We put a man on the moon, and brought him home.
We wiped smallpox off the face of the earth.
We read the human genome — all three billion letters of it.
We landed a probe on a comet, half a billion kilometres from home.
We photographed a black hole.
We built vehicles that drive themselves.
And yet…
recruitment still sucks
We went from circling ads in the newspaper to online job boards carrying every opening on earth, and finding a job got harder.
We wired up professional networks and built one-click apply, and turned one opening into a thousand applications nobody reads.
We went remote, and discovered you could now be ghosted from anywhere on earth.
We got enough compute to model the weather, and aimed it at software that rejects you before a human ever looks.
We taught machines to write, and now they screen the letters that other machines wrote.
We built billion-dollar hiring platforms, automated everything for the employer, wrote protections into law — and yet going through a recruitment process remains one of the most dehumanising experiences a person can have.
Somehow, we wasted every single opportunity we had to make things better and made it worse. So much worse.
None of this is hard. None of this is expensive. It persists because nobody who causes it pays for it — and the people who feel it most have no power to change it.
It costs nothing to answer the people who wrote to you. It costs nothing to tell someone the process moved on without them. It costs nothing to treat candidates like the professionals you claim to be looking for.
This is not a difficult problem.
It is an unowned one.
It's time someone owned it.
Recruitment Still Sucks is an open project. We're mapping what's wrong with recruitment and what needs to change.
Why it keeps happening. The systemic drivers — conditions that allow the same failures to emerge, repeat and survive.
How it breaks. The specific, recurring ways recruitment fails. We've identified 50 dysfunctions so far.
What it does to people. Stories from the people who have been through it.