Define Recruitment?

In the last couple of days, news regarding the exploits of a group calling themselves HACKmarriage has been widely reported on. HACKmarriage have taken it upon themselves to act as equality Robin Hood’s and take on the challenge of stealthily replacing the definition of marriage currently written in dictionaries, to their own amended version.

The news got me thinking and got me Googling. We blog on almost a daily basis about recruitment. We give tips on how to people search using Boolean logic, we select cool new social media tools to help you reach the perfect candidates, we advise you on how to talk to potential candidates depending on the medium your connecting through and we inform you about the latest technology developments that will help you recruit great staff. But I don’t think we’ve ever actually defined recruitment or what it is to be a recruiter.

How do others define it? Well, it was that question that lead to the Googling under which I found three striking definitions! The infamously harsh UrbanDictionary.com (although lacking a definition for ‘recruitment’) brutally defined a Recruitment Consultant as:

1) A high class pimp that charges out his/her whores (temps) by the quarter of an hour while getting their lions share.
2) Spineless, soul less canibalistic maggots that feed on the less fortunate of humans.
3) Evil by another name.

They then went on to define a Recruiter as:

A French word meaning bullshit artist.

Ouch!

The more refined and discerning BusinessDictionary.com defined Recruitment as:

The process of finding and hiring the best-qualified candidate (from within or outside of an organisation) for a job opening, in a timely and cost effective manner. The recruitment process includes analysing the requirements of a job, attracting employees to that job, screening and selecting applicants, hiring, and integrating the new employee to the organisation.

One made us out to be a bunch of self-obsessed monsters, with a thirst for the blood of job seekers, while the other defined us as skilled masters of a people centric craft. Urban Dictionary was just cruel with its definitions (probably written by a group of disgruntled job seekers) and although nice, Business Dictionary was a little vague as to what exactly is involved in the recruitment process (“attracting employees” and “screening and selecting applicants” hardly does justice to the process involved). So how would a recruiter describe recruiting?

These days there’s simply more to it than just finding and hiring the best quality candidates. Should that definition now include phrases like ‘social media expert’, ‘marketing guru’ and ‘public relations master’? After all, our job goes further than just searching for clients.

So my question to you is this: If you had the chance to honestly define Recruitment and indeed a Recruiter, how would you describe them? We’re dying to hear your thoughts, so give us your definitions in the comments below. The best definitions will get a blog post all of their own and together we’ll rewrite what it means to be in recruitment!