If you’ve worked with a recruiter – either as an employer looking to find the right talent or as a job seeker looking for the right opportunity – you may have wondered what it is, exactly, that the recruiter does. Perhaps you have even second-guessed their process.

We think this Recruiter.com article, Why Recruiting Looks Easy, does a nice job of summing up the recruiting process. We agree with the author that, while recruiting may look easy – “few professions look so simple. It’s really hard to pass along a piece of paper, right? You can almost hear hiring managers thinking to themselves, “Yeah, I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging all those resumes from a folder into an email. Real hard work.” Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate.” – there’s certainly more to the recruiting process than meets the eye.

The article mentions the behind-scenes recruiting work like identifying, spotting, finding and assessing talent; understanding the job and culture; working a database and connections; possessing insight into the department’s or hiring manager’s psychology; and the persistent calling and online searching to bring people together.

PSG’s Frank Gentile  agrees with the author’s conclusion that “anyone or any recruiter can luck out and make a placement or two. But the background required for long-term recruiting success is much different. It involves the deep study of companies, products, markets, assessment, and professions coupled with a kind of brute force stamina to doggedly pursue the talents of other people.” Frank has worked in the recruiting field for more than 20 years. As someone who hires and trains recruiters, Frank says that the best recruiters share several traits, including the ability to maintain the stamina and tenacity to focus on long-term goals and a strong sense for evaluating intangibles such as culture fit and matching candidates’ career aspirations with employers’ business objectives.