If Clients Took a Truth Serum, Here’s What They’d Tell Their Recruiter

Let’s play a game. Picture every client a recruiter has ever worked with getting a little truth serum slipped into their coffee right before the intake call. No politeness. No “we’re flexible on the requirements.” No job description that reads like a wish list for a unicorn who also does the dishes.

What do they say?

I’ll tell you what I think comes out, and I bet anybody who has been on the client side of a bad hire is already nodding. They say, I don’t need you to find me somebody who checks the boxes. I can find somebody who checks the boxes. I have LinkedIn too. What I need is somebody who has been looked at hard, and I don’t mean hard on the resume. I mean hard on whether this person is going to be good to be around at 4:45 on a Friday when something is on fire.

That’s what keeps them up at night. Skills you can usually see coming, and plenty of skills you can teach. You can’t teach somebody to be a good person. You can’t coach an asshole out of being an asshole in a six week onboarding. Clients know it, and with the serum kicking in they’d say it out loud: give me the person with a little less on the resume who everybody they ever worked with would run through a wall for, over the superstar who leaves a trail of bodies behind them.

And then comes the part that stings a little for my industry. They’d tell us they are tired of surface level. Tired of the candidate who got “vetted” in fifteen minutes. One call, a couple of nice answers, a friendly chat over Zoom, and boom, qualified. The recruiter has known this person for a quarter of an hour and is now putting their own name behind them. I mean, come on. You wouldn’t hire a babysitter that way, and this person is about to run your sales team.

And so I have to say the other thing, and I’m sorry if it lands wrong. The way everybody is talking about recruiting and AI right now, we are building tools that make this worse. Faster matching, faster outreach, faster screening, faster everything. Speed is the whole pitch. And look, I use AI, I like it, it’s a force multiplier. But a tool that helps you message a thousand people and score a thousand profiles is built to make the surface level thing easier to do at scale. It rewards the fifteen minute conversation. It never asks who vouches for this person. It never asks what they were like when a deal fell apart or a launch went sideways, or whether the people who worked for them would sign up to work for them again. Those answers live in people’s heads and in relationships, and no database holds them.

AI can send the message. It can’t build the relationship. And the relationship is where the real answer lives.

So the way I run things is pretty simple, and it’s slower sometimes. When I put somebody in front of a client, I want to have known that person, or known somebody who worked right next to them, and I make those calls myself, including the awkward ones where somebody tells me the thing that never shows up on a resume. Sometimes that means I go back to a client and say I don’t have the right person yet. Clients would rather hear that than get a rushed name with my stamp on it, and honestly I would rather say it.

At the end of the day, this is a trust business. A client hands you a seat on their team and basically says, I’m betting my culture and my next year on your judgment. Judgment comes from history. It comes from time spent with people and from phone calls that don’t have a script.

So here’s my ask for every recruiter reading this, me included. Pour the truth serum on yourself. Before you send a name to a client, ask whether you would stake your own reputation on this person. If the honest answer is “I talked to them for fifteen minutes,” you’re not done yet. Our industry got fast. It’s time to get good again.

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