What Dan Fisher’s Quote Is Describing
Staffing-sales trainer Dan Fisher, quoted by Haley Marketing, described the industry’s default sales practice in blunt terms: “We’re still applying sales practices we were doing when I got into the industry in the mid-90s.” He went further on tenure specifically: “I’ve worked with salespeople in the industry for 10+ years, and some of them still sound like it’s their first cold call.”
Read carefully, that is not a comment on any individual recruiter’s talent. It is a description of what a system produces when it never asked anyone to build BD skill on purpose, decade after decade of the same untrained approach compounding rather than improving.
Why the Same Person Doing Both Jobs Produces This Result
The default staffing BD model is recruiters and account managers doing outbound themselves, in the gaps between candidate work, with no dedicated, trained BD function at all. That structure produces exactly the outcome Fisher describes: a person whose actual job is sourcing, screening, and placing candidates is also expected to cold-call and pitch hiring managers, without ever getting the deliberate sales training a dedicated BD hire would receive.
Nobody set out to build a bad sales motion. It is what happens when a firm never separates the two functions in the first place, and the resulting habits calcify because nothing forces them to change.
Sourcing and Selling Reward Different Instincts
Sourcing rewards patience, pattern-matching across resumes, and the judgment to know which candidate fits a role. Selling rewards persistence through rejection, comfort initiating a conversation with a stranger who did not ask for it, and the discipline to follow a structured process call after call. Those are not the same muscle, and there is no strong reason to assume a person hired and trained for one will naturally be excellent at the other.
A firm that never separates the roles is implicitly betting every recruiter it hires happens to also be a strong, disciplined salesperson, a bet with no real basis, since nothing in a typical recruiting hire’s background or training selects for that second skill.
What “Stuck in the Mid-90s” Sounds Like on a Real Call
What “still sounds like it’s their first cold call” looks like in practice is a call with no real structure: an opening that does not earn attention, a pitch that leads with the recruiter’s own agenda instead of the hiring manager’s actual problem, and no real plan for handling an objection beyond restating the pitch louder. That describes someone who was never taught to sell, not someone who lacks the ability.
A decade of doing it that way does not fix it either. Repetition without deliberate coaching just makes the same untrained pattern more automatic, which is the specific, uncomfortable point behind Fisher’s ten-year-veteran comment.
What Changes the Moment You Separate the Two Roles
Separating the two roles changes what gets optimized on each side. A recruiter freed from prospecting responsibility can spend that time on sourcing depth and candidate relationships, the work they were trained and likely hired for. A dedicated BD hire, or a done-for-you BD channel, can build and iterate a real sales process, get coached against it, and improve the way any trained salesperson in any other industry would.
The industry already has a name for this exact split: a full desk model has one recruiter running sourcing and business development together, while a split desk model divides the two functions between a dedicated sourcing recruiter and a separate BD or account-management role. Fisher’s critique is, in effect, a case for moving away from the full-desk default.
Why This Is a Structural Problem, Not a Talent Problem
None of this argues any individual recruiter is a weak salesperson personally, it argues the structure most firms run puts that skill on someone whose actual job, training, and incentives were never built around it. The fix is separating a role that was quietly asking one person to do two very different jobs at once, rather than hiring better recruiters.
A firm that has never made that separation is behind on structure, not behind on talent, and that is a solvable, deliberate decision, not a hiring problem.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Haley Marketing, “Is Cold Calling Still Effective for Staffing Agencies?” (Dan Fisher)
- RecruiterFlow, “A Complete Guide to Recruiter Commission Structure”