You’re Overlooking the Best Recruiters – Here’s Why (Why top recruiters too often get overlooked and mediocre ones flourish)
Some of the best recruiters I know are unemployed right now. Some of the worst or least capable are fully employed and getting promoted. What gives?
Yes, there are plenty of ineffective corporate recruiters who are deservedly unemployed but the surprising number of highly competent, often older recruiters highlights a broken system.
In any merit-driven profession, this would be unthinkable. In corporate talent acquisition, its simply business as usual. The root cause is hiding in plain sight: HR tends to elevate optics, loyalty, and alignment over true capability and performance. And by the way, Recruiting KPIs truly suck and don’t say a whole hell of a lot. Stupid stuff like time to fill, cost per hire and quality of hire are easily gamed and manipulated unlike truly metric driven professions like sales and manufacturing.
Research from McKinsey and others show that high performers in professional service roles can multiply the impact of their average peers, sometimes as much as 400-800% more. And yet, in talent acquisition, merit often takes a back seat to likability and internal dynamics. It’s the equivalent of fielding a junior varsity athlete instead of a seasoned professional while expecting the same game-changing results. In recruiting, the difference between a truly skilled operator and a placeholder isn’t just visible, it’s costly.
Yet, many organizations continue to reward the wrong attributes, undermining the potential for the best results.To be clear, we’re talking about corporate, not agency recruiters. Agency recruiting is Darwinian: You produce or you perish.
Corporate recruiting
It’s a political economy where likability, compliance, and internal alliances often outweigh actual recruiting competence, business understanding, and experience.
In this system, many “good enough” recruiters with polished internal optics and a talent for managing can coast for years. Meanwhile, true operators who deliver real outcomes are the first to get pushed out for questioning broken processes or refusing to play resident doormat.
Mediocrity especially thrives in large organizations because most simply don’t measure what matters. A weak recruiter can blend in, but a great one inherits dysfunction and gets blamed for it. Here’s why the system is failing the very function it depends on.
Recruiting has long rewarded charisma over capability and the people who advance fastest are often the ones who tell the cleanest stories, not the ones who deliver the hardest results. A polished narrative can hide shallow skill, while the quiet operators, or the ones who grind through tough searches, are routinely underestimated or overlooked.
Inside many companies, likability still outweighs performance. Internal alliances and low-friction “team fit” employees win out, while the heads-down recruiters who actually move the needle often struggle for recognition. It doesn’t help that the KPIs used to judge them are blunt instruments that reveal almost nothing about true capability. Quality of hire, funnel efficiency, and real cost-per-hire rarely make it into the conversation, except as decorative talking points during interviews.
Part of the problem is that HR often hires for workplace harmony, while the business is in need of outcomes. Recruiters are evaluated through a compliance-and-polish lens instead of through knowledge, speed, and milestone impact.
Context only complicates things further. One recruiter may thrive at a beloved brand with generous compensation and agency support, while another fights uphill battles under toxic leadership or inside a struggling company. Yet both are judged by the same simplistic standard. And when leadership dysfunction leads to high turnover or failed searches, it’s almost always pinned on Talent Acquisition (TA) instead of the decision-makers who constantly shift priorities or refuse to make hard calls. You can’t have a strong recruiting function without strong leadership.
Today’s tools add another layer of distortion. LinkedIn, AI sourcing platforms, and automated workflows can make mediocre recruiters look far more capable than they are. No algorithm can manufacture judgment or genuine talent intuition. Yet these tools separate elite operators from button-pushers.
Many organizations treat TA as a convenient landing spot for culture mascots, corporate misfits, or pet projects of executives looking to place someone anywhere. No bar to clear, no interview, no standards… just a title. Every time this happens, the craft gets weaker and expectations plummet.
At the core, recruiting has no standardized competency bar. Accountants have the CPA. Lawyers have the Bar. Even marketers have a defined skill threshold. But anyone can call themselves a recruiter. With no exam, no apprenticeship, no code of conduct, organizations often can’t even articulate what “good” looks like. This makes it easy for underperformance to hide behind metrics and confident storytelling. And when someone carries the title but can’t source, vet, or close, the damage isn’t limited to one role gone wrong. It becomes systemic and the industry faces a pipeline of bad hires and a cultural message that competence is optional.
AI won’t fix this. It’ll make it worse.
Technology will only enable mediocre recruiters to hide behind dashboards and automated outreach. Companies will keep hiring for likability and cultural chemistry while overlooking true operators who quietly deliver.
This is how organizations end up with TA teams that look busy, but don’t move the business forward.
Additional Measures to Ensure You’re Hiring High-Performing Recruiters
Beyond structured interviews and assessments, several practical signals reliably sort high-performing recruiters from weak ones. Strong recruiters can produce references from business leaders like executives, hiring managers, and functional partners who depended on their judgment and saw the impact of their work firsthand.
Their written output reflects clarity and intellect with crisp outreach, structured candidate evaluations, thoughtful calibration notes, and clean search plans. They can point to “created” success and demonstrate curiosity and learning velocity.
When confronted with difficult candidates or hiring managers, strong recruiters stay composed and maintain momentum. In contrast, weak recruiters crumble in these areas. They provide few references from HR peers, messy or generic documentation, zero original contributions, no intellectual curiosity, and emotional instability when the job gets hard. These signals reveal almost everything you need to know about a recruiter’s real-world capability.
Conclusion
Recruiting isn’t broken because talent is scarce. Recruiting is broken because organizations keep hiring people who don’t actually know how to recruit. These are people who talk well, interview well, and blend neatly into the political fabric, but they lack the skill, judgment, and resilience to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Mediocrity survives because it’s easy, unmeasured, and rarely challenged. High-performing recruiters, by contrast, operate with precision. They think clearly, act decisively, influence effectively, and elevate every team they touch. The difference between the two is not subtle if you know where to look. And once you start using filters, you stop hiring seat-fillers and start hiring operators.
