In a typically managed, closed-allocation company, your job is to suck up to your boss-- not to do what's best for the company. Rachel's ex-company is one where your career rises and sets on "calibration scores" set unilaterally by the manager. (You need good peer reviews to get a promotion, but transfers and firing are based on the scores, and you need good projects to get promoted.) If your manager doesn't think interviewing's important (and most don't) then it hurts your career to spend time on it.
It's also sub-optimal, from a career perspective, to work on long-term projects. Those are the first projects to be cut, and in the modern asshole corporation, a project being cut usually means your job is over (because no one will take a transfer from a failed project, especially because managers tend to blame project failures on the people below them and have months of lead time before shit goes down).
Recruiting is the ultimate in long-term projects. It's extremely important for the company, but very hard for someone who's good at it to get personal credit. Most of your time is wasted on horrible candidates, and the good ones have a lot of great options, so it takes a long time to get a successful hire: 6 months to find the first, plus 12+ months for that person to be successful at the organization (at which point, it reflects on him, not on you for hiring).
Companies rely on good citizens like Rachel who keep the place going, but rarely reward them.
If you like to travel and you're a good interviewer, you might get some free flights and a week of additional vacation as you help with foreign interviews.
This is different, because if a company is buying in to you enough to send you to foreign countries, you probably don't have to worry about getting "perfed" by your manager.
However, most of the traditional closed-allocation companies view (despite their claims to the contrary) non-executive recruiting as undignified grunt work (you're associating with people, most of whom the company won't hire) and don't reward it. It just leaves you with one less hour per day to serve your boss's political needs.
It's also sub-optimal, from a career perspective, to work on long-term projects. Those are the first projects to be cut, and in the modern asshole corporation, a project being cut usually means your job is over (because no one will take a transfer from a failed project, especially because managers tend to blame project failures on the people below them and have months of lead time before shit goes down).
Recruiting is the ultimate in long-term projects. It's extremely important for the company, but very hard for someone who's good at it to get personal credit. Most of your time is wasted on horrible candidates, and the good ones have a lot of great options, so it takes a long time to get a successful hire: 6 months to find the first, plus 12+ months for that person to be successful at the organization (at which point, it reflects on him, not on you for hiring).
Companies rely on good citizens like Rachel who keep the place going, but rarely reward them.