Hi recruiters, with the rise of AI and startups like Juicebox or Sourcewhale, how have your jobs fundamentally changed (if at all)? I am wondering if in the long-term, there will be a structural decline in middle-men (recruitment agencies like Randstad, Adecco, Hays etc) since recruiters will have the tools to source talent on their own?

In your experience, if you have ever engaged a middle man like Randstad or Hays, has the value proposition lived up to your expectations and are the services that they offer really worth paying for rather than doing in house? have a pending offer from a recruitment agency and want to know if that pocket of the industry actually has a future

Curious about how to think about the evolution of the recruitment scene and my place in it as someone who a recruiter, please share insights! Thank you!

We are experiencing a harsh correction from the historic hiring surges of a few years ago. During that boom, companies handed out inflated titles and massive salaries to secure baseline talent. Now that the market has normalized, many unemployed professionals are looking for roles that match their last title, completely blind to the fact that their actual skills don't match the historical weight of that title. The unemployment crisis for mid-to-senior tier talent isn't always a lack of jobs but a refusal to accept a title and compensation reality check.

Hiring has changed a lot over the years, but some processes still create unnecessary friction for candidates. In your experience, what's one practice that should be replaced or improved to create a better hiring experience while still helping companies make great hiring decisions?

This question is regarding the hiring cycle while company is on growth trajectory or Mid Sized,

what challenges do you founders often face? especially while hiring people from offshore (which I think is kinda dead).
About me, I have had a tremendously fulfilling career as a tech professional since 3-4 years now. And now looking to serve founders who have scaled brightly.

I have spent the last four years on the employer side and hired around 40 people for my company. The pattern I keep seeing, in my own process and talking to other people who hire, is that almost nobody defines what they are actually hiring for beyond the job description and a list of skills. So the interview turns into a gut-feel exercise, and "culture fit" becomes a vague label people use to justify a decision they already made emotionally.

When I did not define values and working style upfront, I made expensive wrong hires. The skills were there, but the person and the team pulled in different directions, and they were usually gone within a year. When I did define it clearly and held the whole process to it, hiring got faster and the decisions held up. It also made rejections cleaner, because the reasons were actually articulable.

I am genuinely curious how the people in this sub handle it. Do you have a structured way to assess values and working style, or is it still mostly interviewer instinct at your org? And does leadership actually buy into it, or do they treat culture fit as a soft nice-to-have?

24 F on F-1 OPT. I know I should not lose hope and I won’t. But it’s so frustrating. I have a bachelors degree in accounting and auditing and a masters degree in finance. I also have about a year of experience in risk advisory working at big 4 at my home country and full 10-month internal audit internship experience at a fortune 500 in US. I’m targeting internal audit roles that require 0-5 years of experience. But only get rejections, barely get the HR phone screen, and when I do, it doesn’t go forward with the reasons either they don’t want people who doesn’t have a citizenship/GC or they want more experienced/more specialised experience. I’ve been preparing for my CIA part-1 exam and planning to take the exam this month, in hope that helps a bit. I’m really tired of not understanding what to do. The roles that I think i can absolutely nail are internship for which i get auto filtered since i’m not in school anymore. The entry level (0-2/3) years of experience roles are also rejecting me god knows why (am i under qualified/overqualified).

I also tried a different angle where I target Financial Analyst/FP&A full-time roles and internships, because I’m interested in that as well and because I saw some of my fellow finance graduates with 0 experience land financial and senior financial analyst roles, but I’m getting no luck there as well.

I have tailored my resumes to the jobs i apply, nothing is working. I sometimes even say no to the sponsorship question, just to test whether i’ll get an hr phone screen, and sometimes i do, but nothing goes forward. The only reason/feedback i get is “they have found other candidates that better align with the role” when i know i am very well perfectly aligned with the JD for some roles that I applied, the exact work i have done.

And I do not wish to spend the a huge amount on the consultancies who random stuff your resume with keywords and apply and apply, and when you get a job, they take a huge percentage of your first years salary. And still don’t promise you a job.

I would like any suggestions if you guys have.

i’m trying to understand the hiring process a bit better because applying for jobs has been frustrating.

when companies receive hundreds of applications, what actually happens to all of them? do recruiters and hiring managers feel like qualified candidates sometimes get missed because of the volume?

for people who have been job hunting recently, do you feel like the biggest challenge is being qualified for the role, or getting your application noticed in the first place?

im just trying to get a better understanding of how things work from both sides.

We talk a lot about job satisfaction, but we rarely address the deep cognitive dissonance of the split-identity worker. This isn't about someone wanting to change industries or climb a different corporate ladder but about the profound conflict of remaining in a high-functioning career while your actual ambition lies entirely outside the traditional market ecosystem.

When your dream is completely decoupled from your current professional identity, the decision to quit isn't a career move but an existential crisis. The modern workplace operates on the assumption of linear ambition, treating any desire to exit the system entirely as an irrational gamble or a failure of focus. Consequently, people end up paralyzing themselves, treating their genuine aspirations as a guilty hobby while giving their best cognitive years to a role they intend to leave.

We need to reframe this transition. Choosing to walk away from a stable trajectory to chase a radically disconnected ambition shouldn't be viewed as a reckless leap into the dark. It is a calculated rejection of the slow death that comes from letting your actual potential rot for the sake of corporate predictability.

What is the tipping point where the risk of staying finally outweighs the risk of starting over from scratch?

We need to talk about how the contemporary hiring process is no longer about assessing competency, but about testing a candidate's willingness to endure degradation.

Between one-way video interviews that strip away human reciprocity, multi-stage take-home assignments that amount to free labor, and automated rejection emails sent months after the fact, the system is fundamentally broken. It forces professionals to perform performative enthusiasm for algorithms and jumping through arbitrary hoops just to prove compliance.

When a process requires candidates to surrender their time, labor, and dignity upfront for a mere chance at an introductory conversation, it isn’t recruitment anymore. It is an exercise in systemic subordination.

I'm getting ready to hire again after about two years.

The last time, I didn't have much of a process. I liked the candidate, had a good feeling after the interview, so I hired him. It ended up working out, but looking back, I think I was more lucky than anything.

This time, I'd like to be a little more intentional, but I also don't have an HR team or the time to build a complicated hiring process.

I'm curious how other small business owners handle this without making hiring a full-time job.

I've been in the IT recruitment for nearly six years, and this is probably the most cautious I've seen clients in a long time. Hiring decisions seem to drag on, new headcount is harder to get approved, and plenty of companies appear to be sticking to backfills rather than genuine growth.

I'm curious whether this is a wider trend or if some markets are actually picking up.

Interested to hear what everyone else is experiencing. Feels a bit brutal out there at the moment, but maybe we're all in the same boat.

Cheers! :)

Actually, I'm asking cuz most of the early stage startups who're scaling don't have the seperate HR teams, hence most of the hiring is founder driven.

And, we work with few startups to help them in tech hiring, but I have observed that their hiring timeline are really messy or no timeline at all.

They tell me first that this is very urgent requirement, but then don't close the position for months, and they are even not able to take interviews of candidates.

So can someone with team size of 10 to 20 employees, can explain your hiring workflow.
Are you also slow or uncertain, or is it with my clients only?

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I've applied to thousands of jobs. These AI systems being created by the likes of workday, successfactors and etc are making the market more shittier for all of us.

I built a Chrome extension (not promoting it, hence the cropping) that detects which companies are using these systems on their career pages. Its the little thing we have in our powers to do when it comes to this mess.

Listen, we need to actually come together as humanity and find a solution to this nonsense. Imagine there are these companies building and training these AI models on datasets they know will be bias then they use corporate jargon to cover their nonsense.

I don't know but something needs to be done about this, the market is cooked.

https://preview.redd.it/zy3g9phwlo9h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=6bac3e81e4638ec924092a90ec31011b326f52c8

Before the remote shift, a lot of managers could coast by simply managing presence. If people were sitting at their desks looking busy at 9am, that was considered good leadership. It was management by visibility, not by objective output or actual team enablement.

Once you remove the office walls, that illusion completely falls apart. Suddenly, a manager actually has to know how to define clear outcomes, communicate asynchronously, and trust their team. Instead, what we’re seeing is a wave of panic, endless micromanagement via Slack, constant unnecessary Zoom syncs, and a desperate push for return-to-office mandates.

The reality is that a lot of leaders simply don’t know how to manage work, they only know how to manage a room. Remote work stripped away the physical theater of the office, leaving bad managers with absolutely nowhere to hide.

I’m curious about the recruiter side of ATS systems like Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby.
When a recruiter opens a job with hundreds of applicants, what is the default view most recruiters see?
• Are candidates shown in the order they applied (oldest first)?
• Most recent applicants first?
• ATS match score/ranking?
• Referrals first?
• Candidates with recruiter activity first?
• Something else?
For anyone who has used these systems as a recruiter or hiring manager:
1. What is the default sorting in each ATS?
2. Can recruiters easily change the sort order?
3. In practice, how do recruiters usually review applicants?
4. Does applying early actually help, or do strong matches get surfaced regardless of application date?
Would love insights from recruiters who regularly use Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, or Ashby. Thanks!