder is Not a Strategy LinkedIn Newsletter. 

I'm not one of those people who gets too caught up in the different meanings of similar words - goals vs mission, complicated vs complex. (Except for intake meetings vs strategy meetings - I will fight that fight).

But as I've been thinking through the role of the recruiter the past few years, I've been thinking a lot more about how I and many TA leaders have framed up what recruiters do for the business, and how they fit into the recruiting machine.

The contractor: Some of us see and describe recruiters like we'd describe an hourly contractor, even if they're a full time regular employee. They are there to fill reqs, and if you have a lot of reqs to fill, just add more recruiters. They're paid mostly for their time, and measured on transactional output - how many reqs can they fill for the hourly rate x hours worked?

The consultant: Some of us see and describe recruiters as consultants, who diagnose root issues, come in to our hiring teams to solve problems, and advise and guide the business (hiring managers).

Now I’m seeing more and more folks refer to recruiters as architects, who are designers of things like assessments and hiring experiences. I get the appeal of this framing:

• Contractors do the work.
• Consultants help the business make better decisions.
• Architects design how the work gets done.

Of course, a great recruiter might play all three roles in the same week. Sometimes the business really does just need someone to execute and get a req filled. Sometimes it needs someone to challenge an assumption or help a hiring manager think through a tradeoff. And sometimes it needs someone to step back and redesign the approach entirely.

But here’s why I think the distinction matters more now.

AI is getting very good at the parts of recruiting we’ve historically treated as contractor work.

Finding candidates. Writing outreach. Scheduling. Summarizing interviews. Updating systems. Creating reports. Drafting job descriptions.

That doesn’t mean all of those activities disappear. But it does mean doing the activity is becoming less valuable than knowing what activity should happen, why, and whether it’s actually working.

That’s a pretty significant shift.

For years, TA leaders like me have built recruiting organizations around capacity math:

• We have X reqs.
• A recruiter can handle Y reqs.
• Therefore, we need Z recruiters.

That’s contractor math.

And when the business sees recruiters primarily through that lens, we shouldn’t be surprised when someone eventually asks: If AI lets one recruiter handle twice as much work, why do we need as many recruiters?

That’s a fair question, and one your CFO and CHRO are probably discussing right now.

But it’s a very different question if recruiters are improving the quality of the decisions being made. For example:

• Is this the right hire for this org? How does this hire complement the existing team and help the leader of this team hit their goals for next year?
• Are we assessing the right things? Do we know what predicts on the job success? Are we just copy-pasting our 2020 job description?
• Are our interviewers actually able to distinguish great talent from good interviewees?
• Is this the kind of candidate we should fight hard for because there won't another like her available at this salary again in the short term?

But answering those questions requires knowing the business. Knowing the leader's team today and the capabilities she'll need 1-2 years from now. Diagnosing the root issues getting in the way of speed and quality. And having enough credibility and skills to fix the problems preventing your leaders from fielding the team needed to win.

So, the skills to do those things? Those are not what we typically associate with a contractor (or contractor mentality).

So I’m not particularly interested in winning the argument over what we should call recruiters next. I still like Talent Advisor. But if you love Talent Architect or Talent Strategist or something else, you be you.

I’m much more interested in the question underneath all of those labels:

What are we actually paying recruiters to do?

• Is the answer primarily to complete traditional recruiting activities? If so, I'm nervous for our profession.
• Is the answer to help the business make better talent decisions and build better ways to hire? If so, I think the future looks considerably more interesting.
• And longer term, if the answer is to build better capabilities and capacity of the teams I support, so they can hit their goals, then I'm very excited, as that's where we move up the value chain and earn our $100k+ salaries.

So, to me, the goal isn’t to come up with a more impressive word for recruiter. Instead, it's to make sure the work we do and the ROI of that work deserves something much more than a contractor vibe.

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