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A New Venture for Myself

In lieu of a partner this week, I wanted to plug a new consulting service I am offering (on top of the 100000 other projects I take on)!

Over the last year or two I have travelled the country, speaking to hiring leaders and tech vendors and found a HUGE disconnect.

Executives are demanding we implement AI tools and most people are overwhelmed by the options and using them incorrectly. All while vendors love telling hiring and HR leaders what their problems are and how they can solve them.

Vendors often let me not only sit through demos and have technical conversations with me, but they let me play with their tools in both sandbox and real environments while I’m recruiting. I get to see what shows up in real life use that doesn’t show up in a demo.

I’ve been working with several companies on helping learn what they really need and helping them implement the right tools without any sales pitches or bias, and this is something I am now happy to be able to offer to more people.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by all of the tools, all of the demand, all of the pitches, and the fact that recruiting feels harder as much as these tools are supposed to be making it easier….let’s chat!

This Week’s Breakdown

I had a conversation recently with Emily Mucken on the podcast that hit a nerve in a way I wasn’t expecting. Near the end of a great episode we stumbled on something that feels obvious once you hear it out loud:

We may have optimized Talent Acquisition to death.

At some point over the last decade, recruiting stopped being a craft and became a dashboard.

• Time-to-fill.

• Time-to-hire.

• Pipeline velocity.

• Submission ratios.

• Interview-to-offer conversion.

All important, but also maybe a large contributor to why everything feels worse

Companies got so focused on efficiency that they cut TA functions down to the bone, which took all of the trust, care, and things that made recruiters great with it.

I spoke at TA week in San Diego last week, and I included this conversation into my presentation that was built around a simple thesis:

Every major shift in recruiting changes how we work, almost none of them change what actually works.

During the talk I brought up that the real efficiency metric in recruiting is trust. Low trust creates more work, but for some reason we have optimized everything except trust.

Emily said something simple that honestly stuck with me more than any metric ever has: “I really care. And that’s what got me my numbers.”

She knows she is not the best sourcer, or the flashiest recruiter.Just someone who actually gave a shit about her candidates, team, hiring managers and company.

Which leads to an important question for all of us:

What if the data got worse when we started obsessing over it?

And an even bigger one:

What if we threw the dashboards away for a year…and the data actually got better?

Sounds exactly like the kind of experiment no company would ever approve, but also exactly like the thing that might actually work.

What is your least favorite metric that somebody forces you to collect and you know isn’t really relevant to how good of a job you are doing?

Accrued Time

A weekly check-in on what I’ve got going on behind the scenes, events, projects, and life outside the req pile.

I have been busy and inconsistent on this newsletter to start the year, but the I think You Should Leave Podcast has still been going. I’m behind several episodes to be promoting including Emily’s as mentioned and Jaylyn Jones from DuoLingo

Check out the latest episodes

I also had a wonderful week in San Diego for TA week catching up with some of the titans in the industry. As always, if you are not getting out to live events you should be.

Transform and Unleash are both coming up next month- I will not be in attendance this year, but I do recommend trying to make it to 1.

Cope of the Week

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

If all the tools made this easier… why does it feel harder?

I asked a room full of recruiters at TA Week a simple question:

“Is recruiting harder now… even with all the tools that are supposed to make it easier?”

Almost every hand went up.

Which is… not exactly the ROI slide the AI vendors who sponsored the event were hoping for.

On paper, this job should be smoother than ever:

• Faster sourcing

• Automated scheduling

• AI screening

• Instant data

• Endless dashboards telling us exactly how we’re doing

And yet here we are…

So what gives?

Here’s the uncomfortable answer I keep coming back to:

Most Tools were not created to actually make recruiting better because they were solving the wrong problems to begin with.

Which somehow leaves you doing even more emotional and decision-making work than before, just with prettier software watching you do it.

So if recruiting feels harder right now, it might not mean you’re worse at the job.

It might mean you’re trying to do human work inside a system that keeps optimizing the human part away.

So here’s your cope:

You don’t survive this era by learning every new tool, you survive it by holding onto the part of the job the tools can’t touch.

• Judgment

• Trust

• Care

• The ability to read a room

• The instinct to know when something feels off.

All the things that never show up on a dashboard but still matter the most.

 Forward this to someone in TA who's barely holding it together.