Most managers treat recruiting like a service they're entitled to.

They approve a headcount, hand the requisition to HR, and return their attention to everything else on their plate. A few weeks pass. They check in. The pipeline is thin. The candidates aren't quite right. The role stays open longer than anyone planned.

And somewhere in that process, the manager quietly decides that recruiting is hard — without ever fully accepting that they're the reason it isn't working.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: if you cannot carve out meaningful time each week to actively recruit for an open role, you don't need a new employee badly enough. Either the pain of the vacancy isn't real, or something else has convinced you this can be delegated away. Either way, the result is the same — a slow process, a weak candidate pool, and a higher likelihood of a hire you'll regret.

Finding and hiring the right person is your number one priority until that seat is filled. Not one of your priorities. The top one.

💡The Vault Insight: The quality of your team is the primary lever you have over everything you're accountable for. Recruiting is how you pull it.

There's a second truth that separates good hiring managers from great ones — and it's even more uncomfortable than the first.

By the time you have an open role and an approved headcount, you're already behind.

The best time to recruit for a role is before you need to fill it. Whether you lead a team of five or a function of fifty, you should be continuously networking with people in your industry. Meeting them. Understanding their backgrounds. Having genuine conversations about their careers. And when the fit feels right, planting a seed about the possibility of working together someday.

This isn't about stringing people along. It's about building real relationships before there's urgency on either side — which is exactly when the best conversations happen. When you're not in a rush, you can be selective. You can build the kind of rapport that makes a future recruiting conversation feel natural rather than transactional. And when a role opens — planned or sudden — you already have a shortlist of people who know you, respect what you're building, and are at least somewhat pre-sold on the idea of working with you.

That changes everything about the speed and quality of the hire.

I learned this the hard way early in my career. I took over a team that was severely understaffed. Everyone around me said we'd be lucky to make a handful of hires given the market and the competition for talent. Nobody thought we could build the team to the size we actually needed.

I decided to treat recruiting as my primary job until it was done. I posted the roles. I reached out personally on LinkedIn — dozens of messages a week, crafted individually. I made the process fast and candidate-friendly. I removed every unnecessary step that would cause someone to drop out or lose interest.

We hired 12 people onto that team.

In a market where people told me I'd be fortunate to get one or two.

The difference wasn't luck. It wasn't a better budget or a stronger brand. It was the simple decision to treat recruiting as real work worth doing with real energy and real time — rather than a background task to be managed between other priorities.

Your team is the most important thing you will ever build as a manager. It deserves your best effort — not what's left over after everything else gets done.

—Sean McGinnis, 2X President, 2X CMO, COO & EOS integrator