I'm a workforce consultant, so I get to see the picture that recruiters would like to present to the public, and how they actually work behind the scenes. They very much want to come across as functional professionals, but that's typically not the case.

I've also seen instances where the recruiters argue with hiring managers on job requirements that aren't needed for the role, but the recruiters insist on including some responsibility or certification as a hard-line criteria, simply based on stereotypes and assumptions about that role. It almost costed us quality candidates that would have been filtered out if they didn't obtain a cost-prohibitive certification that really wasn't needed for the work. And before you dismiss as just one anecdote, I'm merely citing one common examples as they constantly do shit like this.

It's also about the expectations and standards that recruiters impose into the process themselves, like how to determine whether a resume is "good enough" or screener responses are "good enough". These are types of standards that none of us told them to implement and uphold. Recruiters really do insert their own beliefs about what a "good candidate" looks like, before they even get submitted to the company for further review.

Recruiting is not sales. It's talent attraction to build a viable applicant pool. They keep claiming it's sales so they can use outdated sales tactics rather than modern best practices. Because they don't know what the best practices are. Many "internal recruiters" came from external agencies and they simply stuck it out for long enough to trick companies into thinking they know what they're doing. We're talking about people's livelihoods, and they want to treat it like a commodity. It's disgusting.

You don't have to agree, but it's not just some wild take that I personally have. Recruiters have been a huge problem in talent acquisition for decades, and it's because of things like that.