Getting this wrong is expensive. A weak partner burns through weeks of a hiring manager’s time and still leaves the role open.

1. Transparency

Transparency can make or break a recruiting partnership. It has to run in both directions from the start. Otherwise trust never really forms. A hiring team owes the recruiter honest feedback on every candidate. That includes the good and the bad, not just the candidates it likes. Specific feedback, like exactly which qualification was missing or which answer fell flat in an interview, helps a recruiter calibrate the rest of the search. Vague feedback like “not quite right” leaves a recruiter guessing. It slows the whole search down.

In return, a strong recruiting partner keeps the client updated throughout the search. That includes the setbacks, not only the wins. A partner who goes quiet for two weeks between updates is not being transparent. It does not matter how the search eventually turns out. A simple weekly update, even a short one, does more for trust than an occasional long email. Recruiting Agency Partnership: What Companies Actually Need to Know digs into what that two-way honesty looks like once a search gets underway.

2. Accountability

Not every business holds itself accountable once a contract is signed. Not every recruiting firm does either. A real partnership includes a stake in the other side’s success. It is not just a transaction that ends at placement.

When a company brings in a recruiting partner, that partner should stay invested in a new hire’s success. That investment should continue well after the placement closes, through the new hire’s retention. It might mean checking in at the 30, 60, and 90 day marks. It might mean standing behind a replacement guarantee if a hire does not work out. Neither of those things costs the recruiter much. Skipping them is usually a sign the relationship was never really a partnership to begin with. A written service agreement that spells out what happens if a placement does not work out is a good sign a firm takes this seriously. The Difference Between Recruiting Support and Ownership looks at exactly where that level of investment should sit.

3. Guidance

Outsourcing a process as important as hiring can feel risky, especially the first time. A strong recruiting partner does more than source candidates and forward resumes. It actively guides a company through the parts of hiring that are hardest to get right.

That might mean pointing out that an interview process has grown to six rounds when three would do. It might mean rewriting a job description that is quietly filtering out strong candidates. A partner who only ever says yes to whatever a client already planned is not adding much guidance. Good guidance sometimes means pushing back, respectfully, on a client’s own assumptions. It also means being upfront when a role’s budget or timeline is not realistic for the market, rather than quietly running a search that was unlikely to succeed. recruitAbility’s own reflections on the value of a recruiter cover what that kind of guidance looks like in practice.

4. Industry Experience

Recruiting keeps changing, and the best partners have been through more than one cycle of it. A firm that has worked a specific industry for years brings pattern recognition. A newer firm simply has not had time to build that yet.

Experienced partners also tend to have a warmer bench of passive candidates already in their network for a given specialty, which shortens a search considerably. That experience shows up in small but real ways. It might mean knowing which compensation range actually clears for a given role this year. It might mean recognizing a candidate profile that looks strong on paper but tends to underperform in that particular industry. Those judgment calls come from years of watching similar hires play out, not from a resume alone. The Same but Different by Degree: Why the Right Recruiting Solutions Matter looks at how that depth of experience should shape which solution a company picks.

5. Positive Candidate and Client Experiences

Every part of a search should reflect well on both the client and the candidates who go through it. A candidate who has a poor experience still walks away with an opinion of the client company. That is true even if the candidate never gets the job, and that opinion gets shared.

One of the clearest ways to check this before signing on with a recruiting partner is to ask for references. Ask for references from past clients. Ask for references from candidates who were placed too, not just the ones a firm chooses to showcase. A partner confident in its own track record makes those references easy to find. This matters beyond any single search too. A poor candidate experience with a recruiting partner reflects on the hiring company’s own employer brand, whether or not that candidate ever gets an offer. Why a Recruiting Partner Makes Everything Easier covers the downstream effect these five traits have once a partnership is actually running.

None of these five traits are hard to check for before signing an agreement. A short conversation with a firm’s current clients usually surfaces most of them within a few minutes. A recruiting partner that struggles to answer basic questions about its own accountability or its own references is telling a company something useful, even if the answer is not what it wants to hear.

What Questions Should You Ask Before Signing With a Recruiting Partner?

The clearest way to check for these five traits is to ask a recruiting partner directly, before signing anything. A short conversation with a firm’s current clients usually surfaces most of them within a few minutes.

A few direct questions tend to work best. Ask how the firm handles a placement that does not work out, and whether that answer includes anything in writing. Two or three client references from the last year matter more than one favorite client from years ago. It also helps to ask how often updates go out during an active search, and what those updates actually include. A recruiting partner that struggles to answer basic questions about its own accountability or its own references is telling a company something useful, even if the answer is not what it wants to hear.

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• Is It Worth Using a Recruitment Agency? The True ROI for Employers
• What Companies Get Wrong About Recruiting Agencies
• The 80/20 Rule of Recruiting: When to Use Outside Help

The post What Makes A Great Recruiting Partner? appeared first on recruitAbility.

When Does a Recruiting Firm’s Cost Actually Pay Off?

Hiring an entry-level customer service representative rarely needs a recruiter. The performance gap between an average hire and a strong one in that kind of role is real, but it will not move the bottom line enough to justify the fee.

That math changes for roles with real revenue or income impact, and it changes further in specialty or competitive fields where the wrong hire is expensive to correct. A recruiter’s subject-matter expertise in a specific field pays for itself on exactly those searches. A senior hire who underperforms by even a modest margin in a revenue-driving role can cost a company far more than the search fee, which is why the honest answer to whether a recruiting firm is worth using is that it depends on what the role is actually worth to the business. Is It Worth Using a Recruitment Agency? The True ROI for Employers works through that math in more detail.

Why Vague Job Descriptions Attract the Wrong Candidates

A weak job description produces weak results, no matter how many places it gets posted. When a company writes a vague description or leaves out the technical terms candidates actually search for, it filters in the wrong applicants and filters out the right ones without anyone noticing.

The gap often comes down to specifics. A description that lists only “strong Excel skills” attracts a different pool than one that names the exact systems, certifications, or years of experience the role actually requires, and only one of those two versions filters correctly. Recruiting firms see this pattern across dozens of similar searches rather than one, which is what lets a recruiter recognize which version of a job description actually produces strong candidates. It is one of several recruiting agency misconceptions worth clearing up, since a company can fix its own postings once it understands why they underperform.

Does a Bigger Candidate Pool Mean Better Hires?

Not necessarily. A quality-focused recruiting firm behaves more like a sniper rifle than a shotgun, prioritizing the right candidate over the largest possible pool. An internal job posting alone reaches only the people actively looking, and that pool leaves out most of the strongest talent, since top performers are usually employed and not browsing job boards.

Reaching them takes someone who can describe a role well enough that a passive candidate, who was not looking and has nothing to gain by taking a call, decides it is worth a conversation anyway. That usually means talking about the team, the growth path, and what the role actually solves for the business, not just repeating the bullet points from a posting. That skill, more than sourcing volume, is what a strong recruiter actually brings to a search, which recruitAbility’s own reflections on the value of a recruiter cover from a different angle.

What Recruiter Data Reveals About the Market

Seeing more candidates produces the same confidence a buyer gets from touring several houses instead of one. Recruiters typically see far more candidates for a given type of role than an internal hiring manager does, simply because they are running similar searches across multiple clients at once.

That volume of exposure gives recruiters a real read on the market, from where salary expectations actually land to which qualifications are becoming harder to find. A hiring manager who only ever interviews for one open role at a time has no easy way to know whether an offer is competitive; a recruiter running similar searches across several clients usually does. Tracking placement outcomes over time turns that exposure into something concrete: a sense of which candidate profiles tend to succeed in a given role, not just which ones interview well, along with a real basis for salary negotiation instead of a guess based on one or two data points.

Push Versus Pull: Reaching the Candidates Who Aren’t Looking

Remote work widened the geographic pool available to almost every company, but a wider pool does not solve the problem on its own. A job posting is a pull strategy. It waits for the right person to come looking, which works fine for candidates who are actively job hunting.

Reaching the strongest passive candidates takes a push strategy instead, proactively identifying and contacting people who are not searching at all. That process is slow and relationship-heavy: identifying the right person, building enough rapport for an honest conversation, and following up without being pushy about it. It also rarely ends after one conversation. A candidate who is not ready to move today may be worth a check-in again in three months, and staying in touch over that stretch is exactly the kind of ongoing effort most internal teams cannot sustain alongside their other hiring needs. Most companies do not have the internal bandwidth to run that process well across every open role, which is exactly why The 80/20 Rule of Recruiting is worth reading to decide when outside help earns its cost.

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• Recruiter vs. Headhunter: Which One Do You Really Need?
• What Happens When You Use the Wrong Recruiting Model
• Why a Recruiting Partner Makes Everything Easier

The post Why Use A Recruiter in Addition To Your Job Posting? appeared first on recruitAbility.

The possibilities were hard to ignore.

AI can help summarize candidate profiles, draft outreach messages, generate interview questions, analyze job descriptions, and reduce time spent on administrative tasks. New tools seem to emerge every week, each promising to make recruiting faster and more efficient.

And in many ways, they do.

But the more I use AI, the more convinced I become that human connection is becoming more valuable, not less.

That may sound counterintuitive in an era of automation, but I’ve seen it firsthand. AI Didn’t Replace Recruiters. It Raised the Bar for Recruiters. digs into exactly what that shift has looked like in practice.

Recruiting Has Always Been About People

Throughout my career, the recruiting landscape has changed dramatically.

When I started, recruiters relied heavily on phone calls, networking events, referrals, job boards, and spreadsheets. LinkedIn transformed how we find talent. Video interviewing changed how we connect with candidates. Applicant tracking systems became more sophisticated. Social media expanded our reach.

Each technological advancement improved efficiency.

Yet none of them replaced the fundamentals of recruiting.

People still wanted to feel understood.

Hiring managers still needed trusted advisors.

Candidates still looked for guidance when making important career decisions.

The technology evolved. The human needs remained remarkably consistent.

AI feels different because of its speed and capabilities. But I believe the lesson is similar.

The tools will change. The importance of relationships will not. The Human Parts of Hiring AI Still Cannot Replace walks through what’s stayed constant even as every tool around it changed.

Efficiency Is No Longer the Differentiator

AI is quickly making many recruiting tasks faster and easier.

Writing outreach messages.

Researching companies.

Summarizing resumes.

Creating interview guides.

Analyzing market data.

Those activities increasingly require less time than they once did.

As a result, efficiency is becoming more accessible to everyone.

When everyone has access to powerful tools, efficiency becomes less of a competitive advantage.

What differentiates recruiters then?

Judgment.

Influence.

Communication.

Relationship-building.

Business acumen.

Trust.

These are the skills that remain difficult to automate. AI Is Everywhere in Hiring. Why Human Judgment in Hiring Has Never Mattered More explains why that gap is only getting wider.

Candidates Don’t Choose Technology. They Choose People.

I’ve spent years helping candidates navigate career decisions.

Some were considering multiple offers.

Others were evaluating a risky startup opportunity.

Some were relocating families.

Others were trying to decide whether leaving a comfortable job was worth the uncertainty.

In those moments, candidates weren’t looking for an AI-generated response.

They wanted honest conversation, perspective, and someone who could listen, ask thoughtful questions, and help them think through a complex decision.

Technology can provide information.

People provide confidence.

The distinction matters. Most Recruiters Will Not Tell You This. I Will. is a closer look at what candidates are actually paying for when they work with a recruiter.

Hiring Managers Need Advisors, Not Order Takers

AI is also changing how talent teams support the business.

As routine tasks become more automated, recruiters have an opportunity to spend more time where they create the greatest value.

Understanding business priorities.

Consulting with hiring managers.

Workforce planning.

Assessing organizational needs.

Providing market intelligence.

Influencing hiring decisions.

The future recruiter looks less like a process manager and more like a strategic advisor.

Ironically, AI may create more capacity for the very human aspects of recruiting that often get squeezed by administrative work.

The Skills Worth Investing In

Whenever a major shift happens in our profession, people naturally ask what skills they should develop.

My answer has become clearer over time.

Continue learning technology.

Understand AI.

Experiment with new tools.

Stay curious.

But invest just as heavily in the skills that make you uniquely human.

Build relationships.

Practice active listening.

Develop business acumen.

Strengthen your communication skills.

Learn how to influence without authority.

Become a trusted partner.

Those capabilities have always mattered.

I believe they’ll matter even more in the years ahead.

AI and Human Connection Are Not Opposing Forces

Sometimes discussions about AI become framed as a competition between technology and people.

I don’t see it that way.

The most successful talent professionals won’t be those who resist technology.

Nor will they be those who rely on it entirely.

They’ll be the people who learn how to blend technology with empathy, efficiency with judgment, and automation with authentic human connection.

AI can help us move faster.

Human connection helps us move people.

And recruiting has always been, and will continue to be, a people business. AI Tools in Recruiting: How to Balance Efficiency and Human Connection breaks down what that blend looks like day to day.

Looking Ahead

As I think about the leaders who have had the greatest impact on my career, one theme consistently stands out: they invested in people.

They created environments where teams could grow, contribute, and do their best work.

Related Articles

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• How Strong Leaders Keep Their Best People: A Practical Guide to Retaining Top Talent
• How My Global Journey Shaped the Recruiter I Became
• The Hidden Risk of AI Recruiting: Everyone Is Fishing in the Same Pond

The post AI Is Changing Recruiting. Human Connection Is Becoming More Valuable appeared first on recruitAbility.

“The executive who got you here may not be the executive who gets you there.”

I’ve heard some version of that throughout my career in executive search.

Sometimes it’s exactly right.

But sometimes we treat it as an assumption when it should be the conclusion of an assessment.

In private equity-backed and growth-stage companies, that distinction matters.

The investment thesis requires something different from the business. More EBITDA. Margin improvement. Better cash conversion. An acquisition strategy. New markets. More sophisticated systems and leadership. Eventually, perhaps, an exit.

Naturally, the leadership team gets evaluated against what comes next. And one of the most common ways to reduce the perceived risk is to hire someone who has already been there.

There is logic in that.

But there is a distinction I think matters.

The larger-company executive may have seen scale. The smaller-company executive may have actually built toward it.

Those are different forms of experience. And neither, by itself, tells me which executive is more likely to create value in the next stage of the business. Recruiting for Private Equity Portfolio Companies: What Hiring Actually Looks Like covers what that evaluation looks like across an entire portfolio company, not just one seat.

Experience at the destination is only part of the evidence

If the value creation plan requires a more sophisticated finance organization, prior experience inside one matters. If the company expects significant M&A, having lived through integrations matters. If the likely exit path requires a particular level of reporting, controls, forecasting or capital-markets sophistication, experience matters.

I’m not arguing against any of that.

What matters more is understanding what the executive actually built, changed or improved while they were there.

A CFO from a much larger company may have operated with systems, processes and leadership depth already in place. Another CFO may have spent the last five years building those things.

When I’m assessing executives, I want to understand the difference. CFO 2.0: How Financial Leadership Is Evolving in the Age of Automation is a good example of how much that difference matters in practice.

But expanding scope isn’t the same as expanding capability

This is where I think executive assessment gets harder.

It’s relatively easy for an executive to describe a career in which their scope continually increased. The company grew. Their team got bigger. Responsibilities expanded. Perhaps acquisitions added businesses or functions underneath them.

But expanding scope doesn’t necessarily mean the executive expanded with it. Sometimes responsibility grows because the organization grows.

What I want to understand is what happened to the executive’s judgment as the complexity increased.

When I talk with executives, I sometimes describe it as the ability to see around corners.

Did they simply get better at solving increasingly complex problems, or did they begin seeing those problems before they arrived? Did they recognize what the business would need next and start building toward it before the need became urgent?

Did they build leaders underneath themselves, or did more decisions continue flowing upward? Did they create systems and operating disciplines that made the organization less dependent on individual heroics? Did their influence with the CEO and board expand because they were bringing better enterprise judgment to the table?

Ultimately, I want to know:

What became possible because this executive was there?

That question tells me considerably more about someone’s ability to scale than the size of the company printed on their resume. Why Hiring at Scale Requires a Different Operating Model makes the same case about what has to change beneath an executive as the company grows.

The incumbent deserves the same scrutiny as the outside candidate

There is risk in assuming an executive will continue scaling simply because they have done so before.

Some don’t.

The approaches that worked at one stage stop working at another. Informal decision-making becomes a bottleneck. A leader who once built aggressively begins protecting what they created. The organization becomes more complex, but the executive’s operating model doesn’t.

At that point, the business may genuinely need different leadership.

But the outside candidate deserves equally serious scrutiny.

A resume that says someone has already operated at the scale you’re trying to reach can create a comforting sense that the risk has been removed.

It hasn’t.

How much of that executive’s success travels with them when the infrastructure is thinner and they have to build rather than inherit?

That’s an expensive distinction to discover after the hire. Watch CFO Behavior Before You Watch CFO Exits tracks the specific warning signs that show up long before that discovery becomes expensive.

Replacement isn’t the only answer

Leadership decisions don’t always have to resolve into keep or replace.

Sometimes the right answer is augmentation.

A CFO who has been instrumental in building the business may need a stronger FP&A leader underneath them. A CEO may need a COO who can institutionalize execution without replacing the entrepreneurial strengths that got the company this far. The Rise of the Chief Operating Partner: Why Operations Deserve a Seat at the Strategy Table covers exactly that kind of role.

An executive may need a clearly defined period to demonstrate that they can build the capabilities required by the next phase of the value creation plan.

Sometimes you don’t need to replace the executive. You need to change what’s around them.

And in a PE-backed business, these decisions are being made against a clock. Waiting indefinitely for an executive to grow into the next stage isn’t a strategy either.

As an executive recruiter, a replacement creates a search.

But replacement isn’t always the right answer.

Sometimes the better leadership decision is identifying what the incumbent does exceptionally well, determining what the next stage requires, and closing the gap around them.

That’s where judgment enters the equation

For private equity operating partners, boards and portfolio-company CEOs, the harder question isn’t whether an executive’s background looks right. It’s what that experience actually tells you about their ability to create value in this business.

And if the incumbent doesn’t yet possess everything the next phase requires, is the gap fundamental, or can it be built around?

After twenty-five years in executive search, those are the questions I’ve become much more interested in.

Because executive assessment shouldn’t simply determine whether someone has already been where the business is going.

It should help determine whether they have demonstrated the ability to get the business there.

Past scale is evidence. Trajectory is evidence. Knowing how to interpret the difference is judgment.

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• Why PE-Backed Companies Need a Different Recruiting Approach
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• CFO or Controller? It’s Not the Choice… It’s the Order

The post The Executive Who Got You Here May Be the Executive To Get You There appeared first on recruitAbility.

And the past several weeks have been some of the most revealing of my career, not because of anything that happened in a boardroom or on a job site, but because of what happened when I started writing honestly about what I was seeing in the hiring market.

Over 50,000 people engaged with a post about ghost jobs.

Hundreds of comments from candidates, HR leaders, hiring managers, and recruiters, each one adding a layer to a conversation that most people in this industry have been having privately for years but rarely say out loud.

What that response told me is something I want to build on today.

The hiring system is not broken in one place. It is broken in several places simultaneously. On both sides of the table. For reasons that are rarely malicious and almost always structural. And the cost – financial, reputational, and human – is significantly higher than most organizations have ever calculated.

This is my honest attempt to name the good, the bad, and the ugly of what hiring actually looks like in 2026. From someone who has seen all three. From both sides of the desk. Ghost Jobs. Ghost Economy. The Jobs Report Nobody Read Correctly. was the piece that started this conversation, and this is the fuller one it deserves.

The Ugly Truth First

Employers ignored 48 percent of job applicants in 2025, a three-year high. And 70 percent of U.S. job seekers now say ghosting an employer is completely fair.

Neither side started it. Both sides are doing it. And each cites the other as justification.

61 percent of job seekers report being ghosted after an interview… up 9 points from the prior year.

The interview was over. They had prepared, taken time off work, researched the company, rehearsed their answers, and invested real hope in a process that was supposed to mean something.

40 percent of candidates were ghosted even after a second or third round interview.

And the mechanism behind the spike is clear. AI tools multiplied application volume until hiring teams defaulted to silent rejection as a coping strategy. Everyone’s behavior is rational in isolation. Together it is a mess.

Ghost jobs – roles posted where a candidate has already been selected internally – affect nearly 70 percent of companies and 18 to 22 percent of all postings.

Now let me say something that most people in my industry will not say out loud.

I have been part of this problem.

Not intentionally. Never intentionally.

But in the middle of managing multiple searches, client relationships, and candidate pipelines, someone has slipped through. A follow-up that did not happen. A candidate who deserved a call that got buried under everything else.

It is humbling to admit.

And it is exactly why I care about this conversation so deeply.

Because if I am going to ask companies to do better, I have to be willing to hold myself to the same standard. From Candidate Ghosting to Employer Brand Loyalty: A 2025 Playbook lays out what holding that standard actually looks like in practice.

The Bad – What the System Is Doing to Both Sides

Here is what I want every hiring leader to understand about the world their candidates are navigating right now.

The average time-to-hire in 2026 is 41 to 44 days.

The top 10 percent of candidates are off the market in ten.

That math does not work. And the candidates who have experienced it enough times have drawn a rational conclusion.

52 percent of candidates decline job offers due to poor hiring experiences. 56 percent say a bad experience makes them less likely to purchase from that company.

The damage is not just to your talent pipeline. It is to your customer base. Your reputation. The long-term perception of your organization in the very communities you are trying to hire from.

A Harvard Business School and Burning Glass Institute joint study found that despite 85 percent of employers claiming to use skills-based hiring, fewer than 1 in 700 hires were actually affected by degree requirement removals. Companies were publicly saying one thing and privately doing another. Brutal Transparency: The Uncomfortable Edge That Makes Great Hires Happen argues that candidates can tell the difference, and it costs companies the hires they actually wanted.

The transparency problem in hiring is not limited to ghost jobs and ghosting. It runs through the entire system. And both sides feel it in different ways, for different reasons, with consequences neither intended.

When Efficiency Comes at the Expense of Connection

87 percent of hiring managers say their company has implemented AI in at least one part of the recruitment process. 58 percent now use AI to screen resumes, up from 35 percent in 2025.

Only 26 percent of applicants trust AI to evaluate them fairly in hiring.

The tools designed to make hiring more efficient are in many cases making the human connection harder to build. And the human connection, as every piece of research consistently shows, is the thing that determines whether a candidate accepts an offer, refers their colleagues, and stays long enough to matter.

The Good – What Actually Works

I do not want to leave this conversation in the dark.

Because there is real evidence of what a better hiring process produces.

Candidates respond with 50 percent higher NPS for willingness to refer when specific feedback is given to them after the interview process.

Talent Board CandE Winners deliver 64 percent of offers within one week of the final interview and see materially fewer post-offer no-shows.

70 percent of Glassdoor users are more likely to apply when the employer actively manages its presence there.

Feedback. Speed. Honest communication. Respect for a candidate’s time.

These are not expensive innovations. They are basic human courtesies that most hiring processes have optimized away in the pursuit of efficiency, and that turn out to be the most powerful competitive differentiators available to any organization competing for talent right now.

The organizations winning the talent competition in 2026 are not the ones with the most sophisticated AI stack. They are the ones whose hiring process feels human to the people going through it. The ones whose candidates, even the ones who do not get the job, walk away feeling seen, respected, and heard.

Those candidates become referrers. Advocates. Future applicants. Future customers.

The ones who are ghosted become something else entirely.

What I Have Learned From Both Sides

I have placed people in roles that changed their careers. I’ve seen companies transform because the right leader walked through the door at the right moment. And I have been part of searches that worked exactly as they should, and ones that did not.

And here is what every one of those experiences – good, bad, and ugly – has taught me.

The quality of the outcome is almost entirely determined by the quality of the process that produced it.

A search that begins with clarity about what the role actually requires, what success looks like, what the organization genuinely needs and not just what the job description says, almost always ends with a hire that works.

A search that begins with ambiguity, pressure, or a brief that nobody has honestly examined…almost always ends with a restart.

When the Process Breaks Down

And a restart has a price.

SHRM’s 2026 benchmarking puts the average cost-per-hire at $4,683 for non-executive roles and $28,329 for senior and executive positions.

Add vacancy costs between $4,000 and $9,000 per month per open role, manager time, onboarding, and the risk of a bad hire at three to four times annual salary. A single mid-level search gone wrong can cost an organization $150,000 to $300,000 before anyone writes a check to a recruiting firm. The Business Cost of Getting Hiring Decisions Wrong breaks down exactly what a price tag like that actually includes.

And the reputational cost – the candidate ghosted after round three, who told everyone in their professional network – never appears on any invoice.

Corporate ghosting is not just a recruitment challenge. It is a reflection of organizational integrity. The way companies engage with candidates often mirrors how they operate internally.

That line stopped me when I read it. Because it is true. And it is the version of this conversation that most hiring leaders have never been invited to have.

What a Different Conversation Looks Like

I am not writing this to make anyone feel ashamed of their hiring process.

I am writing it because I believe the gap between what most organizations intend and what their candidates actually experience is entirely fixable. And because I have seen, from both sides of this work, exactly what it takes to fix it.

It starts before the job is posted.

With an honest conversation about what the role actually needs to accomplish. What kind of person genuinely thrives in this environment. What the market for that talent actually looks like right now. And what the organization is realistically prepared to offer.

That conversation – done well, done honestly, before the search begins – changes everything.

• Fewer ghost postings.
• Fewer searches that restart.
• Fewer candidates who enter a process that was never designed to see them.
• Fewer hiring managers sitting in their tenth interview without finding the person they need.

And a candidate experience that reflects the organization’s values, because the process was designed around what the candidate deserves, not just what the system makes easy. Pressure Doesn’t Fix Your Hiring Process covers why skipping that conversation under deadline pressure only makes the eventual fix more expensive.

Not because I have all the answers.

Because I have been on both sides of this long enough to ask the right questions.

And the right questions, asked early enough, change everything.

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The post The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Truth About Hiring in 2026 appeared first on recruitAbility.

Probably not right now.

Like many of us, I’ve spent my career balancing competing priorities. Recruiting goals. Hiring manager needs. Employee challenges. Business objectives. Family responsibilities. Community involvement. Professional development. Staying current on emerging technologies. Learning new skills. Finding time for the people and activities that matter most. The list never really gets shorter.

Yet one of the most rewarding professional decisions I’ve made has been saying yes to volunteer leadership.

Serving on the Austin SHRM Board has given me an opportunity to continue learning, growing, and contributing alongside an incredible community of HR professionals. While the experience certainly requires time and commitment, I’ve found that the benefits extend far beyond what I initially expected.

We Encourage Growth in Others. But What About Ourselves?

As recruiters and HR leaders, we’re constantly encouraging others to invest in their development.

We encourage candidates to stretch into new opportunities.

We advise employees to build relationships across the organization.

We recommend leadership development, mentorship, networking, and continuous learning.

But how often do we create those same opportunities for ourselves?

It’s easy to become so focused on helping others grow that our own development moves to the bottom of the list.

Volunteer leadership provides a way to step outside our day-to-day responsibilities and continue challenging ourselves in new ways. How To Approach Employee Retention Using Mentors looks at that same instinct from the other side.

Learning Beyond Your Job Description

One of the things I appreciate most about volunteer leadership is the exposure to perspectives beyond my immediate role.

Throughout my career, I’ve worked across startups, high-growth companies, consulting environments, and now the agency world. Each experience has taught me something different about leadership, talent, and organizational growth.

Board service adds another layer of learning.

You’re collaborating with professionals from different industries, company sizes, and career journeys. You’re discussing challenges, sharing ideas, solving problems, and working toward common goals that benefit the broader HR community.

Those conversations often provide insights that I can bring back into my own work. How My Global Journey Shaped the Recruiter I Became traces a similar arc, built outside a single job title.

Developing Leadership in a Different Environment

Volunteer organizations operate differently than most workplaces.

Board members and volunteers are balancing full-time careers while contributing their time, energy, and expertise to a shared mission.

Success depends on collaboration, communication, and influence.

You learn how to build consensus.

You learn how to listen to different viewpoints.

You learn how to move initiatives forward without relying on organizational hierarchy.

These are leadership skills that serve us well regardless of our title or role. You Inherit More Than a Title makes a related point about where real leadership actually comes from. It rarely has much to do with what’s printed on a business card.

The Power of Professional Community

Perhaps the most meaningful benefit has been the relationships.

Over the years, I’ve learned that some of the strongest professional connections are built through shared experiences and shared purpose.

When you’re working alongside other professionals toward a common goal, you get to know them beyond their job titles.

You learn from one another.

You support one another.

You celebrate successes together.

Those relationships often become some of the most valuable parts of the experience.

It’s About More Than Personal Growth

While volunteer leadership offers tremendous development opportunities, it also creates an opportunity to give back to a profession that has given so much to us.

Every HR professional can likely point to a mentor, colleague, manager, or community member who offered guidance, encouragement, or support at an important moment in their career.

Serving in leadership roles allows us to help create those same opportunities for others.

Whether it’s supporting educational programming, facilitating connections, mentoring emerging professionals, or helping strengthen our local HR community, the impact extends beyond ourselves.

Say Yes Before You’re Ready

If you’re waiting for the perfect time to volunteer, I have some news: it probably doesn’t exist.

Most leadership opportunities don’t arrive when our calendars are completely open.

They arrive when we’re already busy.

The question isn’t whether you have extra time.

The question is whether the opportunity to grow, learn, contribute, and connect is worth making time for.

For me, the answer has been an emphatic yes.

And I’m grateful that organizations like Austin SHRM create opportunities for HR and talent professionals to lead, learn, and serve together.

Looking Ahead

Volunteer leadership has reminded me that growth doesn’t stop once we reach a certain title, level, or stage of our careers. The most effective leaders I know remain curious, adaptable, and committed to learning.

As technology continues to reshape recruiting and HR, that mindset may be more important than ever.

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The post Why Busy HR and Talent Leaders Should Say Yes to Volunteer Leadership appeared first on recruitAbility.

I have been doing this work for a long time.

And I want to be honest with you today. That’s a way most people in my industry are not willing to be.

This week, I have been writing about ghost jobs, ghost economies, data center spending records, construction openings, and workforce bottlenecks. After all of that, I find myself sitting with something that the data alone cannot fully capture. This same hiring pressure sits underneath everything explored in The Hiring System Is Broken. And Both Sides Did It.

The pressure.

Not the market pressure. Not the economic pressure.

The human pressure.

The weight that every candidate carries when they send another application into a system that may never see them. The weight every hiring leader carries when they know they have three critical roles open. There is no clear path to filling them. And the weight every HR professional carries is real too. They are managing more requisitions than any human being should reasonably handle. At the same time, the system holds them accountable for outcomes it was never designed to produce.

That weight is real.

And more people than any data point can adequately represent are carrying it right now.

This article is for all of them.

What the Candidate Is Actually Living

Let me start with the person on the other side of the application portal.

61 percent of job seekers report that employers ghosted them after an interview, up nine points since 2024.

Not after applying. After interviewing. After preparing and taking time off work. Then researching the company, rehearsing their answers, and investing their hope in a conversation that was supposed to matter.

61 percent.

66 percent of job applicants accepted an offer specifically because of a positive hiring process. On the other side, 36 percent declined offers after a negative interview experience. Another 26 percent rejected offers due to poor communication or unclear job expectations.

The process is not a formality. It is a signal. It tells every candidate something about the organization they are considering joining. And right now, the signal most organizations are sending, unintentionally in many cases, is this. The people who apply do not matter enough to hear back from.

What Silence Does to a Candidate

I think about what that does to a person over time.

The first rejection without feedback stings. The fifth one makes you question yourself. Then the tenth one makes you wonder if you are missing something fundamental about how this works. And somewhere around the twentieth application into silence, you stop believing the system is going to work for you. You start looking for another way.

The Job Search Has Already Changed

LinkedIn’s Economic Graph data shows that employers are up to eight times more likely to hire candidates sourced through social platforms than direct applicants.  Eight times. This exact gap between who gets found and who gets buried is what From Candidate Ghosting to Employer Brand Loyalty digs into.

The people finding opportunities are not the ones submitting the most applications. They are the ones in relationships with the people who have the opportunities. And the candidates who have not figured that out yet are still grinding through job boards, praying something lands. They are operating in a system that has already moved on without them.

That is not their fault. But it is their reality.

And I sit with that weight too.

Because I have had those conversations. I have watched genuinely talented people, people I believed in completely, lose confidence in themselves. A system that was never designed to see them kept failing to see them.

What the Hiring Leader Is Actually Living

Now let me tell you what I see on the other side of that same silence.

Economic uncertainty has overtaken wage inflation as the top concern for CHROs in 2026. 43 percent cite rising operational costs, and 42 percent feel pressure to meet financial goals.

Constrained hiring is not just a temporary reaction to economic uncertainty. It is the operating reality for most employers at the start of 2026. It is a defining force reshaping how organizations are thinking about talent.

The hiring leaders I speak with every week are not indifferent to the candidates waiting for their calls. They are drowning.

Drowning in Volume, Pressure, and Technology

Drowning in volume. 86 percent of employers have ghosted a candidate because they have too many applicants to respond to. That’s up from 79 percent in 2024.

Drowning in pressure. Pressure from leadership to fill roles faster. Pressure from finance to justify every headcount decision. And pressure from operations to find people who do not seem to exist. That market keeps producing applications from people who do not quite fit.

Drowning in technology that was supposed to help. In many cases, it has made it harder to see the human being behind the resume.

When Efficiency Starts Costing Trust

57 percent of CHROs now list reducing bias in AI hiring tools as a growing priority. That’s a signal. Organizations are beginning to reckon with what their automated processes are actually doing to their candidate pools.

25 percent of candidates report trusting employers less when employers use AI in hiring, according to Gartner’s 2026 research.

The tools designed to make hiring more efficient are in many cases making the human connection harder to build. And the human connection, as every piece of research consistently shows, is the deciding factor. It determines whether a candidate accepts an offer, refers their colleagues, and stays long enough to matter. This exact tension between speed and connection is the same one covered in The AI Productivity Trap in Recruiting.

Nobody built a broken system on purpose.

But here we are.

The Numbers That Reveal the Real Disconnect

I want to put the full picture in one place. When you see it together, the scale of the disconnect becomes impossible to ignore.

7.6 million job openings as of April 2026. Hiring rates softening. A persistent mismatch between available talent and employer needs.

SHRM’s 2026 Talent Trends Report is based on a survey of over 2,000 HR professionals. It identifies ongoing recruitment difficulties, widening skills gaps, and shifting workforce expectations. Those are the three dominant forces shaping talent management right now.

81 percent of companies now evaluate candidates on demonstrated ability rather than credentials alone. That’s a fundamental shift in how organizations make hiring decisions. 95 percent of employers expect skills-based hiring to become the standard.

Neither fully employer nor candidate-driven, the 2026 labor market has created a complex power dynamic in recruitment. That dynamic is more complex than any recent period. Employer branding and candidate experience are no longer back-burner priorities. They are strategic differentiators.

And yet, despite all that research, all that awareness, and all those priorities named in boardrooms and at HR conferences, the ghosting hasn’t stopped. Employers are still ghosting 61 percent of candidates after interviews.

The knowing and the doing are miles apart.

And the gap between them is where careers stall and reputations erode. Great organizations lose great people before the relationship ever had a chance to begin. This exact gap between market data and market reality is what Ghost Jobs. Ghost Economy. The Jobs Report Nobody Read Correctly. digs into from the manufacturing and construction side.

What AI Is Doing to All of It

I have written about this before. But it deserves to be said again in this context, because the AI conversation in hiring is not abstract. It is landing on real people in real ways right now.

92 percent of CHROs anticipate greater AI integration in workforce operations in 2026. 84 percent expect upskilling in AI-specific skills to increase.

AI is not going away. It is not something to resist. Used thoughtfully, with human oversight at every critical decision point, it genuinely changes what is possible in talent acquisition.

But here is what the data also shows.

Candidates are using AI to apply faster and in greater volume. Employers are using AI to screen faster and at greater scale. And somewhere in the middle of that acceleration, the human being is getting lost. They have a real story, real potential, and a genuine desire to contribute to something meaningful. But they are caught in a loop that neither side designed and neither side knows how to stop.

The AI doom loop I described earlier this week is not a technology problem.

It is a trust problem wearing a technology costume.

And the organizations that figure out how to use AI well will have an advantage. They will accelerate the parts of hiring that should be faster. At the same time, they will preserve the human judgment and the human communication that builds trust. That combination is one no amount of job board spend can match.

Skills-based hiring expands eligible talent pools by 6.1 times globally. In the United States, that number rises to 15.9 times, according to LinkedIn’s Economic Graph.

15.9 times.

The talent that most organizations say does not exist is there. The approaches most organizations are still using to look for it just are not reaching it.

What I Have Learned from Both Sides

I want to be vulnerable here. That’s not something I always allow myself to be in professional content.

I have made mistakes in this work.

I have moved too fast on a search and presented candidates before I truly understood what an organization needed. There have also been searches I should have had the courage to decline. The brief was too vague, or the expectations were disconnected from reality. And sometimes, I’ve been the recruiter who let a follow-up slip. That wasn’t out of indifference. It came from the same overwhelm that every hiring leader I described above is living.

I have been on both sides of the pressure. And it has made me better at this work. But not before it made me more humble about how hard this work actually is.

I have learned a lot from the candidates who trusted me with their career moments. I have learned just as much from the companies who trusted me with their most important hires. The thing that makes the difference is never the technology, the database, or the process.

It is the relationship.

The genuine, honest, human relationship between a person and someone who actually cares about getting it right.

That is what was missing when things went wrong. That is what was present every single time something went right.

The Path Forward

SHRM’s 2026 Talent Trends Report says it clearly.

Hiring alone will not solve talent challenges. Organizations that invest in continuous development, leverage technology thoughtfully, and foster inclusive cultures will build resilient future-ready workforces. Success depends on designing talent systems that balance immediate needs with long-term growth.

I believe that completely.

And I would add one thing.

Success also depends on the quality of the partner you trust to navigate all of this alongside you.

Not a headhunter who takes a job order and searches a database.

Not a platform that promises volume and delivers noise.

A partner who understands your business, your culture, and your market. One who finds the people that a broken system will never surface. And one who manages every step of the process with the care and communication that every candidate deserves, regardless of the outcome.

That is not a luxury in 2026.

It is the only approach that consistently works.

I started this week writing about $68 billion in data center spending and construction openings up 36 percent. Then came the jobs reports, revised downward by 103,000.

I want to end it here.

With the truth that all of those numbers point toward.

There are real people behind every one of those statistics.

Candidates who deserve to be seen. Organizations that deserve to find the people they need. Hiring leaders who deserve a partner rather than a vendor.

The pressure is real.

The path through it is real too.

And I am here, genuinely and wholeheartedly, with everything I have learned from both sides of this work. I am here to help you find it.

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The post What the Data Reveals About the Hiring Pressure Everyone Is Feeling appeared first on recruitAbility.

That’s really what recruiting is.

You’re sifting through hundreds (sometimes thousands) of profiles to uncover the handful of engineers who can actually solve the problem. You don’t find those people by hoping they apply. You find them by knowing exactly where to dig.

That’s why mapping is one of the most important stages of my recruiting process. That discipline is exactly what separates specialized search from the rest of Recruiting Engineers and Technical Talent in a Competitive Market

Why Most Recruiters Skip the Map

A lot of recruiters skip it. They’ll say, “Let me see what I’ve got and get back to you.”

So I don’t need to see what I’ve got; I already know.

Before I begin a search, I know the market I’m walking into.

I know where the engineers are located, which companies employ them, the technologies they’re working on, the projects they’re supporting, typical compensation packages, and cost-of-living differences. I also know relocation challenges and approximately how many people actually fit the profile. That upfront work is what surfaces candidates most companies never see, the exact dynamic behind The Hidden Talent Market in Embedded & Firmware Engineering (And Why Now Is the Time to Hire)

Turning the Search Into a Data Exercise

Then I start narrowing it down.

How many engineers have this experience? How many have this plus that? And how many have all three requirements? How many are realistically open to making a move?

That’s where the real work begins.

As a result, every search becomes a data exercise. You’re constantly collecting information, validating assumptions, and eliminating dead ends. You keep refining your map until you know exactly where the best talent is hiding.

A Different Model Than the Generalist Recruiter

This is why I approach specialized engineering recruiting differently.

Many recruiters are generalists. They’re juggling dozens of unrelated industries and hoping to make the next placement. There’s nothing wrong with that model, but it’s different from mine.

I’m not chasing the next commission.

I’m solving a technical hiring problem.

That requires preparation, research, market intelligence, and a repeatable process. That same preparation shapes how I help clients decide between hiring approaches too, something explored further in Full-Time vs. Contract Hiring in Specialized Engineering: Same Goal, Completely Different Strategy

What the Empire Mine Taught Me About Recruiting

Standing here at the historic Empire Mines in Colfax, CA, looking at the old mining operations, is a great reminder. The miners who succeeded didn’t just start digging at random. They studied the terrain. They mapped the ground. Then they understood where the gold was most likely to be before they ever picked up a shovel.

Recruiting is no different.

There are usually multiple paths to the right hire. The difference is whose map gets them there first.

Fifteen Years of the Same Process

I trust my map because I’ve built it over nearly 15 years. I’ve used the same process across embedded systems, firmware, semiconductors, storage, automation, controls, and engineering leadership.

The technologies change.

The process doesn’t.

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• The Engineering Paradox: Too Many Graduates. Not Enough Experience.

The post Why Market Mapping Is the Foundation of Specialized Recruiting appeared first on recruitAbility.

The results have been impressive.

Today, recruiters can generate candidate lists in minutes, draft personalized outreach at scale, summarize interview notes instantly, and automate many of the administrative tasks that once took hours to complete.

There’s no question that recruiting has become dramatically more efficient.

But I’ve been asking myself a different question:

Has recruiting become more effective?

Because while many teams are doing more than ever, many organizations are still facing familiar hiring challenges.

Candidate engagement remains difficult.

Interview processes still break down.

Hiring decisions still stall.

Great candidates still decline offers.

Which raises an important question:

Are we mistaking activity for progress? This same question is at the center of The Hidden Risk of AI Recruiting: Everyone Is Fishing in the Same Pond

More Activity Doesn’t Always Equal Better Results

Recruiting teams today can accomplish significantly more within the same amount of time.

More outreach.

More candidate lists.

Additional screenings.

More follow-up messages.

More data.

Increased automation.

At first glance, this feels like progress.

And in some ways, it is.

But quantity alone doesn’t solve hiring challenges.

Sending twice as many messages doesn’t guarantee stronger candidate engagement.

Reviewing more résumés doesn’t guarantee better hires.

Generating more candidate pipelines doesn’t guarantee offers accepted.

Sometimes it simply creates more activity. This is the same tradeoff explored in How to Build a Hiring Process That Works for Senior and Specialized Roles

The Candidate Experience Still Matters

AI can help us reach more candidates.

What it can’t do is make candidates care about an opportunity.

I’ve seen organizations generate tremendous top-of-funnel activity only to struggle when candidates enter the interview process.

Why?

Because candidates are evaluating much more than the role itself.

They’re evaluating the experience.

How quickly does the team respond?

Are interviewers prepared?

Do conversations feel meaningful?

Can candidates clearly understand the opportunity?

Do they feel respected throughout the process?

No amount of automation can compensate for a poor candidate experience. Keeping that human touch intact is exactly what’s covered in How to Integrate AI Into Your Recruiting Strategy Without Losing the Human Touch

Faster Screening Doesn’t Solve Decision-Making Problems

Many hiring teams are becoming increasingly efficient at identifying qualified candidates.

Yet hiring decisions often remain one of the biggest bottlenecks.

Candidates move through interviews successfully, only to encounter delays because stakeholders aren’t aligned.

Feedback is inconsistent.

Requirements shift.

Teams continue searching for a candidate who may not exist.

AI can help organize information.

It can’t make difficult decisions for hiring teams.

The organizations that hire well are often the ones that are clear on what success looks like and confident in making decisions when they find it. Where AI genuinely helps versus where it falls short is the subject of Where AI Helps Recruiting and Where It Doesn’t

More Data Doesn’t Automatically Create Better Judgment

We have access to more information than ever before.

AI-generated summaries.

Interview notes.

Market insights.

Candidate comparisons.

Assessment results.

All of this information can be useful.

But at some point, hiring remains a judgment call.

The goal isn’t simply collecting more data.

The goal is understanding which data actually matters.

I’ve worked with hiring managers who could articulate exactly what they needed in a candidate and make excellent hiring decisions with relatively little information.

I’ve also seen teams gather enormous amounts of information and still remain uncertain.

The difference wasn’t the amount of data.

It was clarity. This same distinction is what separates the two outcomes in AI Didn’t Replace Recruiters. It Raised the Bar for Recruiters.

The Human Parts of Recruiting Are Becoming More Important

Ironically, the more recruiting becomes automated, the more valuable the human elements become.

Relationship-building.

Influence.

Trust.

Communication.

Advising hiring managers.

Understanding candidate motivations.

Helping both sides navigate uncertainty.

These have always been important parts of recruiting.

Now they’re becoming even more important because technology is handling many of the transactional tasks.

The work that remains is the work that requires judgment, empathy, and experience. That advisory role is the same one explored in Most Recruiters Will Not Tell You This. I Will.

Efficiency Is a Tool, Not the Goal

I am incredibly optimistic about AI’s role in recruiting.

It allows recruiters to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time focusing on the areas where they create the most value.

That’s a positive shift.

But efficiency should never become the objective.

The objective is better hiring outcomes.

Better candidate experiences.

Better hiring decisions.

And better long-term matches between people and organizations.

Sometimes the most valuable thing a recruiter can do isn’t move faster.

It’s pause long enough to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, or help a hiring team rethink its approach.

That’s not something AI can automate.

At least not yet.

Recruiting has become dramatically more efficient.

Now the challenge is making sure that efficiency translates into effectiveness.

More recruiting activity doesn’t automatically lead to better hiring outcomes. Getting better at that craft, not just faster at it, is the whole idea behind The Tool That’s Helping Me Become a Better Recruiter (And It’s Not What You Think)

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