There’s Got To Be A Better Way To Hire

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

‍Most senior leaders believe they have good recruiting practices because the numbers look fine. Time‑to‑fill is acceptable, requisitions are moving, and offers are getting accepted. From the C‑suite vantage point, hiring appears efficient, scalable, and “working.” Those metrics, however, tell you what’s easy to measure, not what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the process.

‍ Executives don’t see:

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

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

• The stellar 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 executives 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 are already forming judgments about whether leadership is competent, whether the culture is trustworthy, and whether the organization lives up to the principles it publicly espouses.

Just as with terminations, leaders are insulated from the lived experience. Talent Acquisition has been delegated, automated, and abstracted to the point where executives rarely witness the human impact and the cost to the business.

The Executive Blind Spot

‍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. The resulting candidate drop-off rate during application can be as high as 70% for some systems.

• Long Response Times – Candidates regularly wait many 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 report 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 from Different People in the Process – Recruiters, hiring managers, and interview panelists 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 it’s one that candidates remember and share.

‍The consequences of poor hiring experiences rarely show up neatly on a single dashboard. Instead, they manifest over time in ways that are hard 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.

‍ A Leadership Imperative

‍Organizations don’t hire poorly because they don’t care. They hire poorly because the Talent Acquisition function has become transactional, automated (we haven’t even talked about what AI is doing to the candidate experience!), and distanced from leadership.

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

There is, unquestionably, a better way to hire people, and it starts with deciding that the experience actually matters.

If you need help identifying the specific hiring practices that drive candidate drop-off in your process and diminishing your candidate experience and brand, please reach out.

‍ ‍