A recruiter emailed me recently with a detailed job description and a note saying they had reviewed my resume and believed I was a strong fit.
I looked over the role and agreed that I could have brought real value to it. Before moving forward, I replied with the same resume they had already seen and a few questions I felt were reasonable to ask before everyone invested more time.
Five minutes later, the tone changed.
The reply “Thank you for the response. Let me check once with manager about your profile and will get back to you if they are interested.”
What stood out was not the rejection itself. Rejection is part of the process, and most job seekers understand that. What stood out was the sudden shift in certainty. A few minutes earlier, I was a good fit. A few routine questions later, the response made it feel as though I had wandered in off the street asking whether they might be interested in my resume.
That kind of experience is familiar to a lot of people right now.
Many candidates are navigating a market where they submit dozens, sometimes hundreds of applications, receive little to no feedback, and yet continue seeing roles reposted or receive recruiter outreach that never seems to convert into an actual conversation.
At the same time, employers continue saying they cannot find qualified candidates. If both sides are telling the truth, then the disconnect is happening somewhere in the process itself. The question should be: why?
My own background may help explain why I keep pulling on that thread. I have a degree in anthropology, spent years in retail leadership and kitchen operations, and eventually found myself in quality systems for a large manufacturing company.
On paper, those jobs do not look especially connected. In practice, they all required the same thing: understanding how decisions, incentives, assumptions, and people interact within a system to produce the outcomes we see.
Whether I was studying human behavior, leading a retail operation, or working in quality systems, I found myself asking the same question: why did this happen, and what made it seem reasonable at the time?
I have never been especially attached to a specific title or discipline. If anything, I have spent much of my career wandering into boxes I never intended to occupy. What has remained constant is the tendency to examine the walls after everyone else has accepted the box.
The questions I keep asking Why does this process exist? What assumptions is it built on? What outcome is it actually producing? Are those the same thing?
Those questions are not just professional habits. They are the way I make sense of friction.
Over the last several months, while navigating the job market and talking to people on both sides of hiring, I started noticing a pattern that felt familiar. Different industries. Different goals. Different stakeholders. Same underlying tension.
Everyone seemed to be operating in systems that were doing a great deal of activity but not always producing the outcome people thought they were paying for.
That is what led me here.
I did not set out to develop a theory of hiring. I started with an observation: thousands of roles, hundreds of applications, two interviews, countless rejections, and a part-time job to keep things moving. Meanwhile, I also received a steady stream of recruiter outreach that rarely went anywhere.
I have seen plenty of discussion about companies struggling to find candidates, and just as much from candidates struggling to get any meaningful response at all. Those two realities feel contradictory only if we accept the premise that the system is designed to find the best candidates. But is it?
That question matters because in any complex organization, “success” is rarely defined in only one way.
- A hiring manager may define success as getting someone who can contribute quickly.
- Operations may define success as keeping work moving. Finance may care about cost and turnover risk.
- HR may care about consistency, compliance, and defensibility.
- Recruiters may be measured on speed, volume, and pipeline health.
None of those goals are unreasonable. The problem is that when success means different things to different parts of the organization, someone eventually has to decide how success will be measured.
A process can be highly effective at reducing risk and still be poor at identifying exceptional talent. It can be highly consistent and still miss people who do not fit neatly into a predefined mold. It can be fast and still produce bad matches. It can create the appearance of efficiency without producing the kind of outcome the organization actually intended.
That is where the idea of proxies becomes important.
A proxy is a shortcut. It is something we can observe, measure, or categorize that we hope tells us something about a more complicated reality.
The problem is that the reality is usually too large, messy, or expensive to evaluate directly. Instead, we rely on signals that seem related to the outcome we care about and treat them as stand-ins for the thing itself.
We use resumes, titles, degrees, credit scores, grades, diagnostic categories, performance ratings, and other signals because they help us simplify information into something manageable.
- A resume is not capability.
- A title is not adaptability.
- A GPA is not intelligence.
- A diagnosis is not the whole patient.
- A credit score is not the whole person.
The problem is not that proxies are bad. The problem is that they are only useful if we remember what they stand for.
These measures are all attempts to compress something complicated into something usable. They are tools. They are not reality itself. Once we start treating them as reality, we risk building systems that reward the proxy more than the outcome it was meant to represent.
The danger appears when the proxy becomes the goal.
Imagine an organization that decides that repeat failures are a sign of poor quality. On the surface, that seems reasonable. Nobody wants the same problem occurring over and over again.
But what happens if the system becomes focused on reducing repeat failures rather than reducing failures?
One solution is to fix the underlying causes. Another is to redefine problems more narrowly so that no two failures are ever categorized the same way.
The metric improves. The outcome may not.
The organization can proudly report zero repeat failures while still experiencing hundreds of individual failures. The proxy succeeded. The objective did not.
Hiring is especially vulnerable to that problem because the volume is so high and the stakes are so sensitive. It is not realistic for every candidate to receive a deep, human review.
Shortcuts are not the problem. We need them. The question is whether the shortcut is still pointing us toward the outcome we care about, or whether we have started confusing the shortcut for the destination.
That is where the disconnect becomes visible.
If a company says it cannot find talent, but many qualified people are applying and getting filtered out, something in the system is likely misaligned. If candidates are told they are strong fits and then treated as uncertain the moment they ask questions, something in the process is likely doing more classification than evaluation.
Job seekers are increasingly bypassing formal application systems in favor of networking, referrals, and direct outreach. But that is only half the story. Employers are frequently bypassing those same systems too — through sourcing, referrals, internal candidates, and professional networks. When both sides are looking for paths around the process, it is worth asking whether either side still trusts the process itself.
That pattern should matter to hiring leaders.
When people work around a system instead of through it, that is often a signal. It may mean the system is too slow, too opaque, too rigid, or too poor at distinguishing signal from noise.
It may also mean that the process is optimized for internal convenience more than external matching quality. Again, that does not mean anyone involved is acting badly. It means the incentives may not be aligned.
That idea becomes even clearer if we look at how systems evolve over time.
Most systems are not designed once and left untouched. They accumulate layers of controls, metrics, exceptions, categories, and compliance requirements. Each change is usually made for a defensible reason. One change improves consistency. Another reduces risk. Another helps reporting. Another supports scale.
The pattern is not unique to hiring. Systems like this evolve one reasonable decision at a time, in almost any sufficiently complex organization.
But the combined effect of many reasonable changes can slowly pull the system away from its original purpose.
That is what I mean by drift.
A process can remain internally consistent while gradually becoming less predictive of the outcome it was designed to support. In other words, it can still be functioning exactly as built, while no longer serving the goal people assume it serves.
This happens in quality systems, and it happens in hiring too.
Imagine a process that originally existed to identify the most capable person for a role.
Over time, more layers get added: keyword filters, ATS rankings, compensation bands, title expectations, years-of-experience thresholds, automated scoring, recruiter scripts, manager preferences, and internal approval requirements.
Each layer may solve a real operational problem. But together, they can create a system that is very good at sorting people and not always as good at recognizing fit.
That is not necessarily a moral failure. It is an analytical one. The more complex the process becomes, the more important it is to ask whether the process is still measuring what we think it is measuring.
Are we screening for actual ability, or for the appearance of a familiar profile? Are we optimizing for long-term performance, or for lower immediate risk? Are we valuing candidates who can do the work, or candidates who fit the easiest classification?
Those questions matter because they reveal a deeper issue: systems often end up being judged by the efficiency of their proxy rather than the quality of their result.
That idea shows up outside hiring all the time.
- In education, grades were created to help measure learning. Over time, attention shifted from what the grades represented to the grades themselves. When the outcomes became undesirable, we adjusted the scale, the weighting, or the standards — changing the measurement without necessarily revisiting what the measurement was meant to tell us.
- In medicine, diagnostic categories help clinicians communicate and treat illness. The diagnosis is useful, but it can also become the thing everyone sees, obscuring the larger and more complicated reality it was meant to describe.
- In finance, credit scores help lenders assess risk. Few people would argue that a three-digit number can fully capture a person’s financial reality. Yet once the score exists, it becomes remarkably easy to treat the number as though it tells the whole story.
In each case, the category is useful. In each case, the danger begins when the category starts to replace the thing it was meant to describe.
Hiring is no different.
If a hiring system is producing lots of activity but not producing confident matches, perhaps the question is not whether candidates are good enough. Perhaps the more important question is whether the system has drifted toward managing process risk at the expense of match quality.
That is a difficult question because it asks organizations to examine their own assumptions. It is easier to say there is a talent shortage than to ask whether the funnel is too narrow. It is easier to say candidates are not engaging than to ask whether the outreach is too detached from the actual decision-making process.
It is easier to say the market is broken than to ask whether the signals being used to define fit are still relevant.
None of that means the people working inside these systems are careless, indifferent, or incompetent. Most are doing their best under real constraints. Recruiters have volume. Hiring managers have urgent openings. HR has compliance requirements. Finance has budget pressure.
Candidates have limited time and mounting fatigue. Everyone is responding rationally to the incentives in front of them. And yet the outcome can still be unsatisfying for almost everyone involved.
That is what makes this worth examining.
I do not think the answer is to eliminate process or pretend every candidate should be reviewed from scratch with no structure at all. That would be unrealistic. The answer is to periodically validate the validation itself.
If the criteria changed, did the meaning of the outcome change too? If the filters became more sophisticated, did they become more predictive? If the process became more efficient, did the quality of the match improve? And how would we know if the system is filtering out strong candidates if we never look at the people it rejected?
Those are not hostile questions. They are responsible ones.
The strongest systems are not the ones that never change. They are the ones that can check whether the changes are still serving the original purpose. In quality, that means asking whether the controls still prevent the failure you think they prevent. In hiring, that means asking whether the process still identifies the people most likely to succeed in the role.
And if it does not, the issue is not necessarily the people. It may be the design.
That is the part I keep coming back to.
I do not believe the current frustration in hiring is only about individual behavior. I believe it is also about system design, proxy drift, and the gap between what organizations say they want and what their processes are actually built to optimize.
What is worth examining If enough people experience the same friction, that is worth studying. If enough candidates and employers keep bypassing the formal system, that is worth asking about. If the system keeps producing activity but not trust, that is worth reevaluating.
Because in the end, the question is not whether hiring systems are functioning.
The question is whether they are still functioning for the purpose we think they are meant to serve. And if they are not, then the work is not to blame the people inside the system. The work is to look honestly at what the system has become.
The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is published by The Inspection Record for editorial and informational purposes. It does not constitute legal, regulatory, or compliance advice and should not be relied upon as such.