The Bookend Crisis

Organizations spend millions improving the middle of the employee experience – wellness programs, engagement initiatives, and culture work – while neglecting the two moments that shape perception most: how people enter and how they leave.

Recruiting and termination practices in most organizations are so poorly handled that they permanently shape how people perceive a company. Highly qualified candidates routinely drop out of the hiring process, and exiting employees rarely return as boomerang hires, refer talent, or leave positive employer reviews. The bookends – hiring and firing – remain fundamentally broken and systematically overlooked, eroding trust and costing organizations millions in talent, productivity, and reputation.

The Front Door Disaster

The breakdown is most visible at the front door of the organization.

If you’re an executive, you likely have no idea what it’s like to apply for a job at your company and how flawed the process actually is.

Most senior leaders believe recruiting is working because the numbers look fine. Time-‑to-‑fill is satisfactory. Offers are accepted. From the C‑suite vantage point, hiring appears efficient and scalable. Those metrics, however, tell you what’s easy to measure, not what it feels like to go through the process.

Executives don’t see:

• The applicant who gave up after 20 minutes of trying to navigate the online application

• The high performer who accepted another offer because the recruiter took a week to respond

• The candidate who walked away because the hiring manager was 15 minutes late for the interview and hadn’t prepared

The gap between perception and reality matters more than most organizations realize. Recruiting is not a neutral administrative process. It is the first sustained interaction a person has with an organization’s values, decision‑making, and brand. Long before someone becomes an employee, they form judgments about whether leadership is competent, whether the culture is trustworthy, and whether the organization lives up to the principles it publicly espouses.

Consider what is happening, routinely and predictably, in organizations that otherwise believe they are doing hiring “well.”

• Cumbersome Application Processes – To apply for most jobs, candidates must create an account, upload a resume, and then manually re‑enter every detail that already exists on that resume. They repeat this process again and again across different jobs and applicant tracking systems (ATS). The process is defended as a technical requirement, but from the candidate’s perspective it signals a lack of respect for their time. Candidate drop-off rates during application can be as high as 70% in some systems.

• Long Response Times – Candidates regularly wait days, and often weeks, for recruiter responses, even after interviews or substantive exchanges. Internally, these delays are explained by workload, approvals, or competing priorities. Externally, they are experienced as disinterest or dysfunction. Highly qualified candidates do not wait indefinitely. They infer meaning from silence and make decisions accordingly.

• Unprepared, Poorly Trained Interviewers – Candidates regularly encounter interviewers who haven’t read their resume, ask generic or duplicative questions, and appear distracted, rushed or disengaged. When an interviewer hasn’t done the basic preparation, the unspoken message is clear: this conversation isn’t important. Executives would never tolerate this level of unpreparedness in a board meeting or client pitch, yet it is routinely normalized in hiring.

• Inconsistent Messaging Throughout the Process – Recruiters, hiring managers, and interview panelists often describe roles differently, offer conflicting timelines, or communicate misaligned expectations around scope and compensation. Candidates begin to question whether the organization itself understands what it is hiring for, or whether the role being presented will resemble the role they ultimately accept.

• Radio Silence After the Interview – Perhaps the most damaging and common experience of all: candidates who make it through multiple rounds – sometimes five, six, or more interviews – only to hear nothing. Ghosted. No update, no closure, and no acknowledgment of the time, preparation, and emotional energy they invested. This is not a neutral experience. It’s a breach of basic respect, and one that candidates remember and share. 

None of this is unusual. And that’s exactly the problem.

The consequences of poor hiring experiences rarely appear neatly on a dashboard. Instead, they manifest over time in ways that are difficult to trace but no less damaging. High‑quality candidates quietly self‑select out, often without providing feedback. Employer brand weakens through informal networks and public forums. Cost‑-per-‑hire increases as pipelines thin, and early attrition rises as misaligned hiring decisions replace thoughtful, mutual selection.

Organizations don’t hire poorly because they don’t care. They hire poorly because the Talent Acquisition function has become transactional, automated, and distanced from leadership.

The Back Door We Ignore

If recruiting is where first impressions are formed, offboarding is where lasting damage is done.

In corporate America, layoffs and terminations have become routine. Yet despite decades of management science and growing investment in employee experience, the process of letting people go remains one of the most traumatic, impersonal, and poorly handled aspects of modern work.

Too often, terminations are executed with cold efficiency. Employees are summoned to a brief meeting, sometimes virtually, given a script, and told their access will be cut off immediately. Security may escort them out. There’s little opportunity for closure, dignity, or even a proper goodbye. The rationale is usually “risk management,” but the result is a process that strips people of their humanity.

We freeze their accounts and walk them out like criminals and then wonder why our employer brand suffers.

Terminations are inevitable. Performance issues happen, business conditions change, and roles become obsolete. Instead of treating these moments as an organizational competency to master, we handle them like liabilities to minimize – quickly and quietly – through managers who are untrained, HR teams that are overwhelmed, and executives who remain distant.

Underneath this approach are a few deeply flawed assumptions:

1. Speed Equals Protection – Organizations assume moving quickly reduces legal risk. In reality, what reduces risk is clarity, transparency, and treating people with respect.

2. Distance Equals Professionalism – Managers are trained to be unemotional and scripted, mistaking detachment for professional competence.

3. Severance Equals Resolution – Companies provide departing employees with money in exchange for a release of liability and assume it softens the blow.

These beliefs ignore the profound emotional impact of job loss. For most, work is a source of identity, community, and purpose. Being suddenly severed from that triggers stress, alienation, and loss of self-worth.

But the damage extends far beyond the individual.

• Your Remaining Employees Are Watching – How an organization treats someone on their worst day sends a powerful message to those who stay. When handled poorly, it erodes trust and disengages entire teams.

• Your Reputation Is at Stake – Glassdoor reviews, social media posts, and water-cooler conversations are disproportionately shaped by termination stories. One bad exit can undo years of positive employer branding.

• Legal Exposure Compounds – Terminations handled without clarity, consistency, or compassion are the ones most likely to escalate into litigation. Treating people with care isn't just ethical, it's risk mitigation.

• You Lose Institutional Knowledge – Even when someone is not working out, they possess information, relationships, and organizational context. Showing them the door without transition burns value that cannot be recovered.

• You're Destroying Your Best Talent Pipeline – Alumni are the #1 and #3 sources of quality hires (boomerang employees and referrals, respectively). Exit people poorly, and organizations eliminate one of their most credible talent pipelines while turning potential advocates into detractors.

The Employee Experience Myth

It’s time to rethink how companies approach the most critical moments in the employee lifecycle.

Improving recruiting does not begin with new technology or employer brand campaigns. It starts with visibility and accountability. Leaders must be willing to experience their own hiring processes firsthand, listen seriously to candidate feedback, and treat recruiting as a reflection of organizational values rather than a logistical hurdle to clear as efficiently as possible.

Likewise, how organizations terminate people is not't a side issue. It is a test of leadership and culture.

Managers require training, practice, and support to conduct terminations with dignity. Employees need transition time for handoffs, goodbyes, and closure. Outplacement services, alumni networks, and post-exit-check-ins help former employees feel respected rather than discarded.

The operational details matter too. Delayed COBRA paperwork, incorrect final paychecks, or poor follow-up turn already difficult moments into lasting resentment.

Leaders must also be willing to learn from exits rather than simply close a file. Every departure contains information about hiring decisions, leadership effectiveness, team dynamics, and organizational systems.  

Fix the Bookends First

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: senior leadership often has no idea how recruitment and terminations occur inside their organizations because they are structurally insulated from the lived experience. The bookends have been delegated, automated, and abstracted to the point where executives rarely witness the human impact and the cost to the business.

That needs to change.

Focusing on the middle of the employee experience is a losing strategy if the bookends are broken. Diagnosing failures in hiring and terminations does not require sophisticated tools or significant investment. It requires visibility, discipline, accountability, and a willingness to confront what is actually happening.

Fix the bookends first.

Build trust earlier, preserve it longer, and turn every entry and exit into a source of talent, reputation, loyalty, and long-term value. Until organizations get these moments right, every investment in the middle will continue to be a waste of time, money, and effort.