What Do Recruiters Even Do?

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The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.

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This Week’s Breakdown

Nobody Knows What a Recruiter Does, Including the People Hiring Them

Brandon Jeffs said something on the podcast recently that stuck with me. He described getting handed work "out of necessity by underresourced HR teams", recruitment marketing, employer brand, full-cycle recruiting, RFPs, product implementations, all of it absorbed quietly, without a title change, without a pay bump, because someone had to do it and he was there.

He framed it as a gift. And looking back, maybe it was. But it also points to something the industry has never really dealt with honestly.

The recruiter job title is load-bearing in ways most organizations never acknowledge. It holds up employer brand, compensation benchmarking, ATS implementations, recruitment marketing, and oh, also the 40 open reqs. Nobody announces this is happening. The scope just expands. The title stays the same.

Brandon's optimistic about what comes next. He pointed to a CNBC piece showing that corporate recruiter was the number one job Gen Z was satisfied by, and that the throughline between recruiting and the other top choices was storytelling. His read is that Gen Z comes in wired for the attention economy, understands human relationships in new ways, and might actually reinvigorate the craft.

I'm not so sure though, as that data is from 2022. The exact moment when recruiting jobs were everywhere, paying well, and the door was as wide open as it had ever been. Gen Z said they wanted in right at the peak, and then as most of us know, the market closed on us quickly.

The entry-level roles that would bring them in are largely dried up now. The mid-level is congested with people who came in during that same COVID hiring boom and haven't moved. And the senior layer has been quietly walking out, going fractional, going independent, and getting laid off enough times that the math just stopped mathing.

So where does the next generation of recruiters actually come from? How do you fall in love with a craft when the on-ramp has been removed? Brandon's vision requires a functioning pipeline. A place where someone early in their career can learn the basics, absorb the fundamentals, and grow into the full scope of what the job has become. That pipeline is in rough shape right now.

The vagueness of the role is a real structural problem for the profession going forward. When a job title can mean anything, it becomes hard to hire for it deliberately, hard to build a career path inside it, and hard to make the case to the next generation that it's worth the trouble.

Brandon is absolutely right that empathy driven roles outlast the automation wave. But surviving AI and having a healthy talent pipeline are two different things. You can believe recruiting matters and still be worried about who's going to be doing it in ten years….or maybe for some of you reading that’s just not your problem and you’re fine watching companies lie in the beds they made these last few years.

Recruited in the Wild

Seen on LinkedIn, overheard in Slack, or posted without shame.

I ran a poll a few days back. The setup was simple: if your life depended on 500 resumes being ranked accurately and speed mattered, would you trust a recruiter or AI to do it?

31% said recruiter.

32% said AI.

36% said neither.

Neither won.

I've been thinking about that result ever since. Because the conversation everyone is having right now is recruiter vs. AI. That's the debate on LinkedIn, that's the debate in TA circles, that's the subtext of about half the vendor pitches landing in your inbox. And the people who actually work in and around hiring looked at that question and the plurality of them said they don't trust either option to get it right.

We've built an entire hiring infrastructure around the idea that you can take a document summarizing someone's career, run it through a filter, be it human or automated, and reliably surface the right people. And a lot of people, when asked directly don't actually believe that's true. We've just kept running the process anyway because nobody has offered a convincing alternative and the reqs still need to get filled.

The debate about whether AI is ruining hiring assumes humans had the accuracy problem solved before AI showed up. The poll results suggest people know we didn't.

Next issue I want to really dig into the idea of is the resume dying, and what does that mean. Consider this your preview.

Accrued Time

A weekly check-in on what I’ve got going on behind the scenes, events, projects, and life outside the req pile.

Consistency is hard. I know, groundbreaking stuff. I've been bad at getting this out on a regular cadence and I'm working on it. If you're still here, I appreciate it more than the open rate will ever show.

A couple of things on the radar: Unleash and Transform are coming up and I won't be at either. If you're going, I'm a little jealous and have some FOMO, but have decided to take a break from them this year. Go find my friends and the Purple Acorn team though!

What I am doing is heading to SXSW for the first time. No HR track, no TA content, no recruiter meetups. That's kind of the point. I want to get out of the bubble for a bit and just listen to how people outside our world are talking about innovation, careers, and where work is actually going. Sometimes the most useful perspective is the one that has no idea about the stupid LinkedIn debates we are constantly in.

If you're going to be in Austin, let me know. Would love to connect with anyone making the trip.

And don’t forget to keep checking out issues of the podcast

Cope of the Week

Because it’s either this or scream into a pillow.

Brandon said something on the podcast that I constantly hear from the best super connecter recruiters like he is. His coping strategy, for work and for life, is just picking up the phone. Struggling with a req? Call a candidate. Struggling personally? Call a friend. Want more friendship in your life? Be a friend to other people first.

He calls me all the time and I never want to answer because I hate unsolicited phone calls like the millenial I am. I almost always answer anyway, because I always feel better after we chat.

I'm not good at this. I think about calling people all the time and then I send a text instead, or I tell myself I'll do it later, or I just don't. Brandon is out here cold calling for sport.

As much as that is my nightmare, he's right. The phone call version of any relationship is better than the text version. The in person version is better than the phone call version. We work in an industry built on human connection and a lot of us are running on fumes socially, talking to the same four people and wondering why we feel isolated.

Call someone this week. Not to network. Not to ask for anything. Just because you haven't talked to them in a while and it would probably be good for both of you.

 Forward this to someone in TA who's barely holding it together.