
Is it the thrill of the chase?
Lots of votes on this one; if you start to read a resume and you start to get an adrenaline rush so strong that you hit yourself in mouth with the phone because you are in such a hurry to call that candidate, you know about the thrill of the chase.
Is it the thrill of the kill?
This one may win the election; there is nothing higher than a recruiter who just closed a big placement and nothing but a snake’s belly is lower than a recruiter who just lost a big one.
Is it that we fall into one of the psychiatric ICD 9 codes?
You don’t understand that? Google it and spend half a day; you WILL find your disorder. All great recruiters are a little crazy — nobody knows which came first, the disorder or a few years in the profession.
Is it that our jobs are different every day so we don’t do well as routine, 8-to-5 pencil-pushers?
If you are a recruiter and you work 8-5, you ain’t great. Don’t waste your time reading the rest of this, go get some certification and get a job taking teller applications at a small bank.


…is this just another big dust devil that will make a mess, disrupt things, then blow on down the road? Every time one of those big ole dust devils shows up on the horizon, people get all twisted up and excited, thinking this is the big one! The tornado of technology that is going to blow us all away, change the whole landscape, or maybe even wipe out a whole industry. The sky gets dark, everybody is sure recruiting as a life form is about to go the way of the dinosaur, but sure enough when it gets up close and personal it’s not as big a wind of change as they feared. It’s just a change that we can talk about when it blows on by.
Thirty six years ago, I was an accountant. Happily or unhappily, as the case may be, putting lots of numbers into lots of big black books. Yes, they were big black books. Edison had invented the light bulb but Microsoft was some kind of fabric that kept small children and big dogs from making a mess on pillows . Being not too long out of a divorce I was focused on talking on the phone to discover what was going on with the rest of the world of newly divorced people — planning where and what time the “young and the restless” were going to solve the problems of the world that night. In a fit of pique, my boss walked by my office and uttered the now infamous words, “Why don’t you go find a job where you can do what you do best…talk on the phone.”














