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Although people are recruited to join corporations or sports teams, the main meaning of recruit seems to have a military connotation to it.

This actually lines up well with the first emergence of the word into English about 50 years after Shakespeare.

At first recruits were only military and the main reason the military needed recruits is actually tied up in the word’s etymology.

One unfortunate aspect of being a soldier during a time of war is that a certain number of soldiers are killed.  In order to keep on having a military force the government needs to recruit new forces—and here I use the word recruit in its original French sense: “re-grow.”  To recruit is to re-grow the army.

The American Heritage Dictionary points back to an Indo-European root ker meaning “to grow.”  This is the same root at the heart of the word create.  This ker root found its way into the Latin crescere and from what I can see, somewhere back as Latin was morphing into French this “grow” word was used to build “re-grow.”

In language as in anything else there is fashion and the first time this recruit word showed up in French it seems to have been in what is now Belgium, but then to have fallen out of fashion and been declared obsolete as a noun.

But other people seemed to like it and it was picked up in some Germanic languages. Then the word remerged in French writings in what is now Holland.

Where there is fashion we often find fashion police and this is certainly the case with the French language.

Around the time of Shakespeare France was just beginning to gear up to put together it’s language police force, the Académie Française.

By the end of the century these intellectuals were busying themselves with such important matters as disapproving of the re-emergence of the word, now as a verb—recruiter—into the French language.

This was too late to save us English speakers who had greedily recruited both the noun and the verb from French while the going was good.