Your Recruitment Problem Might Not Be a Recruitment Problem

By Christopher ED Graham FCIPD, ACTP

When hiring goes wrong, Talent Acquisition is often where the problem becomes visible. That doesn't necessarily mean it is where the problem started.

I have spent nearly three decades working across recruitment and Talent Acquisition, including executive search, agency recruitment, RPO and senior internal TA leadership roles across different countries, industries and organisations. I have seen recruitment functions that were excellent, some that were poor, and plenty somewhere in between.

I have also seen recruitment blamed for an extraordinary number of problems it didn't create.

When a senior role has been open for six months, the natural conclusion is that there is a recruitment problem. If the preferred candidate declines, candidates repeatedly withdraw or the shortlist isn't producing the expected hire, attention inevitably turns towards Talent Acquisition.

Sometimes that is entirely justified. Recruiters should be accountable for understanding their markets, identifying relevant candidates, communicating properly, challenging unrealistic briefs and providing useful market intelligence. If a recruiter or search firm takes weeks to produce a credible shortlist without good reason, then recruitment performance should absolutely be questioned.

But after nearly three decades working around hiring, I think there is a more useful question to ask before reaching that conclusion:

Where did the problem actually start?

The problems we see in recruitment today certainly didn't begin with AI, Covid or even the latest generation of recruitment technology. Anyone who has worked in the industry for long enough will recognise many of them from decades ago. Slow decision-making, changing specifications, unrealistic salary expectations, managers sitting on CVs and candidates disappearing while businesses debate what they actually want are hardly new phenomena.

A useful pre-Covid example comes from Hong Kong. In 2018, research reported by the CIPD found that 72% of jobseekers surveyed had accepted an alternative job because their preferred employer took too long to make a decision. More than half had waited over a month after interviewing to receive an answer.

What makes that data interesting today isn't that it identified a new problem. It is that, eight years later, many of the complaints sound remarkably familiar.

Read almost any current discussion about recruitment and candidates still describe excessive interview stages, weeks without feedback and applications disappearing into systems. Recruiters still describe managers sitting on CVs, interview feedback taking days or weeks, offers becoming stuck in approval processes and roles changing after recruitment has already begun. At the same time, recruiters can now find themselves dealing with hundreds or even thousands of applications while managing numerous vacancies simultaneously.

During those eight years, organisations have invested heavily in Applicant Tracking Systems, automation, scheduling technology, recruitment analytics and now AI. Yet many of the underlying problems remain.

That should tell us something.

Technology has changed enormously. Recruitment processes have become more digitised. We have more data, more automation and more tools than we did twenty or thirty years ago. But technology cannot fix a hiring manager who won't make a decision, an unrealistic salary, a confused brief, internal politics, poor workforce planning or a business that simply doesn't know what it wants.

Perhaps some of the biggest problems we continue to describe as recruitment problems were never really recruitment problems in the first place.

Faster does not necessarily mean better

There is an understandable obsession with speed in recruitment. Time-to-fill and time-to-hire remain common measures of TA performance, and nobody benefits from a process that takes longer than necessary. But speed by itself tells us surprisingly little about whether a recruitment process is actually good.

An organisation can reject an excellent candidate within 24 hours. It can rush a Director through two superficial interviews and make the wrong appointment within ten days. Equally, if you are appointing a Regional CFO, CTO, Managing Director or Partner, I would be considerably more interested in whether the organisation has properly understood and assessed the individual than whether it managed to complete the process within an arbitrary number of days.

An executive search taking several months isn't necessarily inefficient if the market has been mapped properly, credible candidates have been identified and assessed thoroughly, and the organisation ultimately appoints someone capable of solving the problem for which they were hired.

The useful question is therefore not simply how quickly the organisation recruits. It is where the bottlenecks occur, why they exist and whether the time being spent actually improves the hiring decision.

Every organisation will be different. If a recruiter takes three weeks to produce a shortlist for a relatively straightforward position, investigate recruitment. If the shortlist was delivered within a week but then sat with the hiring manager for another ten days, the diagnosis is different. If candidates subsequently wait for feedback, another executive cannot make themselves available for a fortnight and compensation then requires another round of approvals, attributing the entire elapsed time to Talent Acquisition tells us very little about TA performance.

The same principle applies to a senior search. A Regional CFO appointment might take three months, but how much of that time was actually spent identifying and assessing candidates? How much was spent coordinating the Group CFO, CEO, HR leadership and regional stakeholders, waiting for feedback or deciding whether yet another stakeholder needed to meet the preferred candidate?

Instead of simply asking why recruitment took 50 days or why an executive search took four months the better question is where was the time actually spent, and did it add anything to the quality of the decision?

Technology can help identify those bottlenecks. It cannot necessarily solve them.

Recruitment is still about people

This is also where I think some of the current discussion around AI and recruitment is heading in the wrong direction.

Recruitment fundamentally involves people recruiting other people. Someone has to talk to a candidate and understand what they have actually done, what they personally delivered rather than simply participated in, why they made particular career decisions, what motivates them, where their strengths and weaknesses lie, what kind of environment suits them and whether the opportunity being discussed genuinely makes sense.

A CV cannot tell you all of that. Neither can a LinkedIn profile.

At senior level, that distinction becomes even more important. A CV can tell me that someone has been a CFO. It can tell me they have worked internationally, led a finance function or completed a transformation programme. AI can summarise that information extremely efficiently.

What it cannot establish from those words alone is what the individual actually did.

Did the Regional CFO inherit a well-performing finance organisation or rebuild a dysfunctional one? What was the scale and complexity? How much of the transformation did they personally lead? How did they operate with the CEO and board? How did they handle disagreement? What went wrong? What did they learn from it? Would the people who worked for them want to work for them again?

The same applies to a CTO, Partner or regional functional leader. That requires conversation, context, questioning and judgement.

One of the skills experienced recruiters develop is the ability to join the dots. Someone may never have held the exact title being searched for but may already have been doing essentially the same work. A Partner from an adjacent consulting practice may have exactly the client relationships and commercial experience required. A CFO from another industry may have led precisely the kind of transformation the organisation needs. A technology leader may have built something highly relevant without using the fashionable terminology that happens to appear in the job description.

AI should not be given responsibility for candidate screening or selection decisions. Those decisions require human judgement and human accountability.

There is nothing wrong with using technology to support search. Recruiters have used keywords, Boolean searches, database filters, locations and job titles for decades. If 1,000 people apply for a position, using sensible criteria to make that population manageable is inevitable. AI can also help recruiters search information, organise it and surface potentially relevant profiles.

But searching is not selecting.

There is a fundamental difference between technology saying, “Here are people you may want to look at,” and technology deciding, “These people should not be considered.”

The latter risks recreating one of the oldest problems associated with Applicant Tracking Systems using considerably more sophisticated technology: potentially good people being overlooked because their experience wasn't expressed using the words the system expected to find.

The current job market makes that distinction increasingly important. AI has made it easier for candidates to tailor CVs and applications and apply for substantially more positions. At the same time, a difficult employment market means there are many genuinely capable people looking for work. Employers can therefore receive enormous numbers of increasingly polished applications, and high application volume does not automatically mean hundreds of unsuitable people and five good ones.

Some organisations are trying to deal with that volume using TA teams that have themselves been substantially reduced.

That creates an obvious temptation: use more AI to compensate for having fewer recruiters.

But if AI helps candidates create applications, another AI system screens those applications, algorithms rank the candidates and automation moves them through the workflow, the process may become extremely efficient while becoming progressively less human.

At some point it is worth asking who is actually recruiting.

Automate the administration, not the recruitment

I am certainly not arguing against recruitment technology. Quite the opposite. There is a substantial amount of work surrounding recruitment that should be automated.

Interview scheduling, reminders, routine candidate communications, reporting, data entry and repetitive workflow are administrative activities. There is little value in paying experienced recruiters to spend hours moving information between systems or coordinating calendars if technology can do it reliably.

The purpose of removing that work should be to give recruiters more time to recruit.

If AI and automation save ten hours of administration each week, those hours can be spent speaking to candidates, understanding markets, assessing experience, advising hiring managers and building relationships. That is a genuine productivity improvement.

The problem comes when the productivity gain is immediately converted into lower TA headcount. The remaining recruiters manage more requisitions and more applications, eventually lack the capacity to assess them properly, and the organisation then introduces still more automation to compensate.

We repeatedly hear that AI should remove repetitive work so employees can concentrate on higher-value human activity. Recruitment provides a very simple opportunity to demonstrate that principle in practice.

Automate the administration and let recruiters recruit.

An Applicant Tracking System also shouldn't be confused with a CRM. An ATS is principally designed to manage requisitions, applications, workflow and compliance. A CRM is designed to maintain relationships with people who may not be applicants today but could become relevant months or years later.

If an organisation says it wants recruiters to develop genuine talent networks while equipping them primarily with technology designed to process current applications, there is an obvious mismatch between the stated objective and the operating model.

The objective should be less administration and more recruitment, not less recruitment.

Know what you want before asking someone to find it

Even an excellent recruiter with appropriate technology and sufficient capacity cannot compensate indefinitely for a business that doesn't know what it wants.

This becomes particularly expensive at senior level.

Consider a search for a Regional CFO. The business agrees the brief, compensation and experience required, and the search begins. The market is mapped, credible candidates are approached and several are interviewed. Three weeks into the process, another senior stakeholder becomes involved and decides the successful candidate must also have led a major ERP transformation. Someone else decides significant M&A experience is essential. Another questions whether the person really needs to come from the same industry.

Suddenly, candidates who met the original specification no longer meet a specification that didn't exist when the search started.

The recruiter can go back to the market and start again, but that isn't evidence that recruitment failed. The business has changed the problem it is asking recruitment to solve.

Sometimes that is justified. Good recruitment is partly a process of learning from the market. A recruiter or search consultant may discover that the capability the business expected to find is exceptionally scarce, that compensation assumptions are wrong or that the original combination of requirements simply does not exist in sufficient numbers. That intelligence should be fed back and the strategy adjusted.

But changing a plan because new evidence challenges an assumption is very different from constantly moving the goalposts because the stakeholders were never aligned in the first place.

This is why the work before the search begins matters. What problem is the new CFO, CTO, Partner or regional leader actually being hired to solve? What experience is genuinely essential and what is merely desirable? What does success look like after twelve or twenty-four months? What is the organisation realistically prepared to pay, and who actually needs to assess the person before a decision can be made?

The job description should reflect that reality rather than becoming an accumulation of every characteristic every stakeholder would ideally like to have. Compensation should be benchmarked against the external market and, wherever practical, salary and benefits should be transparent enough that everyone understands the parameters before significant time is invested.

The assessment process should also be agreed before the search begins. At Director, Partner and C-suite level, several stakeholders may legitimately need to meet the candidate. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The issue is whether those conversations have a clear purpose and whether everyone involved understands what they are assessing.

Five purposeful executive conversations conducted efficiently may produce an excellent candidate experience.

Five interviews followed by an unexpected sixth because nobody can agree what they want is something else entirely.

The external market gets a vote

Compensation provides a simple illustration of why recruitment cannot be viewed in isolation.

An organisation can determine what it would like to pay a Regional CFO, CTO or Partner. It cannot determine what credible candidates in the external market will accept.

If people with the scale, experience and track record required are earning materially more than the approved package, the recruiter can explain the market and discuss alternatives. The business can reconsider the specification, level, compensation or geography, look more seriously at internal succession, or accept that the search will be extremely difficult.

What the recruiter cannot do is make the external market agree with an internally approved salary simply because that is what the budget says.

Employer reputation works in much the same way.

In one global organisation where I led regional Talent Acquisition, senior leadership had ambitions to reposition what had historically been perceived as a telecommunications company as a leading technology employer. Internally, the aspiration was to compete for talent with some of the world's most recognised technology companies.

I understood the strategic ambition. The difficulty was the external reality.

You don't become a competitor to Google or Microsoft for talent simply because leadership decides that they are now your competitive set.

The organisation had its own view of its technology, future direction and employer proposition. Candidates looking at the company from outside had their own view, and the two were not necessarily the same. Nor could the organisation automatically compete with leading technology businesses on compensation, employer brand, perceived innovation and career opportunity while simultaneously expecting to attract the same calibre of talent quickly.

This is something leaders who have spent much of their careers inside one organisation can occasionally underestimate. They understandably know the business from the inside. They see its technology, strategy, investment and ambitions. The external candidate sees the brand through an entirely different lens.

Candidates have a vote too.

This is where experienced TA professionals earn their place in the strategic conversation. They should understand how the external talent market perceives the organisation, what competitors are paying, where particular capabilities sit and whether the hiring expectations are realistic.

That expertise is not interchangeable either. Different markets have their own organisations, terminology, compensation structures, networks and candidate behaviours. Someone who understands investment banking is not automatically the right recruiter for a highly technical engineering population, just as someone whose experience is primarily graduate recruitment is not automatically equipped to conduct a CFO or Partner search.

At senior level, market knowledge means considerably more than knowing where people work. It includes understanding organisational structures, reporting lines, career paths, compensation, competitors and often the history behind why particular people have moved—or haven't moved.

Good recruiters accumulate that knowledge and judgement over years. Technology can make them considerably more effective, but it cannot instantly manufacture that experience.

Horses for courses.

Diagnose the problem properly

Recruitment sits surprisingly far downstream from many of the decisions that ultimately determine whether a hire succeeds. Workforce planning, budgets, organisational design, succession, compensation, employer reputation, management behaviour, timing, internal politics and business strategy can all eventually arrive at the recruiter's desk in the form of an urgent Director, Partner or C-suite vacancy.

If the retirement or departure of a senior executive was entirely predictable but there is no credible internal successor, for example, the problem may have started years before anybody opened a requisition. If there is no approved budget, the search shouldn't have started. If the compensation is materially below market, the recruiter cannot manufacture candidates at the required price. If the stakeholders repeatedly change the specification, going back to the market for a third time isn't evidence of poor sourcing.

Equally, if the recruiter doesn't understand the market, cannot identify credible candidates, communicates badly or fails to challenge obviously unrealistic assumptions, then improve the recruitment function.

That is the point.

Diagnose the problem before deciding who owns it.

TA becomes highly visible because it manages the hiring process, but visibility is not the same as causation. The purpose isn't to protect recruitment from scrutiny. Recruitment should be scrutinised. The purpose is to understand the entire system well enough to know what is actually failing.

Know what problem you are trying to solve and what kind of person you realistically need to solve it. Understand the market before setting expectations. Pay appropriately. Put recruiters with relevant experience on the work and give them sufficient capacity to do it properly. Agree a sensible assessment process before starting, make sure the stakeholders understand their roles and don't move the goalposts every other week.

Use technology aggressively to remove administration and intelligently to support research, but keep screening, assessment and selection where the accountability belongs, with people.

Then listen when the recruiter tells you something about the market that you weren't expecting to hear.

If all of that is in place and recruitment still isn't delivering, then you may genuinely have a recruitment problem.

Until then, it is worth looking a little further upstream.

Because whether you are hiring an analyst or a Global CFO, recruitment is ultimately a people business. The systems, data and technology should make it easier for recruiters to do the one thing at the centre of the profession that cannot simply be reduced to workflow:

Talk to people, understand people and recruit people.

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