How Recruiting's KPIs Are Making Your Job Harder - Explanation And Solution Inside
do you ever notice many of the "HR screened candidates" turn out to be absolute garbage and the candidates don't remember applying, don't understand the basic architecture of the frameworks on their resume, or seem to be using chatgpt in realtime on the call?
The reason this happens is due to Recruiting's KPIs.
Let's walk through a common scenario.
The talent acquisition team has been told their KPIs are:
number of applicants sourced
time-to-interview
low cost-per-hire
These KPIs are impossible to achieve organically. Real, senior engineering talent is expensive, passive, and hard to find. So what can they do?
They choose to use cheap sourcing agencies, offshore resume farms, and mass "easy apply" job board blasts. A great side effect of this cheap sourcing is it fills the ATS with loads of candidates.
Sounds great right? They're getting lots of applicants, the pipeline looks full, and the cost-per-hire metrics are low. The KPIs are being smashed.
But there's a problem. The pipeline is fake. It's keyword-stuffed auto-apply spam and proxy candidates. The scam works like this:
- Sourcing agencies and "bootcamp mills" earn money or reputation when they get candidates into your interview pipeline.
- So they use automated scripts to spam your ATS. As long as these resumes are keyword-stuffed properly (listing the exact stack you asked for: Next.js, React, Tailwind, Python, etc.), the ATS algorithms will consider the applicant valid.
- To ensure the candidate looks even more real, they use proxy interviewers or real-time LLM whisperers during the initial non-technical HR screen. These fake candidates trick the recruiters into thinking they are high-quality technical talent.
The above is a massive problem, and it steals thousands of engineering hours from product teams every year.
So, recruiters are using these crappy sourcing methods, getting lots of cheap applicants, and pushing loads of fake candidates onto your calendar. The end result? You waste your time doing technical screens for people who can't write a basic script or explain a simple API integration. Recruiting then blames you for being "too picky" or having "unrealistic technical standards."
As you've probably guessed, the problem is Recruiting's KPIs. They're going to do what they have to do to hit those numbers. I've spoken to dozens of hiring managers, and almost all of them see the same thing instead of finding real talent, recruiters are focused on their vanity metrics. And can you blame them? That's what their bosses told them to do.
Option 1
Have a meeting with your CTO and the Head of HR (it needs to come from the top) to change Recruiting's KPIs to be Offer Acceptance Rate, 90-Day Retention, and Candidate Quality (measured by how many pass the technical screen). No more vanity metrics that can be easily faked using auto-apply bots. That will force them to do things properly and stop relying on resume farms.
Option 2
Recruiting will resist Option 1. The Head of TA will threaten that this will grind hiring to a halt. In this case, you force the recruiting team to implement a strict, async, proctored coding assessment or a standardized GitHub pull-request review before the candidate ever hits an engineer's calendar. That will stop the proxy candidates and re-train the recruiters to find real, high-quality developers. They'll resist this too, of course, but they'll take it instead of Option 1.
Good luck!