Tired of the Excuses — It’s Time to Make Hiring Human Again
Every week, my feeds looks like déjà vu.
“We’re not ignoring you — we’re drowning.”
“The market is brutal right now.”
“We had 1,000+ applications in 24 hours.”
“We can only get back to people we are really interested in”
Yeah, no kidding. If you’re tired of drowning — maybe stop drilling holes in the boat.
If you have to post the same job ten times to get a fill, you’re not recruiting. You’re acquiring. You’re fishing, not developing.
And you’re burning out the VERY PEOPLE who build your company’s future — your recruiters.
For years, I was in that cycle. Everything was a numbers game:
Thousands of candidates in the ATS
Job posts on repeat
Recruiting teams strapped to target numbers only
Recruiting spend through the roof
Teams filling 100 jobs a week, but only growing the business by 10%
I was chasing “more” and missing better. Then one day, I realized something that hit harder than a Monday morning all-hands meeting:
The numbers are BS.
Busy doesn’t mean productive.
More candidates doesn’t mean more hires.
And more tools don’t mean better recruiting.
Now AI’s in the mix, and it’s supposed to be our “golden goose.” Except instead of fixing the system, it’s compounding the chaos. We’ve automated the noise. We’ve traded relationships for reach and called it progress. Here’s the truth: AI doesn’t replace recruiters — it exposes them and it exposes your brand and business.
If your process is broken, AI makes it break faster. What’s missing isn’t another tool. It’s training. Not a “sit-with-Sarah-for-a-day” kind of training. Not another policy PowerPoint from HR. Real recruiting training — the kind that teaches people how to find, engage, and build relationships again and how to use the tools to take away the RIGHT white noise.
Job boards aren’t the problem. How we use them is. They were meant to be one tool in the box, not the entire toolbox. Recruiting was never supposed to be a volume game, It was always a connection game. And let’s not ignore the ripple effect here — entry-level opportunities are disappearing. The jobs that used to teach people how to recruit, how to sell, how to build relationships… are being automated, outsourced, and forgotten (over 3 million of them in the last 12-15 years) We’re not just losing candidates. We’re losing the pipeline for our own profession.
So here’s the question that keeps me up at night—> How long are we going to keep chasing “efficiency” while talent, opportunity, and trust slip through our fingers?
At some point, we’ve got to stop counting applications and start building recruiters again, because when we lose that… we lose the human part of hiring entirely.
Make hiring human again.
Or as I like to say… stop trying to automate empathy.