A01Ghosting
A party silently abandons an active recruitment interaction rather than explicitly closing it.
The recruitment dysfunction index
We have identified 50 recurrent failure modes across eight categories.
Here are the first 24 — the ones without which you cannot describe how recruitment fails. The rest are named and waiting for publication.
This is a taxonomy of failures, not a list of things we dislike. Seven interviews are not inherently dysfunctional; seven interviews that produce no decision-changing evidence are. Each entry is defined so it can be disagreed with, and eventually measured.
Transparency, information and closure
A02Recruitment Information Asymmetry
An employer requires a candidate to progressively commit information, evidence, time or effort without providing the material information reasonably necessary for the candidate to make an equally informed decision about entering or continuing the process.
A03Feedback Failure
After a candidate has materially participated in evaluation, the employer fails to provide meaningful information about why the candidate did not progress or was rejected.
Role specification and requirements
B01Job Specification Failure
A job specification fails to define and communicate the role, its requirements, responsibilities, constraints, conditions or meaningful differentiators with enough clarity and specificity for reasonable candidates to judge whether they should apply.
B03Recruitment Contract Drift
A material condition on which a candidate reasonably decided to enter or continue a recruitment process changes without the change being clearly disclosed and presented as a revised proposition requiring the candidate's informed reconsideration.
B05Credential Inflation
Degrees, certifications, years of experience or other credentials are required beyond what can be reasonably justified by the work.
B07Perfect Candidate Syndrome
The employer defines an implausibly broad or deep combination of requirements instead of distinguishing the capabilities genuinely necessary for success in the role.
Evaluation validity and measurement
C01Recruitment Theatre
A recruitment activity, stage, process or representation is performed primarily to create the appearance that a legitimate recruitment function is occurring rather than to fulfil the function it ostensibly exists to provide.
C02Process Without Purpose
A recruitment activity exists without a defined, relevant value or information need and without a defensible relationship between the activity and the outcome it is intended to support.
C03Assessment Reality Gap
The conditions, tasks, tools, constraints or behaviours used to evaluate a candidate differ materially from those of the actual work in ways that weaken the assessment's ability to predict job performance.
C05Interview Loop Inflation
Interview rounds are added beyond those originally disclosed or reasonably expected without a distinct, relevant, decision-changing information need and without the candidate's informed agreement to the additional commitment.
C06Take-home Exercise Abuse
A recruitment process requires substantial asynchronous candidate work in a way that transfers disproportionate cost to the candidate, creates non-comparable evaluation conditions, or enables uncompensated extraction of commercially valuable work.
C07Unvalidated Proxy Assessment
Performance on a test, puzzle, psychometric instrument, personality measure, cognitive assessment or other proxy is used as evidence of job capability without sufficient independent evidence that the measure validly predicts the capability or outcome for which it is being used.
C08Interpersonal Impression Bias
Appearance, personality, communication style, charisma, confidence, rapport, cultural familiarity, attractiveness or other interpersonal impressions influence judgments of professional capability beyond their legitimate relevance to the role.
Bias and irrelevant signal
D01Culture Fit Abuse
'Culture fit', or equivalent subjective compatibility criteria, are used to justify hiring decisions that cannot be substantiated against role-relevant requirements, including decisions influenced by similarity preference, conformity or prejudice.
D02Name Bias
A candidate's name influences evaluation independently of job-relevant evidence.
D03Nationality Bias
Nationality or perceived national origin influences evaluation without legitimate role relevance.
D05Age Bias
Actual or perceived age influences evaluation independently of role capability.
D06Gender Bias
Gender or perceived gender influences evaluation independently of role capability.
D07Ethnicity Bias
Actual or perceived ethnicity influences evaluation independently of role capability.
Decision and governance
E01Decision Ownership Failure
Decision authority within a recruitment process is absent, unclear, duplicated, improperly delegated or assigned to participants without a distinct and legitimate decision responsibility, resulting in unnecessary evaluation, delay, conflicting judgments, or decisions for which nobody is meaningfully accountable.
E02Governance Failure
The organisation cannot adequately explain, own, audit, evaluate or revise why its recruitment system works the way it does.
E05Recruitment Process Design Failure
The recruitment process has not been deliberately structured around information needs, decision ownership, evidence reuse, stage purpose and handoffs, causing ad-hoc evaluation, repeated fact gathering, inconsistent preparation or unnecessary synchronous interaction.
Candidate access, treatment, data and commitment
H02Recruitment Conduct Failure
An employer fails to exercise reasonable responsibility for the candidate's time, effort, conditions and ability to participate meaningfully in interactions the employer controls, including by transferring the cost or consequences of employer-side failures onto the candidate or continuing an interaction after its conditions have become materially compromised.