Across industries, the narrative around hiring has grown increasingly fatalistic. “There’s a talent shortage.” “It’s a tough market.” “The right people just aren’t out there.” These refrains have become so routine that few stop to interrogate them. Are these real reflections of external scarcity, or signs of deeper internal dysfunction?
The reality is this: how to hire well is not some elusive formula. Hiring becomes “hard” when companies run broken, inconsistent processes and then blame the market for the results. The failure isn’t out there—it’s often within. What we interpret as market difficulty is usually a sign of misaligned expectations, vague role definitions, and reactive rather than deliberate hiring habits.
This is why hiring is broken. Not because talent has vanished, but because strategic clarity has. Organizations have moved away from structured collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers. The rigor once foundational to hiring has been replaced with templates, tools, and assumptions. The process has become less about solving business problems and more about filling seats.
If companies want better outcomes, they must start by taking accountability for the systems they’ve built. Understanding how to hire well begins with admitting that hiring isn’t inherently difficult—it’s just been allowed to become that way.
"How to hire well starts with knowing what the job actually is."
The Historical Drift: From Craft to Transaction
In the not-so-distant past, especially within agency environments, recruitment was regarded as a craft. Knowing how to hire well wasn’t just about filling roles—it was a strategic discipline that combined market insight, structured processes, and commercial alignment. Good recruiters were not order-takers. They were consultants who added measurable value by advising hiring managers, navigating market realities, and shaping hiring decisions.
Two fundamentals sat at the core of this approach. First, taking a realistic, market-informed job brief—not just a recycled job description, but a bespoke conversation that aligned business needs with what the talent market could actually deliver. Second, defining a clear interview framework from the outset, including timelines, assessment methods, and availability for candidate engagement. These weren’t optional steps; they were non-negotiable.
As internal talent acquisition teams scaled and automation tools became more prevalent, these foundational practices began to erode. Speed, efficiency, and volume took precedence over clarity, accuracy, and depth. Job specs became wishlists. ATS systems were optimized to track activity, not to guide quality. In the process, how to hire well was quietly displaced by how to hire fast—or at least appear to.
This shift from thoughtful, collaborative hiring to high-volume transactional processing lies at the heart of why hiring is broken today. When the hiring process becomes detached from business goals, candidate realities, and market nuance, it no longer functions as a strategic lever. It becomes a compliance task, managed by workflows and metrics that often fail to reflect what makes a hire successful.
Recovering the craft means returning to first principles. It means valuing quality over motion, and structure over assumption. If we want to fix hiring, we have to stop treating it like an administrative function and start treating it like the competitive advantage it once was.
The Job Description Is Where Good Hiring Dies
If there’s a single point in the hiring process where misalignment begins, it’s the job description. Despite its critical role, it is too often treated as an afterthought. In theory, the job description should act as the blueprint for how to hire well—a document that clearly articulates the business need, outlines what success looks like, and sets realistic expectations based on current talent market conditions.
In practice, this rarely happens. Instead, job descriptions are vague, outdated, and aspirational. Many are repurposed from previous roles, loaded with buzzwords, or bloated with wishlist requirements that bear little relation to the actual challenges of the position. Rather than setting direction, they create confusion and false expectations.
A strong hiring process begins with a true job specification, created not in isolation but through direct, informed collaboration between the recruiter and hiring manager. This discussion should go beyond listing duties. It should interrogate questions like:
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What problem does this role solve for the business?
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What are the critical success outcomes in the first 6–12 months?
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Which qualifications or experiences are genuinely non-negotiable, and which can be coached?
Hiring managers are experts in their domain, but often lack visibility into talent market dynamics. That’s where recruiters must step in—not just to facilitate, but to advise. Providing market context, salary benchmarking, and insight into talent supply is not optional. It’s central to how to hire well.
When this alignment is skipped or rushed, everything that follows is compromised. Unqualified candidates are sourced against impossible standards, feedback cycles stretch, and momentum collapses. This disconnect at the very start of the process is a fundamental reason why hiring is broken across so many organizations. If the blueprint is flawed, no amount of effort can fix what comes next.
The Interview Process Is the Real Employer Brand
For all the effort companies put into branding and talent attraction strategies, the real test of credibility lies in the interview process. You cannot claim to know how to hire well if your hiring process lacks structure, consistency, and respect for the candidate experience.
Today’s top candidates assess companies with the same scrutiny used in investor due diligence. They pay close attention to how an organisation behaves, communicates, and follows through. The polished careers page or purpose-driven mission statement means little if it isn’t reflected in the interview experience. When a process is slow, disorganised or vague, it sends a clear message: this business doesn’t value people, or its own time.
And this is where things often unravel. CVs are submitted, but interviews go unscheduled. Hiring managers become unavailable at key stages. Feedback is delayed or, worse, never delivered. These gaps aren’t just operational failings—they are moments that shape perception. In the eyes of top talent, they indicate either a lack of alignment or a lack of care.
A core principle of how to hire well is process ownership. That means:
- Setting timelines at the briefing stage
- Blocking out interview slots in advance
- Committing to feedback within 48 hours
- Establishing SLAs between talent acquisition and the business
When companies do not respect candidates’ time or show urgency, they lose credibility. Candidates disengage, offers get declined, and reputational damage quietly spreads through networks. This kind of drift is a major reason why hiring is broken in today’s market.
Ultimately, the interview process is not just a logistical phase. It is a brand moment, a trust test, and a key competitive differentiator. If it doesn’t reflect the values you claim to hold, the market will notice—and so will your best prospects.
It’s a Process Deficit, Not a Talent Shortage
The phrase “talent shortage” has become the default explanation for hiring struggles across industries. But when you examine the data and the mechanics of most hiring processes, it becomes clear: the problem is not a lack of qualified people. It’s a lack of process discipline and clarity. What many perceive as scarcity is in fact dysfunction. This is a central reason why hiring is broken.
The numbers speak for themselves. LinkedIn’s 2024 data reveals that 70% of job seekers abandon hiring processes due to slow communication or disorganisation. McKinsey has found that structured interviews deliver up to 50% better hiring outcomes. Lever.io’s 2023 research shows that companies using predefined hiring timelines see a 35% higher rate of offer acceptance. None of these metrics point to a talent problem—they point to a systems problem.
Knowing how to hire well means designing and executing a process that respects both candidate and business needs. Yet many organisations fail at this foundational level. Internal talent acquisition teams are often understaffed or inexperienced, forced to manage high volumes with limited support or strategy. Meanwhile, external recruiters are brought in reactively, without collaboration or shared accountability.
This leads to a lack of ownership across the hiring journey. Deadlines slip, feedback loops stall, and top candidates quietly exit. The organisation then misreads this as a market issue rather than an internal failure of execution.
Hiring well is not just a function of sourcing; it’s a matter of orchestration. Building a process that is timely, consistent, and informed by real-world market context is non-negotiable. Until businesses recognise that it is their process—not the market—that is the barrier, they will continue to ask why hiring is hard instead of learning how to hire well.
The real question isn’t whether hiring is inherently difficult—it’s why so many companies continue to make it harder than it needs to be. The truth is, how to hire well is not some hidden knowledge available only to a select few. It is a repeatable, learnable discipline grounded in structure, communication, and context.
To move forward, organisations must stop defaulting to narratives about talent scarcity and start examining their own internal processes. Hiring well starts with crafting job specifications that reflect real business needs—not generic wish lists. It means positioning recruiters as strategic partners who understand both the talent landscape and commercial goals.
It also requires pre-committing to interview frameworks, maintaining velocity in decision-making, and treating candidates with the same care and clarity that would be extended to customers or investors. Because the hiring process is the candidate experience.
At its core, why hiring is broken is not due to a talent drought. It’s due to misaligned expectations, weak process design, and a lack of accountability. Fixing this is not about working harder—it’s about working smarter. If companies are serious about building better teams, they must treat hiring as a strategic function. The path is clear. But the commitment must be real.
Your employer brand starts with your hiring process. Don’t get it wrong.
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