The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers is like a bad marriage where neither person can leave. You need each other, you resent each other, and you're both convinced the other person is making your life unnecessarily difficult.

Spoiler alert: you're both right.

What Hiring Managers Think Recruiters Do All Day

What they imagine: You're sitting around ignoring their urgent hiring needs while occasionally sending them one mediocre resume per week out of spite.

What we actually do: Screen 200 applicants, 190 of whom are completely unqualified because the hiring manager's job description asked for "10 years of experience with a technology that's existed for 3 years." Spend hours sourcing passive candidates who ghost us. Beg the same hiring manager to please, please respond to candidates so they don't ghost US.

But sure, we're the lazy ones.

What Recruiters Think Hiring Managers Do All Day

What we imagine: Reject perfectly good candidates for absurd reasons while simultaneously complaining that they "can't find anyone." Change requirements mid-search. Take three weeks to respond to candidates, then get mad when the candidate accepts another offer.

What they actually do: Have actual jobs beyond hiring that take up most of their time. Try to squeeze interviews into calendars that are already booked solid. Get frustrated when recruiters don't magically understand their team dynamics and unspoken requirements.

Okay, so we're both slightly wrong about each other. But only slightly.

The Classic Fights

Fight #1: "These candidates aren't qualified!"

Hiring Manager: "None of these candidates have the exact experience I need!"

Recruiter: "Your requirements are literally impossible. Nobody exists with this exact combination of skills."

HM: "Well keep looking."

Recruiter: screams internally

The reality: sometimes hiring managers have unrealistic expectations. Sometimes recruiters don't fully understand the role requirements. Usually, it's both.

Fight #2: "Why is this taking so long?"

HM: "I posted this req three weeks ago, where are the candidates?"

Recruiter: "You took two weeks to approve the job description, then another week to respond to my first batch of candidates. It's been four days of actual searching."

HM: "That's not my problem."

Recruiter: eye twitches

The reality: everyone's calendar is insane and nobody has time for anything. But we all blame each other instead of acknowledging that modern work culture is unsustainable.

Fight #3: "Why did they decline our offer?"

HM: "You said this candidate was excited about the role!"

Recruiter: "They were! Until you spent three weeks deliberating on the offer while they got two other offers that were 20% higher!"

HM: "Well we can't compete with those companies."

Recruiter: "Then we can't hire people with that experience level!"

HM: "Not my budget."

Recruiter: considers career change to literally anything else

The reality: everyone wants champagne hiring on a beer budget. Surprise—it doesn't work.

The Actual Problems

Look, the hiring manager/recruiter relationship is dysfunctional because the system is dysfunctional. Here's why:

Misaligned incentives. Recruiters are judged on time-to-fill and volume. Hiring managers are judged on quality of hire and team performance. These goals naturally conflict.

Different priorities. Recruiters are juggling 15 open roles. Hiring managers care about exactly one role—their open position. Neither is wrong, but the mismatch creates frustration.

Communication breakdowns. Hiring managers don't always articulate what they actually need. Recruiters don't always ask the right questions to uncover unspoken requirements. Everyone assumes the other person understands, and nobody does.

Insufficient time. Neither party has enough time to do this well. Recruiters are overloaded. Hiring managers have hiring as a side responsibility on top of their actual job. Everyone's rushing, and quality suffers.

How to Fix It (LOL JK, We Won't)

The solution is painfully obvious: better communication, realistic timelines, aligned expectations, and adequate resources for both parties.

Regular intake meetings to clarify requirements. Realistic job descriptions that match actual budgets. Prompt feedback and communication from hiring managers. Recruiters who develop deep understanding of team needs beyond just the job description.

Will any of this happen? Of course not. We'll keep operating in crisis mode, blaming each other when things go wrong, and wondering why hiring is so difficult.

The Truth

Here's what nobody wants to admit: most of the time, both the recruiter and hiring manager are trying their best in a broken system with insufficient time, resources, and information.

But it's way easier to blame each other than to acknowledge that modern hiring is fundamentally flawed and fixing it would require systemic changes that nobody wants to make.

So instead we'll keep this dysfunctional dance going, united only in our shared misery and our mutual certainty that the other person is making everything harder than it needs to be.

It's not a love story. It's not even a like story. It's a "we're stuck together and making the best of it" story.

Romantic, right?