recruitment still sucks

Six interviews, then nothing

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A recruiter, a CMO, and four more executives. Then no rejection, no update, nothing a person could use to close the loop.

Too good for the job, right for a worse one

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

They rang personally instead of using the scheduler. It was to say he was overqualified — then offer him something smaller in the same call.

120 applications, 8% callback

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Six months, a hundred and twenty applications, and no reply at all to nearly half of them.

They rejected her, then posted her video

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The assessment asked for an original video shot in-store. She was rejected on the first of May. Then she saw it on the company’s own account.

Four rounds, five weeks, silence

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every stage professional, every signal positive. Then nothing.

The marketing internship in a basement

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

No website, no reviews, a basement office, and fifteen other people her age waiting in the lobby.

The recruiter who lied to get him in the room

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The job was permanent only. The pitch suggested it might not be. The recruiter was betting that showing up would change his mind.

We said $30 because that's what we used to pay

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The posted wage was not a mistake, and not out of date. The interviewer explained, out loud, that it was bait.

Ten hours for a four-hour task, then nothing

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Told it would take about four hours. It took ten, across two days. Then two weeks of the silence they’d asked him to wait through — and more after that.

The company that said it pays candidates, and didn't

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Fifteen-odd requirements sold as a couple of hours, which took days — from an employer that had publicly stated it pays for every stage regardless of outcome.

A plan they could implement without hiring him

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Six or seven hours of unpaid work producing a full performance-improvement plan — code review, staff conversations, engineering changes.

He capped it at two hours, as instructed

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The brief said spend no more than two hours. He spent two hours, flagged what he’d left out, and was rejected for leaving it out.

Three hours, six endpoints, and a frontend from scratch

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A recruiter sent a zip file with a three-hour budget for work that could not be done in three hours. He worked out what the exercise was really measuring.

Contribute a story

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Credits

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This site is made of other people’s work. Here is whose.

Photographs

Several of these have been cropped and colour-graded for the page. Where a licence requires it, the change is noted and the same terms are passed on.

The moon — Buzz Aldrin carrying the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package to its deployment site, 20 July 1969. Photographed by Neil Armstrong on a 70mm lunar surface camera. NASA, frame AS11-40-5942. Public domain. Cropped and colour-graded.

Systemic drivers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The same failures turn up in different companies, in different countries, in different decades. Different people, same outcome. That is not what accidents look like.

Underneath them sit conditions — how organisations are run, what they value, what they distrust, what they reward, and what they have learned to tolerate. Not malice, not stupidity. Conditions that make certain failures more likely, and keep making them likely long after the people involved have moved on.

The recruitment census

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone has a story about a bad hiring process. Almost nobody has the numbers.

This is a census, not a survey. Every question is a fixed choice, nothing is written in prose, and none of it asks who you are. It takes about four minutes.

We run it every year, so the answers can be compared against last year’s — which is the only way to know whether any of this is getting better.

The recruitment dysfunction index

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Recruitment Still Sucks Manifesto

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I

People are unique. Jobs are not.

Hiring has treated it the other way round, and everything broken follows from that.

II

Respect is not conditional.

We uphold it before we ask for it. Every interaction with a candidate or an employer deserves an answer. Silence is a choice we do not make.

III

Transparency is not optional.

Everything needed to start is on the table before anyone applies — the pay, the stages of the process, the work as it truly is and where it leads, and a factual representation of who we are and what we bring to the table. No one should have to enter a process to discover what they are entering.

You're in

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We have your email. Nothing else is required of you.

If you ticked a box, we will write to you about it. If you did not, you will just get the newsletter, which is the point of the newsletter.

You can leave at any time, and we will not make it difficult.

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