The Situation: What Modern Recruiting Actually Looks Like
Few topics occupy HR departments and leadership teams with such regularity as the shortage of skilled workers. The diagnosis is usually the same: the market is thin, competition is fierce, suitable candidates are nowhere to be found. What rarely gets asked is whether the problem starts outside at all.
The infrastructure for hiring has never been more elaborate. Job adverts go up in minutes, distributed automatically across dozens of platforms. Incoming applications are filtered by software before a human sees them. Applicant tracking systems handle the first pass; algorithms scan for keywords, rank, and discard. It looks like efficiency. In certain respects it is. And yet roles sit unfilled for months. Hundreds of applications yield no suitable candidate. Every second hire ends in quiet disappointment, on one side or both.
When a system reliably fails to produce good outcomes, it is worth examining the system itself. Not just the results it generates.