Hiring is broken.

Why Your Best Candidate Never Applies

The person who'd transform your business never finished reading your job ad. They stopped at paragraph two.

I surveyed 60 companies and over 100 live vacancies in the past year. 87% of those job descriptions weren't written wrong by accident — they were diluted by process. And it's not a one-year anomaly. I've reviewed thousands of job ads over 25 years, and the pattern holds: every internal review stage waters a role down a little further. The hiring manager writes something with actual personality. HR makes it compliant. Legal makes it safe. By the time it's published, nothing's left that would make a genuinely great candidate want it.

The cost is specific. The candidates with the most options read a flattened, jargon-heavy ad and think: if this is how they communicate before I've even started, I don't want to find out what it's like after. They don't apply. They don't complain. They disappear — to a company whose ad didn't waste their time. Somewhere in that 87%, a genuinely good person quietly decided you weren't worth the risk. That's the part that should actually bother you — not the metrics.

This is fixable in a week if you're still small enough to move fast. It's a much slower fight if you're not.

You don't have a talent shortage. You have a dilution problem.

If this is costing you candidates, we should talk.

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AI Can Screen Faster Than You. It Still Can't Choose Like You.

AI can read ten thousand CVs before lunch. It still can't tell you which one of them would have changed your business.

Speed was never the actual problem in hiring. Judgement was. Hand the screening to a machine and you've automated the wrong bottleneck — you'll reject people faster, and still miss the one who mattered.

The companies who win this decade won't be the ones who screen fastest. They'll be the ones who still know how to look.

If this is costing you candidates, we should talk.

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The Career Currency No One Taught You

You were taught one currency: competence. Be good, get paid, get promoted. Nobody mentioned it would stop being enough.

Competence still gets you the job. It doesn't keep it. The currency that's actually appreciating right now is visibility — being known for what you can do, not just doing it quietly and hoping someone notices.

The redundancy lists are full of competent people. None of them were the loudest in the room. I'm telling you this because I don't want you to end up on one.

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The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong

Companies talk about the cost of a bad hire in HR meetings. They almost never talk about it in the boardroom, where it belongs.

The U.S. Department of Labor puts the average cost of a bad hire at 30% of first-year salary. SHRM puts replacement cost for a senior role at up to 200% of annual salary. One analysis puts the total exposure — hiring, onboarding, severance, lost productivity, client damage — at the equivalent of nearly a quarter of a million dollars per incident. That's not a statistic. That's a budget line that doesn't exist in most companies because nobody built it.

74% of employers admit to hiring the wrong person. 80% of employee turnover traces back to poor hiring decisions. You are almost certainly already paying this bill. You just don't know where it's sitting in your numbers.

The financial hit is only part of it. Managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. When a manager spends their time babysitting a bad hire, that damage lands on everyone beneath them. The bad hire isn't just consuming their own salary — they're neutralising the person above them. Which cascades down.

This is not an HR problem. It's a business problem being managed by the wrong people, at the wrong level, with the wrong brief.

The bill for getting hiring right is smaller than the one you're already running up getting it wrong.

Let's talk.

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The Interview Is Broken Too

Most interviews are a performance review of the wrong thing.

The candidate prepares. The interviewer prepares. Both show up and perform a version of themselves optimised for the next 45 minutes. Everyone leaves feeling broadly positive. Six months later you're having a conversation you didn't see coming.

The interview wasn't designed to reveal capability. It was designed to confirm a decision you'd already half-made from the CV. The questions are too safe. The format rewards polish and fluency. Those are useful traits. They are not the same as capability, judgement or fit.

I've sat in thousands of interviews over 25 years. The candidates who impressed the room most weren't always the best hires. The ones the process flagged as risks sometimes turned out to be the best people anyone brought in.

If your interview process makes everyone feel good walking out, it isn't working.

Let's talk.

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Your Best People Are Already Being Called

There's a conversation happening right now that you're not part of.

Someone is calling your best person. Not the one you're worried about. The one you haven't thought about at all. The one who turns up, delivers, never complains, never asks for much. The one you haven't checked in with in months because they never give you a reason to.

That's exactly who gets called.

Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report put global employee engagement at 21% — matching the lowest levels seen during the pandemic. The people still engaged, still performing, still caring — they're visible to the outside market even when they're invisible inside your business. Headhunters don't go looking for the disengaged. They go looking for the exceptional. And the exceptional are easier to find than you think.

Companies don't lose their best people because something goes dramatically wrong. They lose them because nothing goes right enough. The conversations stop. The recognition dries up. The assumption sets in that because someone isn't complaining, they're fine. They're not always fine. They're just quiet about it.

When the market tightens and competitors get aggressive, the people with the most options move first. Those are always the people you can least afford to lose.

I've watched this play out more times than I can count. A business builds momentum, gets comfortable, stops having the conversations that matter. Then three of their best people are gone inside six months. The business doesn't collapse. But the momentum does. And momentum, once lost, is brutally hard to rebuild.

Retention isn't a culture initiative. It's a competitive strategy. And it starts with a conversation you should probably be having this week.

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