What if instead of recruiting for roles, we recruited for contribution?

What if organizations weren’t machines needing parts, but living systems seeking nutrients? To recruit for a role is to fill a predefined slot—an act rooted in a mechanistic, industrial-age logic where efficiency and control dominate. The individual is a functionary, the job a fixed point, the relationship extractive and static. But to recruit for contribution is to invite transformation. It assumes that people are not interchangeable parts but unique sources of potential, insight, and disturbance. It sees the act of joining not as fitting in, but as co-creating—shaping the work, the culture, and the possibilities ahead. This shift asks: What does this person see that we don’t? What could emerge if we designed our systems around people’s capacities, not just around our org charts? What new futures could we grow if we stopped treating recruitment as filling gaps, and started treating it as cultivating the conditions for emergence?