Head I Lose, Tails You Win

This Week’s Breakdown

Recruiting is fun because it’s basically just choosing which group of people you want mad at you this week!

Last week, my friend and one of the first guests on my upcoming “Is This Still A Good Time” podcast (wait what????) Bonnie Dilber ran this fantastic poll on Linkedin about how long to keep a job posted.

The question was straightforward, the results and 200+ comments debating it were not.

A similar thing happened when I ran this poll last year about how many candidates should be interviewed by a recruiter.

If you’ve been recruiting for more than a week, you’ve probably realized something that took me far too long to accept: this job is one long lose/lose scenario.

Newton’s laws of recruitment state: every action we take has an equal and opposite over reaction.

• Post a role and close it fast? “You didn’t give people enough time to apply.”

• Leave it open longer? “You’re wasting time wading through hundreds of applications you’ll never read.”

• Interview more people to be thorough? “You clearly don’t know what you want.”

• Interview fewer people to be efficient? “You’re shutting people out without a fair shot.”

What these polls really show is that whichever choice you make, someone in the comments will act like there’s one objectively correct answer and you’re just too lazy, heartless, or clueless to see it. Though their argument is almost always made because they’re imagining how they would prefer it to work if they were the candidate… which is fair, except that your job isn’t to design a process for one person’s convenience.

The reality? Recruiting is nothing but trade-offs.

• More fairness means more time.

• More time means more drop-off.

• More efficiency means more misses.

• More interviews means more burnout for you and the hiring team.

We all want to build a perfect, fair, bias-free, quick-moving, budget-friendly, transparent hiring process. But those levers all pull in different directions. You can’t have them all maxed out at once.

So what do we do? We make the call with the information and resources we have right now. We communicate why. And then we log on tomorrow and do it all over again.

Because the only real “wrong” move in recruiting… is pretending there’s a perfect one…Well that, or whatever doesn’t please all 300 applicants at once.

Recruited in the Wild

Seen on LinkedIn, overheard in Slack, or posted without shame.

Is this post and comment section on LinkedIn the recruiting equivalent of the Anything except therapy meme?

The comments of course became a TED Talk convention about “the science” of when to interview. Morning versus afternoon. Monday versus Thursday. Going first versus going last. I half expected someone to drop a lunar calendar and start mapping interview success to moon phases.

I know everyone is looking for an edge, but it really feels sometimes like candidates will do anything but just accept that getting a job is hard, prep for the interview, and show up ready to crush it.

If you spend more time plotting your interview on a bias chart than practicing your answers, you’re probably solving for the wrong variable.

They want silver bullets. Perfect timing. “Life hacks” that beat the system. But us recruiters of course know that’s not how it works. That won’t stop the LinkedIn sales bros from making posts about it though.

Sometimes the 1% edge is great. Most of the time, the 99% edge is just being qualified, prepared, and not a jerk in the interview.

Horror Stories

True recruiting nightmares from the field.
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(All stories in this section are submitted anonymously and potentially edited for clarity, removal of trackable information, and length to fit in the newsletter. I can not verify the truth of any of them)

A colleague of mine called a candidate for their scheduled interview. Easy, routine, nothing out of the ordinary… until about 15 minutes later when their phone rang again.

It wasn’t the candidate.

It was his girlfriend.

She skipped right past hello and went straight into interrogation mode. Who are you? Why are you calling my man? What’s going on here?

My colleague explained that she was calling about a job interview, that this was a professional conversation, and nothing else.

Didn’t matter. The girlfriend wasn’t having it. She told my colleague, in no uncertain terms, to never reach out to that candidate again.

This reader did not let me know if the candidate was hired anyway or not! I’ll assume this was the end for them.

Cope of the Week

Because it’s either this or scream into a pillow.

This week’s cope? Accept that recruiting is one long game of “you’re doing it wrong.”

Last week it was Bonnie’s poll about job posting timelines. This week it’s an entire comment section arguing the exact lunar phase in which to schedule an interview. Next week it’ll be something else.

Every time, the tone is the same: There is one correct way to do this and you, dear recruiter, clearly don’t know it.

But just like the recruiters who can’t stop giving hiring rules, they’re just one person’s preference dressed up as universal truth. Most of the time, they come from imagining how they would want the process to work if they were the candidate. Fair? Sure. Practical? Not when you’re hiring for dozens of roles with different timelines, stakeholders, and constraints.

You can’t build a process that optimizes for everyone’s personal ideal. Not candidates. Not hiring managers. Not even your own sanity.

So instead of chasing the “perfect” answer, the exact right job posting length, the scientifically optimal interview slot, the magical candidate to interview ratio, pick the option that works best for your role, your resources, and your hiring team right now.

Communicate it. Own it. Move forward.

Because the real trap isn’t making the wrong call. It’s believing there’s one you can make that’ll please all 300 applicants, 5 interviewers, and the internet at the same time.

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