I think about recruiting as an experience. Honestly, I think about most things that way.
What does it feel like to move through this? Where does it get confusing? Where does someone have to work harder than they should? Where does trust get built? Where does it break? What makes someone walk away thinking, that was thoughtful?
In recruiting, we ask those questions about candidates all the time. We should.
A recruiter is often someone's first real interaction with a company. Before they've met the hiring manager, before they've experienced the culture for themselves, before they've decided whether any of this is actually for them, they've met us. That matters to me.
I want people to feel sought after. I want hiring partners to trust that I understand what they're trying to build. I want interviewers to have what they need to make thoughtful decisions. I want the business to get the outcome it needs. But somewhere along the way, I started wondering about the person standing in the middle of all of those experiences.
Recruiting is a human-operated system.
A recruiter can own a search without controlling every variable inside of it. That's an important distinction.
There are hiring partners. Interviewers. Coordinators. Candidates. Systems. Approvals. Scheduling. Market conditions. Changing business needs. Decisions that happen above or around us. Each one can change what happens next. And the recruiter is often the person trying to keep the entire thing moving.
When something slows down, we follow up. When something changes, we recalibrate. When the market isn't responding, we investigate. When candidates aren't converting, we figure out why. When expectations and reality aren't matching, we bring the information back into the room. When something gets stuck somewhere we can't personally unstick it, we're still often responsible for explaining why the search isn't moving.
That doesn't mean recruiters shouldn't be accountable. We should. But people should be accountable for the parts of a system they actually own.
That sounds obvious until you start looking closely at how recruiting work gets measured. A search can be affected by a delayed decision, limited interviewer availability, changing requirements, scheduling capacity, misalignment, an evolving market, or any number of other variables. The eventual number on a dashboard may tell you what happened. It doesn't necessarily tell you why. And if we're going to hold people accountable to outcomes, I think we have an obligation to understand the systems producing those outcomes.
Sometimes good recruiters hide bad design.
This is the part I've been pulling on. Recruiters are problem solvers. We compensate.
We remember the thing that isn't documented. We chase down the person who hasn't responded. We rebuild context. We create the tracker. We schedule another calibration. We make the side document. We figure out the workaround. And eventually, if we're good enough at working around the friction, the work gets done. Which can make the system look healthier than it actually is.
The role gets filled. The metric moves. Everybody exhales. Success.
Except sometimes you know you barely dragged the car across the finish line. I've had to rethink what a successful search means to me because of that.
Did the process help us make a strong decision? Did we understand what was happening when something wasn't working? Did we solve the actual problem, or did we just push hard enough to get around it? Did everybody have what they needed to do their part well? Could we reasonably do it this way again? That's where recruiter experience becomes interesting to me.
Not because I think recruiting should be frictionless. Some friction is the work.
Finding the right person can be difficult. Advising a business through an ambiguous decision can be difficult. Learning a new domain can be difficult. Challenging assumptions can be difficult. I like difficult problems.
What I'm interested in is unnecessary difficulty. The friction that doesn't make the work better.
I don't build systems because I love systems.
For a long time, I didn't even think of what I was doing as building systems. I thought I was improving experiences.
Something wasn't working, so I wanted to understand why. If it happened once, maybe it was a one-off. If it kept happening, now I had questions.
Is there a pattern? Where does it start? What information are we missing? What are the people inside the process experiencing? What happens immediately before the breakdown? What happens after it?
And once you start asking those questions, an experience problem can reveal itself as a systems problem. That's how I think about building.
Not:
But:
Because I don't build systems because I love systems.
A useful system should help someone do excellent work more consistently. It should hold the things a human shouldn't have to keep carrying. It should make important information easier to find. It should help us see patterns sooner. It should create clearer pathways for decisions. It should give people more capacity for the parts of the job that actually require them. And increasingly, that's also how I think about technology.
The goal isn't to remove the human.
There is a lot we can automate. There is even more that we probably will be able to automate. But I don't think the most interesting question is how much of a recruiter's desk technology can take over. I think it's:
There is a difference.
Technology can help with repetitive work. It can help retrieve information. It can help us recognize patterns, preserve context, interrogate data, draft, organize, synthesize, and think. Great. Carry the load.
But there are parts of recruiting I don't want to surrender simply because something becomes technically capable of doing them.
Judgment. Conversation. Curiosity. Advocacy.
The ability to notice hesitation and say, Hey, I'm picking up on something. Talk to me.
The ability to understand that a person making a career decision may need more than information. They may need space to actually think.
The ability to tell a hiring partner, Here's what I'm seeing. Here's what the evidence suggests. Here's what I recommend. And then let another human make a decision.
That is the work. I don't want technology replacing those moments. I want it creating more room for them.
White glove was never about having more.
I also don't think designing a better recruiter experience requires some enormous transformation program. The same is true of candidate experience.
When I talk about white-glove recruiting, I'm not talking about money. I've never thought of it that way. I'm talking about consideration.
If I tell someone I'll follow up, I follow up. If I don't have the answer yet, I can still tell them I don't have the answer yet. If I only interact with a candidate a handful of times, those interactions don't have to matter less because there were fewer of them.
More touchpoints don't automatically create a better experience.
That's what I want systems to protect.
Not process for process's sake. Not automation for automation's sake. Not efficiency because a dashboard says efficiency is good.
Capacity for people to be thoughtful. Capacity for recruiters to investigate instead of react. Capacity to have direct conversations. Capacity to notice. Capacity to advise. Capacity to build trust. Capacity to do what we came here to do:
Maybe that's why I've become so interested in recruiter experience. Because the recruiter isn't outside the candidate experience. The recruiter isn't outside the hiring-manager experience. We're inside both.
And when the person responsible for holding so much of the experience is fighting the system underneath it, eventually somebody else feels that friction too.
So yes, I want us to keep obsessing over candidate experience. I want us to keep improving hiring-manager experience. I want better technology, stronger data, smarter workflows, and better business outcomes. I just think there's another person in the experience we've been forgetting to design for.