The Rhino in the Room: Recruitment Is Broken

The resume sat between them on the table: eight years of experience, an MBA, references that read like love letters. The hiring manager pushed it aside anyway. "No Workday certification," she said—her seventh rejection for the same reason. Outside, thousands of qualified candidates were refreshing job boards. Inside, her senior finance role sat empty for another week. Welcome to 2025's recruiting paradox.

When "Good Enough" Beats "Great Opportunity"

Here's what's happening beneath the surface. People are scared. Not the dramatic, hand-wringing kind of scared, but the quiet, practical fear that makes you check your bank balance twice before booking a vacation. In uncertain economies, employees with stable jobs become barnacles. They cling. Hard.
A recruiter in Toronto told me she's seeing candidates turn down 15% raises because they're terrified of being "last in, first out" if layoffs come. The math is grim but rational. Stay put, collect a decent severance if things go south. Jump ship, and you're the newest name on the reduction list with nothing to show for it. One candidate literally said, "I'd rather be bored and employed than excited and expendable."

And make no mistake, this isn't apathy. It's survival instinct dressed in business casual. And it's shrinking your talent pool before you even post the job.
The flip side is that the candidates who are available often carry the psychological weight of a recent layoff or even just the news around them, making them hyper-cautious. They're not just evaluating your role. They're stress-testing it against every worst-case scenario their anxiety can conjure. Your "exciting growth opportunity" gets translated as "will this company exist in eighteen months?"

The Unicorn Tax

There's a phrase making the rounds that I can't shake: we're asking for unicorns but paying rhino wages. It's uncomfortably accurate.
I watched a job description cross my desk last month that required five years of Power BI experience, Workday certification, fluency in Python, and "strong stakeholder management skills." The salary? twenty percent below market. The hiring manager was genuinely baffled when we got three applicants (besides the AI ones) in six weeks, none of them suitable.

We've become addicted to specificity. Every nice-to-have has migrated into the must-have column. Certifications that didn't exist two years ago are now deal-breakers. We want people who can hit the ground sprinting, fully formed, requiring close to zero onboarding. It's understandable—training budgets have been slashed, timelines are brutal, and nobody has bandwidth to mentor. But the unintended consequence is a hiring process that filters out 98% of capable humans who could learn that Workday module in a month.
A finance director in Vancouver shared something that stuck with me. His team rejected a candidate with stellar analytical skills because she'd used Tableau instead of Power BI. Three months later, the role was still open. He finally hired someone with Power BI experience who turned out to be mediocre at the actual job. "We optimized for the tool," he admitted, "and forgot about the brain using it."
Here's the kicker. While we're holding out for the perfect match, competitors with slightly lower standards are scooping up the "pretty great" candidates. And those people? They're thriving, because competence and curiosity beat keyword compliance every single time.

The Algorithm Ate My Best Candidate

Let's talk about the robots for a second. AI-driven applicant tracking systems were supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they've become overzealous bouncers at a club we desperately need people to enter.
I know a recruiter who discovered—purely by accident—that her ATS had been auto-rejecting anyone without a master's degree, even though the job description listed it as "preferred, not required." Forty-seven qualified candidates never made it past the digital velvet rope. When she manually reviewed the rejected pile, she found her next three hires.
The problem compounds when candidates figure out the game. Resumes get stuffed with every conceivable keyword, whether accurate or not. You end up with a thousand applications, most of them algorithmic fiction. Sorting through that noise becomes its own full-time job, which means you're spending less time actually finding people and more time drowning in false positives.
One HR lead described it perfectly: "We've created a system where the best candidates get filtered out for being honest, and the worst candidates get through for being good at SEO."

What Actually Works (According to People in the Trenches)

I reached out to my network—recruiters, hiring managers, talent leads across industries—and asked what's moving the needle right now. The answers weren't revolutionary, but they were consistent.

Flexibility is the new signing bonus. Multiple people told me that offering fully remote work or a four-day week attracted talent willing to take a modest pay cut. One tech company in Berlin filled a six-month-old opening within two weeks after adding "work from anywhere" to the listing. The hire was a phenomenal analyst from Portugal who would never have applied for an office-based role.
Transferable skills beat perfect experience. A pharmaceutical company started hiring former teachers for project management roles. Teachers, it turns out, are exceptional at managing chaos, communicating across diverse audiences, and hitting deadlines with limited resources. Retention in that cohort is now higher than their traditional PM hires. The miraculous trick was recognizing that "classroom management" and "stakeholder alignment" are functionally identical skills wearing different name tags.
Training is cheaper than searching. I know, I know—budgets are tight. But consider this: one organization calculated they'd spent $47,000 in recruiter fees, job board postings, and lost productivity trying to fill a niche analytics role. They could have hired someone with 70% of the skills and paid for a three-month Coursera certification ten times over. They eventually did exactly that.
Job descriptions need a diet. Strip out the keyword soup. Focus on core competencies and growth opportunities. One hiring manager rewrote a listing to emphasize what the candidate would learn along with what they needed to already know. Applications almost doubled, and quality improved because the posting attracted curious, ambitious people instead of checkbox-tickers.

A Moment for the Humans

I want to acknowledge something we don't say enough. This is exhausting. You're juggling impossible expectations—fill roles faster, spend less, maintain quality, improve diversity, oh and also fix the candidate experience while you're at it. It's like being asked to bake a wedding cake with half the ingredients and a broken oven.
If you're feeling the weight of it, that's not a personal failing. It's a structural reality. The system is designed to optimize for speed and cost, not for the messy, human work of matching potential to opportunity. You're doing your best inside a framework that wasn't built for the world we're actually living in.
And to the candidates reading this—because I know some of you are—we see you too. The ghosting, the endless rounds of interviews, the job postings that vanish without explanation. It's demoralizing, and you deserve better. We're trying to fix it, one process improvement at a time.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I don't have a silver bullet. If I did, I'd be retired on a beach somewhere instead of writing newsletters at 11 p.m. But here's what I believe: the organizations that will win the talent war are the ones willing to get uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable enough to hire someone who doesn't tick every box. Uncomfortable enough to question whether that certification is truly essential or just a nice-to-have that became dogma. Uncomfortable enough to pay above market for scarce skills instead of hoping the perfect candidate will accept below-market out of desperation.
And maybe, just maybe, uncomfortable enough to admit that our job descriptions have become wish lists written by committees who forgot that actual humans have to read them.
The rhino in the room isn't that there's no talent. It's that we've built a system that makes it nearly impossible for talent and opportunity to find each other. The good news? We built it. Which means we can rebuild it.

Your turn: What's one requirement you could remove from your hardest-to-fill role right now? Not "nice to have"—I mean a current must-have that, if you're honest, someone could learn on the job. Hit reply and tell me. I'm curious if we're all holding onto the same unnecessary anchors.

Keep going. You're doing harder work than most people realize.

Warmly,

HR Letters

P.S. — If you found this useful, forward it to another recruiter who's currently staring at an empty pipeline and questioning their life choices. Misery loves company, but solutions love networks.