means To recruit is to enlist or sign someone up for a job, army, cause, or team; a recruit is the freshly enlisted person.

from From French recrue, 'a fresh growth' — literally a new sprout of soldiers reinforcing the ranks. That recrue traces back to Latin recrescere, 'to grow again' (re-, 'again,' plus crescere, 'to grow,' the same root that gives us 'crescent' and 'increase'). So the original recruit was vegetation: the army was a body that lost limbs in battle and grew new ones, and you were the spring growth filling the gap.