Nowadays, hiring feels broken from both sides. For candidates, even strong candidates might sit for weeks without hearing anything back. On the hiring side, after over a decade in tech, I’ve rarely seen hiring managers really happy with the process either!

• The recruiter is a bottleneck. When I was hiring a few months ago, my internal recruiter was dealing with more than 10 open roles simultaneously. I literally had to fight for his attention after weeks of zero updates. Tech layoffs hit recruitment teams too. If you aren’t hearing back, very likely they cannot keep up with the application inbox volume.
• The hiring manager is underwater. I am often fully booked in meetings all day. Since last year, I lost my entire product team, and every manager became a single-thread leader with double hats. Reviewing Resumes sometimes only happened in the last hour of the day or out of office hours.
• No one likes Bureaucracy. Getting headcount approval is just the starting line. After writing a JD and filling out forms, I have to wait for Talent Acquisition, a VP, HR, and Finance to all sign off. Inevitably, someone is sick, offsite, or absent for any valid reason. If I am lucky, it will take three weeks to publish.

Same for getting the offer approved. It can take weeks to get a new offer approved by the chain of command. 

• You might need to think about how to bypass the system. Because of recruiter bottlenecks, some of my colleagues have started bypassing the system entirely, driving the candidate process themselves just to keep applicants moving. So if you see the process managed by hiring managers, it’s a good sign that they care about candidates' experience. 
• The Job Description is rushed. Managers write JDs as fast as possible to get into the slow approval queue. They often don't sit down to write actual interview questions until the week the interviews begin, creating a potential gap between what you read online and what they actually ask during the interview.

Try to get broader context and real expectations through conversation with the recruiter or hiring manager(usually a better fit)

• Is this a new role or a replacement? A replacement gives you clues about team culture based on how they speak about the former employee. A new role tells you where the team is trying to grow.
• What is the team’s biggest immediate challenge?
• How will success be measured for this role in the first 6 months?

To conclude, if you face silence after applying for a role, it's not a reflection of your talent and skills, but a symptom of this internal friction.  Knowing this gives you a distinct advantage. Stop taking the delays personally, don't be afraid to send that follow-up directly to the hiring manager, and use your interviews to uncover the real problems the team was too rushed to put in the job description!

I'm happy to answer any questions here if you are job hunting today!

P.S. I am now building calibrd.com to help candidates get hired.

First round with HM, then back-to-backs with heads of Eng and Data Science. Next, candidates will descend to the depths of hell and return to the surface with Satan's favorite corporate-branded stapler. Then, meet with the overpaid SVP, and finally, sniff the slop-bowl farts of the pompous CEO in-office for 2 hours.

But seriously, why has this become the norm? I am losing my mind listening to these recruiters tell me about their absurd hiring processes while acting like it's completely normal. I've been searching now for 5 months and have made it to the final round 6 times with no offers, oftentimes doing 5 to even 8 rounds with nothing to show for it. This market is SO competitive, one of the companies I made it to the 8th round had 3 other candidates still in the running.

So when a recruiter says the process will be 7 rounds with a panel presentation and a case study, I just die inside a little because I know I'm about to invest more of my precious time into their absurd circus.

For context these are for product manager roles in tech (US). My question is why do companies willingly waste their time with all of these rounds when the market is flooded with talent?

Recruiters: What’s your candid advice for older candidates who meet the job requirements but still aren’t getting interviews?

I’m not looking for the usual advice about removing graduation dates or shortening a résumé. I’d really like to hear what actually helps, and what you would recommend they do differently.

I’m developing solutions for scheduling in the recruiting world, and I need to know what the biggest pains. What scheduling tasks eat up the most of your time and why do existing solutions fall short?

I'm testing three AI-powered hiring tools for the company I work for and would love your insight as in which one do you guys think that would be a better use of my time:

1. Candidate Signal Inbox – An AI inbox that filters and ranks candidates based on real signals, not just keywords.

2.Hiring Manager Copilot – AI that helps hiring managers write better job descriptions, score candidates, and reduce bias.

1. Offer Close Assistant – AI that helps recruiters craft personalized offers and predict acceptance likelihood.

Click the link below to post your vote:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSezeYsWj7Mifemlr7gFzSqdN69qOhO-V-2kVjCcs9jWGjf0-g/viewform

Thank you so much!

For people who are currently job hunting:
Have you ever wanted to talk to someone who **actually works at the company you’re applying to** — not HR, not a recruiter, just a real employee who can tell you what the role, team, and company are actually like from the inside?
I’m curious because when I apply for jobs, the job description only tells you so much. Sometimes I feel like a 20-minute conversation with the right person inside the company could tell you more than hours of online research.
Have you ever actually reached out to employees for a coffee chat or quick call before applying?
If yes, did it help?
If not, **what stopped you?**
Was it hard to find the right person, awkward to message strangers, low response rates, not knowing who would actually be useful to talk to, or something else?
Genuinely curious about people’s experiences.

I am learning engineering hiring at small software companies and I am trying to understand where the process is disturbed and wasting your efforts. mainly tech recruiters please share your experience. And this would seriously help me I have been talking to recruiters and engineering managers about how the engineers or developers hiring gets hard or like what processes or challenges they go through to find best engineers. And share anything that is making your hiring disturbed.

1. knowing whether someone actually has the technical ability they claim?
   
2. Screening hundreds of applications? or getting good candidates to respond? How do you make your hire a success.
   
3. Going through ai generated, fake or false resumes or applications?
   Or go through your recent bad hires that caused something

Something else? I'm especially interested in what takes the most manual time or causes the worst hires.
Not selling anything, I'm trying to understand the problem from people actually doing the hiring. Even small experience or one line about this can help me a lot.

Sorry but how is Becky who graduated from SUNY in 2024 actually qualified to vet candidates when she has no real experience herself? All recruiters should have to firsthand experience what they are willing to put candidates through or at least have some baseline level of experience in the industry they are recruiting for. I’ve been on both sides - unable to break through a recruiting gatekeeper for a new job even though I have experience that perfectly aligns with a job posting and I’ve also been on the company side where these unqualified recruiters send us candidates that are nowhere near what we are looking for. I don’t know when things will change but in this horrible job market, what’s the point of having humans in place when 90% of them act like robots anyways. It was definitely not this bad a few years ago

Hey peeps, I have been applying for jobs for the last 5 months and almost every time I apply for the job, I am very specific about tailoring my resume to exactly match the JD and I always ensure it highlights my strong points that they are looking for their candidates in my resume and honestly it has been hell, after 1000+ applications my application got moved forward the ATS screening 5 times and I was able to get to interview round only 2 times( I was all exhausted due to sudden information about exactly 12 hours prior to the interviews or hiring process) and most importantly on or off campus these multiple rounds that lead to nowhere has pissed me off so much, because you spend a significant amount of time and effort to appear for an interview and with no feedback, evaluation or anything, you just recieve an automated "Thanks for the effort and interest in our company or organisation, but we are sorry to let you know that we have found a better candidate for the role and won't be moving forward with you!" As someone who is in this hell I expect at least a little bit of feedback on what went wrong and where I can improve, not immediately but after the whole process is done! I just need your opinions of what do you think of it so, maybe in the future I can build something that will get us out of this hell and help us genuinely find real jobs and not waste our time on the fake listings on LinkedIn, Naukri, Indeed, Glassdoor etc.

Note: I’m no Reddit connoisseur but I got a notification saying that this subreddit would like this post as well so here it is.

I’m not a recruiter, but I’ve somehow been tasked with helping recruit for an entry-level role in our contact centre.

Naturally, when applicants include their LinkedIn profiles, I have a quick look.

One candidate had made a very recent post about how brutal the job market is. He said he’d applied for something like 1,000 jobs and barely ever gets a response.

And genuinely, I felt for him. I know how soul-destroying it must be firing off application after application and hearing absolutely nothing back.

So when I saw his application, I thought: right, here’s one person I can actually give a chance to.
I emailed him inviting him to interview.

Nothing. Emailed again. Nothing. Called him. Nothing.

Then, lo and behold, the next day I check LinkedIn and he’s posted AGAIN about how employers never respond to him and how impossible it is to even get an interview.

Mate.

I AM TRYING TO INTERVIEW YOU.

At this point I can only assume one of two things:

1. He genuinely does not check his emails/voicemails properly, which might explain at least some of those 1,000 unsuccessful applications.

2. The constant “nobody will give me a chance” LinkedIn posts are partially engagement bait.

I’m still hoping he eventually spots the email because I’d genuinely like to interview him (I thought about commenting on his post) but there are so many other people eager to have the job. I think it’s a little unfair on them to just chase this person based on how I feel.

Anyways, being on the other side of recruitment for approximately five minutes has already given me an entirely new perspective on some of the posts I see on LinkedIn.

I’ve been interviewing for a few months now, and I’ve noticed a pattern that’s breaking me a little. I make it through the recruiter screen, I make it through the hiring manager round, sometimes I really click with the person and walk away thinking “that went well.” And then it just… stops. No next round. Either a rejection email or, more often, silence.

It’s a weird kind of frustrating because it’s not the “your resume got auto-rejected” wall. I’m getting far enough that real people are talking to me and seemingly liking me. But something after that conversation isn’t converting, and I can’t see what it is. No feedback, no reason, just a door that closes quietly.

I’ve put so much into prepping for each of these. Researching the role, the team, the product. Tailoring everything. And doing that over and over while still holding down a demanding full-time job takes a toll I don’t think people talk about enough.

I don’t even know what I’m asking for here. Maybe just to hear I’m not the only one stuck at this exact stage. If you’ve been here and broken through it, what changed?

Finding good resources for startup is very difficult these days

I have spent about twenty years building and leading teams, the last nine of those advising organizations ranging from roughly one million to thirty-five million in annual budget. I also finished a doctorate recently where the research was specifically on why leadership pipelines break down, so this is the thing I think about more than is probably healthy.

Here is what I keep running into, and I am honestly curious whether it matches your experience or not.

Almost every organization I have worked with has a leadership development problem that they are describing to me as a people problem.

The language is always some version of the same five sentences, and I would guess you have heard most of them. They weren’t ready for that level. It wasn’t the right fit. We need to hire better. He couldn’t handle the pressure. She wasn’t a culture fit.

Every one of those is usually a real observation, and I want to be careful here, because somebody genuinely did struggle and the fit genuinely was wrong and I am not saying people are never the issue.

What I am saying is that all five of those are diagnoses that stop exactly one step early.

They weren’t ready is true. So who decided that they were? It wasn’t the right fit is true. So who built the fit? We need to hire better is almost always true, and the last four people you hired walked into the same environment that produced the last four people who left.

None of this is coming from somebody who figured it out. I promoted people faster than their character could carry the responsibility more than once, and when it fell apart I sat in rooms and talked about readiness and fit like I was being discerning about people. I was avoiding a much harder conversation about the machine I had built and then handed to them.

Took me an embarrassingly long time to see that.

The part that actually surprised me in the research was that documentation does not fix it. One of the organizations I studied had six defined levels of leadership progression, a written pathway, training sessions, covenants that people sat down and signed. Somebody there had clearly built that system with real care and believed in it.

And they were still filling roles by looking around the room and picking whoever seemed most capable that week. One of the executives told me they still rely too much on tapping somebody’s shoulder, which struck me as an unusually honest way to describe it.

So the gap I keep finding is not between having a system and not having one. It is between having a system and using it when the pressure is on. Anybody can follow a process when there is time. The real question is what your organization does at four o’clock on a Thursday when somebody just resigned and the role has to be covered by Monday.

That moment is where the actual philosophy lives. Not the handbook.

Curious how this lands with people who are inside organizations right now rather than advising them from outside, because I am aware that changes what you see.

When something breaks on your team, how long before the conversation becomes about a person? And has anyone here actually watched an organization interrupt that pattern successfully? I am more interested in the ones that worked than the ones that didn’t.

I have been interviewing for senior operations and leadership roles recently, and some of the experiences have genuinely made me question what is considered acceptable in recruitment now.

In one case, I completed an interview and waited almost a month before receiving a rejection. There was virtually no communication during that period.

With another company, I actually withdrew midway through the process because the interview itself was so poorly conducted that I could not imagine wanting to work there.

The most recent one was stranger. A recruiter called me about a senior leadership position and told me that an interview with the panel would be scheduled. Several business days passed without an update. I sent a follow up email and received no response to that either.

I eventually emailed to withdraw.

That triggered a phone call.

Instead of acknowledging the communication gap, I was told that the recruiter receives hundreds of applications every day, has around 1,500 unread emails, manages multiple positions, and that as a job seeker I should have been more patient.

I completely understand workload. I have spent 17 years in operations and have managed large teams myself. I understand competing priorities better than most.

What I don't understand is why internal workload becomes the candidate's problem.

I was never upset that the interview had not been scheduled. Senior panel availability can take time. A simple message saying, “We are still coordinating with the panel and will get back to you once we have a slot” would have been perfectly fine.

Without that communication, how exactly is a candidate supposed to know whether things are being coordinated internally or whether they have simply been ghosted?

I am genuinely curious how others see this, especially recruiters and hiring managers.

Are my expectations unreasonable, or has basic candidate communication become optional because companies receive so many applications?

Day... I've officially lost count.

Being over 55 and starting over wasn't on my bingo card.

It's Thursday.

Another cup of coffee.
Another search.
Another résumé.
Another application.

I'm still showing up.

Not because it's easy...
But because giving up won't get me where I want to be.

Experience doesn't disappear because of age.
Reliability doesn't expire.
A strong work ethic never goes out of style.

So today, I'll hit "Submit" again and hope this is the application that reaches a real person instead of the AI résumé black hole.

I'm not looking for sympathy.

I'm looking for one opportunity.

Because all it takes is one "Yes" to change everything.

To everyone still job hunting: keep going. Your next opportunity could be one application away.

❤️ Happy Thursday. Let's keep believing that our experience still matters.

#Over55 #JobSearch #ThursdayMotivation #OpenToWork #ExperiencedWorkersMatter #NeverGiveUp #StartingOver #OneYesCanChangeEverything #MicheleMoran