In this and our other articles on Recruiting, we’re quite critical of recruiting as a practice. However, I want to make it clear: recruiters as people are not the problem. Like anyone else, they’re doing a job that lets them care for themselves and their loved ones. The overwhelming majority of them are kind, decent human beings. Sure, some of them can be rude or dismissive, and that makes an already difficult situation harder, but this is rarely out of a desire to be cruel. The root problem, is the process, rather than the individuals in the role.
Internal recruiting has some clear advantages over external recruiting, especially since the recruiters are explicitly teammates of the rest of the hiring team, and so some of the misaligned best interests are addressed.
Make no mistake, however, there are still many problems with how it’s done at companies. Together, all of of these lead me to say that it is still quite terrible, a fact that few people who have ever gone through a job process would debate.
As I said, this is not as bad as with external recruiters, but it’s still pretty bad
As with any job at a sufficiently large company, recruiters are judged by a set of metrics. Depending on the place, these may be applied in a rational manner or not, but regardless, they are there.
Generally, the metrics are some combo of these:
None of these are fundamentally irrational. A recruiter doing good work will generally have a lower time to hire than one who isn’t. Feeding good candidates into the process is a good thing. Finally, helping to make sure we consider a diverse range of candidates is important not just to address long standing social injustices, but also for constructing high-functioning teams. All of this seems like good things to look at.
But… you can meet two of these without positively impacting hiring at all.
It is the easiest thing in the world to feed more candidates into the hiring process, especially if you’re willing to get sloppy with the parameters. You want someone who’s a java expert? Easy, let’s feed anyone with the word "Java" on their resume into the process. Similar to external recruiters, internal recruiters face this pressure, which makes them less selective.
To make it worse, internal recruiters are often expected to somehow undo generations of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia etc. by ensuring a company hires a diverse set of candidates. Everyone else will act as if the key to hiring diversity is just telling the internal recruiters to look for more people from an underrepresented group. As if the recruiter had some sort of filter turned on that was just looking for group X.
I have seen some excellent recruiters and sourcers rise to this challenge. They work to identify places where the hiring process might eliminate strong underrepresented candidates and look for pipelines of candidates who might not go through the traditional application process. After all that work, they watch the hiring manager reject a candidate because their profile doesn’t match the narrow criteria. This is a huge, complex and nuanced issue that I can’t do any sort of justice to here. I can only mention that this is yet another thing that internal recruiters are expected to magically sort out.