Why are you so bad at recruiting?

A much-admired client at a life insurance company (we'll leave them both nameless) told me recently that ‘the industry' is really bad at recruiting.

Because he's a good friend, we were able to have a frank conversation about why. "It's because you don't try" I said.

"What do you think all these people we have in sales are doing?" he retorted.

I said business development managers only very, very, rarely do any recruitment to the industry. We argued a bit, and then we looked for evidence of recruitment activity, and this is what we found: