As Usual

I was paging through some LinkedIn posts that I'd set aside for later, and came across one from a recruiter that read as follows:

So after posting a recruiter role, I received over 200 applicants in under 24 hours.

I'm having a thought, what if I gave all these recruiters access to source and find us candidates?

If a candidate they source gets a job they get paid full commission, that simple.

Why is this powerful:

1. It gives all laid off recruiters the ability to make money
2. It gives us more bandwidth
3. We can then hire the best recruiters, it's like a trial run

What do you all think??

I was not surprised to find that it wasn't a popular idea. There were comments that people would find ways to game the system almost immediately, but most of the objections were to asking people to work for free, in the hope of gaining a commission, but with no guarantees that they'd get anything for their time.

And it strikes me as being similar to any number of other Bad Ideas that come out of corporate America; it's envisioned as a win-win, but pretty much no-one outside of the organization itself sees it that way.

I think that this is more indicative of how businesses think than the deliberate evil that they're often accused of; their first priority is themselves, and so that's where the benefits are aimed. Sure, the recruiter who posted this saw it as an opportunity for recruiters who had lost their jobs, but any benefits to them were contingent; the company's benefits were more locked in.

The fact that this was put out there for people to critique points to that disconnect. People don't normally volunteer for a beating, and I don't think that this person intended to, either. They simply lacked the ability to see this from the point of the view of the audience they were presenting it to. And I would venture that this is because being able to take that outside perspective isn't highly valued in the organization that this person works for, or the business community at large. Or maybe it's a targeted myopia, that prevents people from seeing the objections to the way they do things. After all, everyone who had a comment likely worked for a business, or had done so in the past.