People think being a recruiter is all about talking. About smiling on calls, flipping through resumes, tossing out buzzwords like “culture fit” and “synergy.” But the hardest part of recruiting? It’s not what people see on those cringe LinkedIn posts. It’s what happens in the quiet spaces between all that talking.
It’s the waiting.
Waiting for the candidate to show up for their final-round interview. Waiting for the hiring manager to give you feedback that should’ve come three days ago. Waiting for the government to answer that one email, either approving or rejecting your candidate. Waiting for an answer you already suspect is a no, but have to pretend might still be a yes. In those moments, you learn how to live in limbo. And it’s exhausting.
Then there’s the heartbreak.
You get attached. You’re not supposed to, but you do. You root for people—candidates you’ve never met in person but whose stories you know like your own. You coach them through doubts, help them dust off old failures, rehearse answers to the same behavioral questions over and over until confidence finally shows up. And then, sometimes, they don’t get the job. Or worse: they do, and then they vanish. Ghosted. No response. Nothing but a calendar event that once meant “first day” now silently haunting your inbox.
You play therapist, cheerleader, negotiator, and translator. You take hiring managers’ vague wishlists (“someone who takes initiative but doesn’t ask too many questions” or “someone who can do this classified work that you will never know about”) and somehow turn them into human beings. You find resumes that read like laundry lists, but when you talk to the person? They’re electric. Now you just have to make your program manager and the customer see that too.
You deal with rejection. Not just your candidates’—yours. The perfect match gets passed over for the safe bet. A hiring freeze cancels the role right as you were closing. You have the perfect pipeline for a contract that will never be awarded to you. Your success, your wins, are tied to decisions you don’t control.
But here’s the thing: if you’re still doing it, despite all that?
It means you love people. Not just the easy parts—like great conversations or a signed offer. You love the challenge of decoding what someone really wants in their career, even when they don’t know it yet. You love the puzzle. The chase. The spark when a resume turns into a real story, and that story finds the right next chapter.
Recruiting is hard. It’s human. It’s messy and maddening and beautiful in its own weird way.
And that is the hardest part of all.
You have to continue to care despite the merri-go-round of heartache.
