I realise I've shared this chapter fairly recently, but there's good reason to revisit it. On Friday, I launched a new AI tool - Your Job Search Plan. You can find it here: https://your-jobsearch-plan.netlify.app/ It's based on the inversion principle below: the optimal job search is an inversion of how that job is optimally recruited. In other words, the first step in a job search should be to understand how recruiters and hiring processes seek to fill your ideal vacancy. Then to access all those channels while putting your best foot forward. It connects your applications, your networking, your CV, your LinkedIn profile, and so on, all of which should stem from your professional identity, the context of your career, the market conditions for that career, and therefore the work you'll need to do to boost your odds. One thing I'm pleased about with this tool is how it relates to the other tools and resources on www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources . So what seemed abstract, or painful activities without guaranteed outcome, become a practical arrow in the quiver of your search. I hope you find these tools helpful. They are a starting point, rather than a resolution. 20 - An inverted job search So, your broad approach to looking for a job is based on a product marketing strategy. How does this link to your job search and how companies hire? The next step is to recognise a job search is an inverted recruitment process. Whatever you can learn about the actual workings of recruitment, the better armed you are to navigate them. The first way in which this is true is around the routes to market employers take to fill a job. Employers want to fill vacancies in the most economical and efficient means possible. Sometimes they’ll rely on external advice, sometimes they’ll figure out their own way, and sometimes they’ll employ people to do it for them (such as a Talent Acquisition Manager or internal recruiter). When they rely on external advice, it may not surprise you it’s as varied and contradictory as job seeker advice. Take this nugget of wisdom: 80% of suitable candidates are not actively looking for work. By advertising, you’ll only have access to the 20% that applies to adverts. Hang on a minute! Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the hidden jobs market? Of course, candidates aren’t hidden - much like hidden jobs, the priority is to understand the channels through which candidates are found. These channels directly mirror the channels through which you look for that job: Job boards; LinkedIn; Recruitment agencies; Confidential headhunting; Internal promotions; Secondments; Temp-to-perm hires; Consulting-to-perm hires; Referrals; Networking; Speculative approaches; Careers pages; Talent pools; Candidate databases Every job is different, dictated by principles like supply and demand, confidentiality, reputational risk, wherewithal, budget and capacity. The hiring process of a Software Developer is different from that of a Sales Director. If an employer only hires through an advert - this means if you don’t apply for adverts, there’s no way in which you can be considered for that vacancy. A second way it’s accurate is the notion that what’s true for one may not be true for others. This relates to candidate resentment . You may read online that some recruitment behaviours are signs of a bad employer. Yet, you should always follow the instructions given when applying for an advert or through an agency. They may instruct you to: 1/ Write a CV, cover letter and duplicate it on their ATS 2/ Tell them your salary when they don’t list theirs 3/ Do 17 interviews before reaching a decision 4/ Deliver a 6-month strategy plan by presentation 5/ Or any other request deemed unreasonable by Career Coaches, Job seekers, or people otherwise uninvolved in that process What some consider red flags, others will deem acceptable practice. It becomes your choice to play the game or not. Either follow their instructions or step away. You don’t have to apply if you don’t want to. In a similar vein, if you hear a hiring process has a preference, or if there are gaps in their employment armoury - these might be biases you can lean into. The hiring manager loves Arsenal Football Club and is biased towards people who love the same? Now might be the time to switch allegiance, if you can fake it or make it. They love a one page CV? Apply with a one page CV. You know the hiring manager of an advert with 400 applications? Give them a call - they might give you an unfair advantage. Poor practice from the employer, yet these are problems you can turn into opportunity. A third way in which this is true is by comparing inbound and outbound activity Outbound activity is where you go to your prospect (phone calls, messaging). Inbound activity is where the prospect comes to you (job adverts, content). Yet an outbound activity for a recruiter is an inbound activity for you (you receive phone calls and messages). While an inbound activity has you getting in touch because of their advert or content. When we talk about optimising your work, whether your CV, profile or interviews, it has to give the process what it needs. How can you be more discoverable, so you receive more relevant calls and messages? How can you improve your return on applications and your outbound messages? What about inverse non-recruitment? A brilliant, if strange question, with the same answer. When networking, going direct, seeking to become a referral, doorknocking, or other, what is the inverse of that activity? How does that person find or recommend people, if they become aware of a vacancy? How might they see you as a person to solve their problems, even if it isn’t a vacancy? You do these activities because of how they might help you and because of the benefit the other party experiences. What’s in it for them? If there isn’t anything in it for them, why should they help you? For each and every stage in recruitment, there is an opposed force, as candidates and the hiring process meet each other. It’s rarely an equal force, because every vacancy has supply and demand, resource, skill level, biases and intent at play. This is why each type of role has a different method of looking for work. Executive vacancies typically prioritise headhunted candidates, with fewer public adverts. Here the priority shifts towards building relationships with, and being discoverable by, Executive Search recruiters. If executives rely mainly on job boards, they may never think to focus on more suited channels. If you can learn what the other needs for that process to be successful, you can deliver the same. Speak to peers, speak to hiring managers you know, speak to recruiters, speak to former job seekers. How have they found work, and how would they recruit for your roles? Research your market to find viable employers, to identify recruiters and to build your network.  Then execute an appropriate strategy to access these channels.

I had an aborted conversation at a networking event on Tuesday. It was about a problem vacancy a fractional people lead was looking at. Her client had instructed various executive search firms and none had produced a viable candidate. It seems the consistent approach was to match CVs to job description - pureplay transactional - and none were candidates that met the goal of the vacancy. You see that organisational pain that the vacancy heals wasn't defined by documentation, and therefore if you rely on that documentation to find candidates, it's happenstance that you come across someone viable. It's such a common problem, and when I 'fix' problem vacancies, it's invariably something that isn't described which was holding back a successful hire. The irony is this shouldn't be a hidden pain - presuming it's appropriate to share, it should be front and centre. What complicates modern recruitment is that, instead of better specifying vacancies, both sides of the hiring fence increasingly rely on LLMs to produce documentation that shaves the edges off. And as a result a candidate that has extensively healed the hidden pain a vacancy might even remove the evidence from their application in a bit to better match an advert or job description. The more transactional recruitment comes, particularly through reliance on technology, the worse this problem becomes. Probably not an issue for business as usual vacancy, but when a vacancy has impact, standard process of "5 CVs by Friday" will invariably hold you back. The chapter below is from A Career Breakdown Kit , my guide for navigating a skewiff employment market. It may be for job seekers, but the problem and solution are directly mirrored by the hiring side. It's taken word for word from the book, so some of the content is interconnected with other chapters. You can read most of them for free in the Jobseeker Basics newsletter. Hierarchy of pain This chapter reflects on how buyers make decisions, how this is reflected in hiring and why it matters in how you put forward your CV, application, interviews and other messages. If you’ve ever encountered sales in your career or life you are likely familiar with the concepts of Features and Benefits. The product is what is proposed. Features are what it does. Benefits are how it helps. However there are actually three other components in this hierarchy that make up commercial messaging. Value is what the benefits mean to you. “Sell the sizzle, not the sausage” - the sizzle isn’t a benefit, if you don’t like sausages. Outcomes are the tangible long-term results from using that product or service. “Sell the picture frame, not the screwdriver” - or rather what’s in the frame. Why does it matter? The idea being these peel back the layers of the onion to help a potential customer understand exactly What’s In It For Them. Yet, it may not matter whatsoever if your brilliantly put together message doesn’t achieve one element - show how you heal their hidden pain. In that frame example above, this might be a photo of a loved one, no longer with us. The photo is for our memories and feelings. The frame has to be right, to commemorate them properly. While it needs to be mounted well, using tools that make the job easier. Could you market that loss to sell a screwdriver? Hopefully not, though the message might be, “For memories that matter,” instead of "High Quality Screwdriver". It's a common pain many share, yet not one you might discuss down the DIY shop. Early in my career I had a lesson on hidden pain and its importance. I recruited an HR Manager for a high growth business whose requirement was for someone with broad experience in a similar environment. I presented an excellent candidate who was only available due to the shutdown of her employer - she had to stay to the final day to manage the process well, which limited her availability to start work. That was the only reason I explained her current situation to this new employer, because redundancy management wasn’t on the job description. She got the job! On day one of her new employment, her role was made redundant and she was offered a retention bonus to shut down the local site - everyone was to lose their jobs. The hidden pain here was redundancy, something not even mentioned to me during the vacancy briefing, and something I never broached with Julie. IIRC, there was no mention of it during the interview process either. Perhaps that’s an extreme example, but it does show what can happen behind the scenes. And if you happened to be out of work, a fixed term contract with a retention bonus might be quite appealing. Were you to apply to that vacancy, it would be important to highlight your redundancy experience - customising your CV might even have worked against you! So how does this hierarchy fit within your job search? You are the product, with your next employer on a buyer’s journey. Your features are what you offer. In a CV this is a combination of job titles, qualifications, skills and areas of experience. It’s also your salary requirement, where you are based and other elements like Visa status and working arrangements. Get these right and a little luck might mean they are all you need, considering that these same elements are what we source and filter on. I expect in this market you’re in competition with many people that offer the same Features, so the differentiator is what you bring to the table uniquely. The contexts of your career combined with how you helped, your impact, your achievements, and what the outcomes were. Related chapters: Principles of a Good CV Should I customise my CV? LinkedIn profiles that get found LinkedIn profiles that convert These are all resources that will help you communicate the benefits of your experience, the value you bring, the problems you solve, and the outcomes of these solutions. As for the hidden pain question, which in many vacancies isn’t articulated, how can you unpick hidden? Go back to why vacancies are recruited. How did they come about in the first place? They only fit into two piles - new and replacement. However these two piles have many subcategories relating to the problems they solve and the pain they heal. Researching the company can help. Inside knowledge definitely helps - it’s one reason good agency recruiters will be a valuable ally. But this knowledge isn’t always available, and sometimes the employer may not even know! I always come back to the principle, “You can’t be all things to all people.” And when you try to do this, you appeal to no one. It’s one reason why using LLM style AI to customise CVs is so problematic. The output is necessarily same-same because it’s a probabilistic determination of what you want based on an aggregate of data. It’s why, when recruiters receive a volume of AI augmented CVs, they all look the same. Your ‘good enough’ core CV ( Should I customise my CV ) leans into your strengths. While you might tweak it to meet the essential requirements, in the language of the employer, this should naturally support your greatest strength - the unique fingerprint that is your career. The downside of relying on customisation against vague, and often misrepresentative, adverts is that you can deemphasise and even remove your biggest achievements. The same achievements that would have helped you stand out. If your application doesn’t heal the hidden pain of a vacancy, it’s either because you have not defined your strengths correctly or you aren’t that close of a fit with the actual needs of the vacancy. An example to show this pitfall in practice. I caught up with a friend yesterday who has resigned from a post that was missold to him. His career is based on commercial acumen and enablement in a field that is heavily focused on risk management and compliance. So he’s already unusual in a good way (though his CV didn’t show this). On day one of his new job, he encountered a literal unexpected disaster. While these things happen, and he managed the situation effectively, this proved a consequence of the business culture and strategy. These problems kept coming up and his functional area in the business needed a complete overhaul at executive level. Rather than the commercial enablement picture they painted, they needed someone who relished chaos - a master of disaster. Completely the opposite of the career Simon wants. This isn’t something they could publicise in their recruitment process, for reputational reasons, yet it was a fundamental baked-in aspect of the role. I’ve no doubt Simon’s CV is a match for their job description. Yet he is not a match for their job. What if they’d seen CVs of people who’d leant into strengths of healing dysfunction? What if he’d leant into his strength of enablement? He may not have left his previous job for something he went on to regret. If you’re sceptical about how crucial hidden pain is in recruitment, think about your own hidden pain when applying for jobs. What’s going on in your life that impacts which roles are ideal for you. The same points you might not divulge when you’re just trying to get back into employment. Perhaps you've even experienced the pain I did when considering a hardware purchase. How did that pain inform your buying decisions? It’s no different for employers when they consider the pain and problems inherent in their vacancy. 

Earlier in this blog, I released 16 chapters from A Recruitment AiDE , a discipline on effective key hire recruitment. AiDE is something I've developed throughout my career, from curiousity, from a desire to find improvement, and because through experimentation I became a better recruiter. You might say it's a copywriting framework, but recruitment is different to attracting customers. For me adverts are the consequence of the work required to make sure employers are hiring the right people for the right role, and interpreting that message with meaning for readers who might just start the path to becoming an employee. But when you've advertised the way you've always done, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, it's easy to think 'what a bunch of hot air'. Adverts work for some vacancies, not for all! You might think you'll get to too much AI slop in terms of applications, so what's the point? You might think headhunting is best. Yet what you'd miss is 'the consequence'. Because better messaging helps all recruitment, irrespective of the way you do it. And if you get it right, you'll hire more suited people who'll enjoy their roles. Fortunately little of this is speculative. In itself it's the consequence of the work that has gone before, by many experts in many arenas. Some of which I share here, in some of the evidence which validates AiDE. It's very long, and the research cited longer still, but you can read the originals and make up your own mind. Then maybe you can try AiDE and see the results. Experimenting like I have over 25 and change years. (btw this chapter may have some errors from how I copied it from the manuscript, given citations sat as a footnote) Chapter 2: The evidence Why each dimension of AiDE has a research foundation This chapter shares research that supports what I learnt, developed and deployed through AiDE, because "Well you would say that" is such a natural objection. Good recruitment advertising is not complicated in principle. Write for the people you want to attract. Be specific. Tell the truth. State the salary. Be decent. And yet the evidence tells a different story. Across decades of research into how language shapes decisions, how candidates read and respond to job advertising, and what makes a hire succeed or fail, the same gulf recurs: between what employers write and what candidates actually need. Something that may lead to failed recruitment. This chapter maps that evidence onto AiDE's four dimensions: Attention, ikigai, Definition, and Experience. The research did not produce AiDE. AiDE reflects a set of candidate-first principles developed over twenty-five years of practice. But the research independently supports those principles and understanding why each dimension matters makes it easier to apply them well. A note on sources: the evidence assembled here draws on peer-reviewed academic research, large-scale industry data, and practitioner findings from conversion copywriting - a field that works from A/B testing and measurable outcomes rather than controlled laboratory studies. Each source type has different strengths. Where practitioner literature is cited, this is noted. Where academic studies are cited, the original papers are referenced at the end. The reader is encouraged to verify independently. Attention The AIDA framework - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action - was introduced by advertising pioneer Elias St. Elmo Lewis.¹ It is one of the oldest continuously applied frameworks in commercial communication. Its longevity reflects a current truth: attention must be earned before anything else can follow. Interest, desire, and action are unreachable if the opening fails. Research into how candidates actually process job advertisements confirms how early this failure can occur. A study by Jones, Shultz, and Chapman (2006) found that when candidates were browsing rather than actively searching - the typical state of a passive reader - the presentation of an advert had a disproportionate influence on whether they would pursue it further.² When attention and interest were not secured in the opening, the quality of the remaining content became largely irrelevant: the candidate had already moved on. Further research into job advert design found that job seekers "identify a small number of early favourites on the basis of very limited information," which they use as a template for subsequent search behaviour.³ An advert that does not establish itself as an early favourite - typically in the opening sentences - does not recover its position later, regardless of what follows. The implication is direct. The standard job advert opening - company name, generic description, duty list - is not just dull. It structurally fails the passive candidate at the moment that determines whether they keep reading at all. What conversion copywriting tells us about opening in the reader's world Conversion copywriting is a practitioner discipline grounded in A/B testing and measurable outcomes rather than controlled academic studies - but no less empirically founded for that. Its central finding, consistently replicated across thousands of tests, is that copy using the reader's own language outperforms copy written from the sender's perspective. A commonly cited demonstration is a split-test run by Joanna Wiebe on a rehabilitation clinic's website. The control headline read "Your addiction ends here." The challenger was drawn verbatim from a book review on addiction: "If you think you need rehab, you do." The challenger generated over 400% more clicks on the main call to action and over 26% more form submissions on the following page.⁴ When your opening uses the exact words a reader uses to describe their own situation, it creates an immediate recognition response: this person understands me.⁵ This is the outside-in principle in measurable form: begin in the candidate's world, with something they already know to be true, and the reader's default scepticism is suspended long enough for the rest of the advert to make its case. The conversion copywriting tradition also establishes that the opening carries disproportionate weight - estimates suggest that roughly 80% of a page's conversion performance is determined before the reader has absorbed the first paragraph. In job advertising terms this is the opening sentence: the one visible in a search results summary, the one that determines the click. AiDE's Attention dimension asks a single question of every advert opening: could this appear in any other advert for any other employer? If the answer is yes, the opening has not yet done its work. ikigai The most operationally direct evidence for AiDE's ikigai dimension comes from a study by Joseph A. Schmidt and colleagues, published in the Journal of Business Psychology, reported by the Association for Psychological Science. Schmidt's team worked with a large multinational engineering consulting firm to manipulate the wording of live online job advertisements across engineering, technical design, and project administration roles. The manipulation was straightforward. Some adverts were written to emphasise what the job would offer the candidate: variety, autonomy, the opportunity for development, the chance to work across multiple areas. Others emphasised what the employer required: the qualifications expected, the tasks demanded, the standards to be met. The role was identical. Only the orientation of the language changed. The offer-focused adverts drew more applications relative to views. More significantly, they attracted applicants independently rated as higher quality across three dimensions: educational qualifications, stability of employment history, and relevant experience.⁶ The hiring managers, unaware of the research, responded accordingly - they were more likely to call the highest-rated applicants in for interview. The finding was strongest for technical roles where candidate demand was high. The researchers concluded that high-quality applicants who perceive their skills as being in demand "have the luxury to be more discriminating about the number and types of positions to which they apply" and are "more sensitive to recruitment messages" than those who feel they have fewer options.⁷ The candidates most worth attracting are precisely those who will read a requirements-heavy advert and feel nothing. The advert that describes what the work genuinely offers gives that same person a reason to keep reading. Honesty as a mechanism: what realistic job preview research shows A parallel body of research - the Realistic Job Preview (RJP) literature, developed since the 1970s and meta-analysed most recently by Earnest, Allen and Landis (2011) across 52 studies⁸ - reaches the same conclusion from a different angle. An RJP provides candidates with honest information about both the positive and negative aspects of a role, with the explicit goal of reducing turnover by enabling better self-selection. The initial assumption was that RJPs worked by lowering inflated candidate expectations. The Earnest meta-analysis found something more interesting: the primary mechanism was perceived organisational honesty.⁹ Candidates who received an honest preview did not simply have more accurate expectations - they perceived the employer as more trustworthy, and that trust was the strongest predictor of subsequent retention. The implication runs directly through the ikigai dimension. An advert that describes both the genuine opportunity and the genuine challenge of a role is not just more honest than one that hides the warts. It is more effective - because candidates who apply having seen the full picture are applying for the right reasons, and the research shows they are more likely to stay. Candidates who received an honest preview perceived the employer as more trustworthy - and that trust was the strongest predictor of subsequent retention. The passive majority LinkedIn's global workforce data identifies approximately 75% of the working population as passive, with 45% "approachable passive": employed, not actively searching, but potentially open to the right opportunity.¹⁰ The remaining 25% are active candidates: currently looking, CVs live on job boards, checking their email. These two groups require fundamentally different things from an advert. Active candidates have already decided to move. They need information. Passive candidates have not made that decision - their default is no. For an advert to convert a passive reader from "not looking" to "genuinely interested", it has to give a specific, honest, compelling reason for a contented person to reconsider their situation. The ikigai dimension is the primary mechanism for reaching passive candidates through advertising. It is where the advert articulates not what the employer needs, but what the candidate might gain - and does so with enough specificity that a content professional has a genuine reason to weigh up a change they were not already planning. The next chapter introduces 'problem awareness' as a different way of considering active vs passive candidates, and is one which sets aside the notion that situation defines candidacy. Definition In 2011, Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen, and Aaron Kay published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examining whether gendered language in job advertisements affected applicant behaviour. The methodology was substantial: an archival analysis of job advertisements, followed by three controlled experiments creating masculine and feminine versions of the same advert for identical roles. The headline finding is that masculine-coded language reduced appeal to women. But the mechanism is more instructive than the result. The reduced appeal was not explained by women perceiving themselves as less qualified. It was explained by a lower sense of belongingness: whether a candidate felt they would fit, be welcomed, and belong in the culture being described.¹⁰ ¹¹ Participants did not explicitly attribute identified gendered language as the reason for their response in any of the studies.¹² They rationalised decisions on other grounds without recognising that the words themselves had done the filtering. The study has since been replicated in start-up contexts.¹³ The implications reach well beyond gender. If carefully coded language can signal who belongs and who does not - and if candidates act on those signals without knowing they are doing so - then the question any employer should ask of their advert is not only whether it excludes anyone deliberately, but what it is signalling without knowing it. This is a Definition problem as much as a language problem. The same mechanism operates whenever a requirements list is unnecessarily exclusive, whenever insider jargon narrows the reader without narrowing the role, whenever cultural shorthand communicates a kind of person rather than a set of capabilities. The definition section of an advert is not neutral. In the Gaucher framework, it is a continuous projection about who the organisation is imagining when it writes - and who belongs there. The requirements section of an advert is not neutral. It is a continuous sign of who the organisation is imagining - and who belongs there. Specificity, salary, and the cost of vagueness Research into message specificity in recruitment advertising consistently shows that specific information increases candidate perceptions of ad truthfulness, organisational attractiveness, and intention to apply.¹⁴ More specific content shows a sincere and honest employer; lower specificity reduces credibility and increases negative attitudes toward the message. On salary specifically: a 2026 analysis of 18,283 full-time UK job listings found only 13% included numeric salary details.¹⁵ Reed's 2024 analysis found roles disclosing salary received approximately 60% more applications; one sector-specific dataset showed 67% more applications and response times over 50% faster when salary was listed.¹⁶ These are commercial reports reflecting indicative trends from proprietary datasets rather than generalisable effect sizes. Four in five UK jobseekers report being less likely to apply for a role if the salary is not shown. Sixty-four per cent, according to one analysis of nearly 10,000 listings, will simply not apply unless salary information appears.¹⁷ "Competitive salary" is the most common form of this failure. It is not a salary statement. It is the absence of one, dressed in language that implies the opposite. For a senior passive candidate with options, it functions as an early indicator that the process ahead may be opaque - and that impression, once formed, is difficult to recover. Experience The Experience dimension carries the lowest weighting in AiDE because candidates tolerate process friction when they genuinely want the role. But this does not mean process design is unimportant. Certain elements in the advert itself communicate process quality before any application has been made. Research into how candidates respond to disclosed selection processes is instructive. A study published in Computers in Human Behavior (2021) found that job-seekers reported significantly lower intention to apply when advertisements described AI-based, automated selection compared to human decision-making.¹⁸ The mechanism was reduced expectation of control and fairness - a feeling that there was no human on the other side of the process who would read what they sent. This finding translates directly to the unnamed, contactless advert. "Click apply below" with no named contact and no stated timeline communicates, accurately or not, that the application will enter an automated queue. For a passive candidate with options - who has no urgent need to apply and is evaluating whether the process is worth their time - this is often sufficient reason to move on. The persuasion knowledge literature offers a complementary explanation. Research in this field shows that when readers can identify a communication as self-serving, they activate scepticism and become harder to persuade.¹⁹ An anonymous process reads as employer-serving: it withholds information that would benefit the candidate while asking for information that benefits the employer. A named contact, a stated timeline, and a commitment to reply are not merely courteous. They are evidence that the process is designed for people, not for volume. The evidence on fit - and why getting it right matters The research literature on person-organisation fit is extensive. A meta-analysis by Kristof-Brown and colleagues (2005) across hundreds of studies found that higher levels of fit were consistently associated with greater job satisfaction, stronger organisational commitment, higher engagement, and meaningfully lower turnover.²⁰ The connection to advertising is logically direct: a specific and honest advert gives candidates the information required to assess fit before applying, and filters out those for whom the role is not right. The cost of getting it wrong is substantial. The REC's Perfect Match report calculated that a poor hire at mid-manager level with a £42,000 salary could cost a business more than £132,000. The same report found that 85% of HR decision-makers admitted their organisation had made a bad hire - and a third believed it had cost them nothing.²¹ CIPD figures put the average direct cost of filling a vacancy at £6,125, rising to £19,000 for management roles; Oxford Economics' modelling put the cost of replacing a single employee at approximately £30,000 once productivity loss, training, and transition are included.²² Against these costs, the investment required to write a more specific, more honest advert - one that attracts a more considered applicant, supports better self-selection, and communicates clearly about what a candidate would be joining - is negligible. A note on when standard adverts work - and why better always helps The evidence assembled here should not be read as a claim that standard job adverts never work. They do, under certain conditions: when candidate supply is abundant, when applicants are highly motivated and will process information regardless of quality, when the role is sufficiently distinctive that even a generic description generates interest. The Schmidt data makes this explicit. For administrative roles where the candidate market was less constrained, ad wording had no measurable effect on applicant quality. Standard adverts, in those conditions, are adequate. The offer-oriented premium appears where it is most needed: in competitive talent markets, for roles requiring specific experience, when the target candidate is employed and content. Is adequacy what we need? The 2026 UK job market is characterised by high volumes of AI-generated applications from candidates applying at scale without genuine engagement, and by increasing difficulty reaching the experienced professionals most likely to succeed in senior roles. A standard advert in a competitive sector does not produce adequate results - it produces noise. There is also a rising-tide argument that applies regardless of market conditions. A better-written advert helps all three candidate types. The active candidate gets clearer information and can self-select more accurately. The unsuitable candidate gets honest insight that allows them to step away without wasting anyone's time. The passive candidate gets a reason to consider a move they were not already planning. Better writing does not disadvantage the candidates a standard advert would have reached. It simply reaches further. The Greg Evidence Since 2020, a 99.1% fill rate on retained mandates has been achieved in this practice, excluding only those vacancies cancelled due to changes in economic conditions.²³ Average retention of successful placements runs at 4.1 years, with consistent feedback they deliver above expectation and enjoy their roles. The proportion of applications that warrant a conversation consistently exceeds 30%, against an industry norm where unsuitable applications are estimated at 95% or more of the total. The adverts that produce these results are not sophisticated in any technical sense. They are specific, honest, and written from the candidate's point of view rather than the employer's. They name the salary. They describe the actual texture of the work. They say something true about why a satisfied professional might consider the move. This is, in practice, what the research predicts. The Gaucher findings on language and belongingness in the Definition dimension. The RJP research on honesty as a mechanism for retention. Schmidt's evidence that offer-oriented adverts attract measurably better candidates. The passive-candidate data on what motivates a content professional to reconsider. The salary transparency evidence on what withholding information costs. The conversion copywriting tradition on how opening in the reader's world changes response rates. The person-organisation fit literature on why precision in attraction produces better retention. The research does not prove AiDE. It establishes the conditions under which a candidate-first framework addresses real, evidenced problems. The chapters that follow make the case for the specific approach.  References Barry, T.E. & Howard, D.J. (1990). A review and critique of the hierarchy of effects in advertising. International Journal of Advertising, 9(2), 121–135. Jones, D.A., Shultz, J.W. & Chapman, D.S. (2006). Recruiting through job advertisements: The effects of cognitive elaboration on decision making. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 14(2), 167–179. Petry, T., Treisch, C. & Peters, M. (2022). Designing job ads to stimulate the decision to apply. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 33(15), 3019–3055. The phrase "identify a small number of early favourites on the basis of very limited information" appears in Allen et al. (2007, p. 1697), cited in this study. Attributed to Wiebe, J. (CopyHackers). Rehab clinic headline split-test. Control: "Your addiction ends here." Challenger (VOC-derived): "If you think you need rehab, you do." Result: >400% increase in CTA clicks, >26% increase in form submissions. Reported in CXL (2024). cxl.com/blog/voice-of-customer/ Palmer, R. (2025). Conversion Copywriting: How to Write Copy That Turns Visitors Into Buyers. robpalmer.com . Headlines derived from VOC research consistently outperform headlines written from the marketer's vocabulary in A/B tests. Schmidt, J.A., Chapman, D.S. & Jones, D.A. (2014). Journal of Business and Psychology, 30(2). Higher-quality applicants tend to be more selective and more sensitive to recruitment messaging (Schmidt et al., 2014). Earnest, D.R., Allen, D.G. & Landis, R.S. (2011). Mechanisms linking realistic job previews with turnover: A meta-analytic path analysis. Personnel Psychology, 64(4), 865–897. Meta-analysis of 52 studies. Primary mechanism identified: perceptions of organisational honesty. Premack, S.L. & Wanous, J.P. (1985). A meta-analysis of realistic job preview experiments. Journal of Applied Psychology, 70(4), 706–719. See also Wanous, J.P. (1973). Effects of a realistic job preview on job acceptance, job attitudes, and job survival. Journal of Applied Psychology, 58(3), 327–332. LinkedIn Talent Solutions (2014). Active vs. passive candidates: The latest global breakdown revealed. Talent Trends 2014 (n=18,000 across 26 countries). Gaucher, D., Friesen, J. & Kay, A.C. (2011). Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(1), 109–128. Archival analysis of job advertisements plus three controlled experiments. Reduced appeal was not explained by women perceiving themselves as less qualified. It was explained by a lower sense of belongingness — whether a candidate felt they would fit and be welcomed (Gaucher et al., 2011). Participants did not explicitly attribute their responses to gendered wording; instead, effects on attraction and application intentions were driven by implicit perceptions of belongingness and fit (Gaucher et al., 2011). Seong, M. & Parker, S. (2024), in a replication and extension of Gaucher, Friesen & Kay (2011), report that gendered wording in job advertisements can deter women from applying to start-up roles, consistent with prior evidence on belongingness effects. Roberson, Q.M., Collins, C.J. & Oreg, S. (2005). The effects of recruitment message specificity on applicant attraction to organisations. Journal of Business and Psychology, 19(3), 319–339. See also Feldman, D.C., Bearden, W.O. & Hardesty, D.M. (2006). Varying the content of job advertisements: The effects of message specificity. Journal of Advertising, 35(1), 123–141. Careerminds UK (April 2026). UK Salary Transparency Report: analysis of 18,283 full-time job listings across 27 UK cities. Only 13% of listings included numeric salary details. Reed.co.uk analysis (2024), cited in Astute People (2025). Roles disclosing salary received approximately 60% more applications. Liberty Hive dataset showed 67% more applications, response times 50% faster. D&I Leaders campaign (2024), citing Reed.co.uk research: four in five jobseekers report being less likely to apply if salary is not shown. Reward Gateway | Edenred (2026) analysis of 9,646 UK listings: 64% of jobseekers will not apply unless salary information appears. Wesche, J.S. & Sonderegger, A. (2021). Repelled at first sight? Expectations and intentions of job-seekers reading about AI selection in job advertisements. Computers in Human Behavior, 125, 106931. Eisend, M. & Tarrahi, F. (2022). Persuasion knowledge in the marketplace: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 32(1), 3–22. Kristof-Brown, A.L. et al. (2005). Consequences of individuals' fit at work: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281–342. See also Hoffman, B.J. & Woehr, D.J. (2006). A quantitative review of the relationship between person–organisation fit and behavioral outcomes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 68(3), 389–399. Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC, 2017). Perfect Match: Making the Right Hire and the Cost of Getting It Wrong. A poor hire at mid-manager level (£42,000 salary) calculated to cost over £132,000. 85% of HR decision-makers admitted a bad hire; a third believed it cost nothing. CIPD (2022) reports average recruitment costs of approximately £6,000 per hire, rising to around £19,000 for managerial roles, depending on organisation size and sector. Broader economic modelling, such as estimates from Oxford Economics, suggests that replacing an employee may cost in the region of £30,000 when productivity loss and wider disruption are included. Wyatt, G. (2020–2026). Bircham Wyatt Recruitment internal data. 99.1% fill rate across retained mandates, excluding cancellations. Average candidate retention 4.1 years. Suitability rate consistently above 30%. Okay I'm citing myself, you're welcome to contact me to challenge, and you should always be sceptical of unverified statements.

What follows it Chapter 8 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) , my guide for job seekers on navigating our weird and wonderful jobs market. When supporting job seekers, a common objection is "Isn't that your job?" when I can't help them, a job seeker who isn't in my domain, find a job. I explain that most recruiters are paid for fulfilling vacancies, not for finding people work, and while they are an important part of the supply chain, their expectation is the inverse of what normally happens. I also explain that recruiters often do candidate led business development, but that this is mainly a mechanism to win vacancies, given its unknowable if that person would be a good fit for the culture and context of any given vacancy. Then I explain that niche recruiters may indeed have connections that would be valuable introductions, but that in this case it isn't me. But that if they have such in demand experience, they might look at avenues to find those people directly, such as doorknocking and networking. But mainly I explain that it's important they understand how recruiters work in general, so that they can build relationships that serve them, the recruiter and their clients. And because a job search is the inverse of how that same job is filled, employers should take the same consideration for their suppliers. Which is why I'm sharing this chapter for job seekers with employers, who may sometimes think both "Isn't that your job?" and "Aren't all recruiters the same?" I've been careful not to criticise my industry. While I work on a retained and fractional basis, those aren't inherently better than other models. It's the work that matters, and the problems it solves. This is both too long and not comprehensive enough, given how every recruiter may work in different ways. Happy to answer any questions about how the work beneath the tip of the iceberg is often very different to what you might expect. Here's Chapter 8, in full. 8 - How recruiters work This chapter illustrates standard recruiter working practices and why they lead to some of the experiences commonly talked about among job seekers. This is about managing your expectations, by lifting the curtain on recruitment. I’ll use broad terms where applicable and a steer on how others may use more obscure terminology. What a candidate is If you jump on any recruiter website, I’m pretty sure the vast majority will say something along these lines: ‘We’re disrupting the market with better candidate experience.’ As well as a lot of promises of being different in a way that looks much the same as everyone else. And yet your experiences will differ wildly. Part of this may be generic marketing. Based on many discussions with fellow recruiters, my belief is that the industry definition is different to a job seeker’s definition. Many hiring processes see candidates as an employable person being considered for a job. I use this terminology myself. For example, a job advert may have 99 applications, while only 5 are potential candidates - because they meet the criteria of the role and the remaining applicants don’t. The nuance of this definition is that the more cynical the process, the worse the memory retention of which candidates were assessed. Some companies may have seen you as a candidate at 2nd stage interview, then completely forget about you if they’ve discounted you from the process - you are no longer a candidate. Using this definition, many recruiters think they give a first class of candidate experience because they only relate it to the people they think of as candidates. This is equally true of someone who treats everyone decently and those who only treat people they place into jobs decently. On the other hand, pretty much anyone who looks at new employment sees themselves as a candidate for that employment. Assuming you are accountable, you wouldn’t apply for any job you didn’t see yourself as suitable for. Even if you chose not to apply, it’s not necessarily because you didn’t see yourself as a candidate. It may be that even though you are a suitable candidate for that vacancy, your experience of the process made you choose to step away - which might be as simple as not liking the advert or email you read. This last point relates to the phenomenon of candidate resentment (p89). There’s another industry nuance to the candidate definition. In the same way you may have heard about the hidden jobs market, recruiters talk about the passive candidate market: ‘80% of candidates aren’t looking for a job, and these are the best candidates.’ Not my words, btw. A passive opportunity (p160) explores why this happens and how you can use the same principles to improve your odds. If you think it odd that I’ve started ‘How recruiters work’ with a discussion on candidates, it’s because our relationship with our candidates is a sign of how we work with employers. Without placing candidates in one form or another, most recruiters wouldn’t make any money. It is deeply integrated into how we work. Different agency recruitment models Typically, agency fees come from the successful placement of staff irrespective of the nature of work. The fee is often a percentage of salary and in most situations is budgeted separately from the new employee's pay. The overall steps recruiters often work to are these: Receive job description from employer Advertise job (on a job board or through outreach like DMs and calls) Find and submit qualified candidates Arrange interviews Coordinate offer process The differentiators are the quality of information at each step and how rigorously they are executed. For example, my requirement for recruiting a vacancy is a full consultation on the company, vacancy, context and culture, which I summarise in writing in a detailed candidate pack. Where there are issues, I advise the employer on how we can overcome them. There are variations around this type of process. Some agencies may rely more on a video presentation, others may ‘sell in’ candidates. Some agencies will use psychometrics or other types of assessments. Some will meet all candidates, some won't even talk to them. The general steps have a lot of crossovers. Contingency The most popular recruitment model is akin to 'no win, no fee'. In the UK, it’s estimated that the average fill rate is between 20% and 33%. This is a range from several sources, although it’s next to impossible to pinpoint accurately. At the lower end, for every vacancy filled, that recruiter won’t fill four vacancies. Therefore, their fee implicitly accounts for unfulfilled work. The reason it’s low is that most vacancies provided to recruiters are given on a ‘multi-agency’ basis and even in competition with the employer themselves. A lot of contingency recruitment is first past the post, in that a submitted CV is seen to be owned by the agency which submitted it first. Let’s say Joe Recruiter has to fill 3 vacancies a month to hit target. At a 20% fill rate, he works on 15 vacancies a month. You can see how this might impact quality of service if there are multiple different candidates for each role. And if the race is on to get CVs over as quickly as possible. This can result bad behaviours like refusing to divulge company information (for fear of divulging competitor secrets) to trying to find out who you are interviewing with (which may be to use them as leads). And classics like ghosting and poor responsiveness. It isn’t necessarily the case. There are some great contingency recruiters out there who work closely with employers, often with exclusivity. When I was a pure contingency recruiter, my fill rate varied between 50% and 70% annually. It’s higher consistently now, though I don’t work contingently anymore. Other models The traditional counterpoint to contingency is retained where we receive a portion of a fee up front to service a vacancy. This requires exclusivity and better access to hiring information. Retained isn’t intrinsically better than contingency - both have their issues, challenges and opportunities. It can lead to mutual obligation from the employer while allowing a more quality focused approach to candidate work, resulting in a better experience for everyone. A different approach is RPO (recruitment process outsourcing ) whereby a third party manages recruitment for the employer. Over the past few years, we’ve seen other models come through, from subscription types (bizarrely called Recruitment as a Service ), to embedded / insourced / fractional (acting as an in-house recruitment function as a third party) to Uber-style apps. Different types of agency recruiter There are as many types of agency recruiter as there are recruitment models. What complicates matters is that as an industry we sometimes try to hide what we do by clever names. Am I a boutique headhunter or am I a recruiter? Or a Talent Ecosystem Intelligence Officer? I’m proud to be a recruiter who wears my process on my sleeve. Whatever we term ourselves the nature of an agency will inform whether they might help you: Temps / interim Where you sign up for temporary work on an hourly or daily rate employed through a contract for service. While Interim recruitment also relates to temporary projects it is quite different. Interims have a skills set a traditional employee doesn’t have. They provide a service through their limited company, held outside of IR35 (off-payroll working regulations). The agency will make money on a margin / markup based on your pay. Permanent An agency that works mainly on permanent vacancies typically paid on filling a job, by the employer. Many agencies offer both. Specialist These are typically recruitment agencies that specialise in a domain. This could be a broad industry like manufacturing or professional services, or a market vertical like marketing or HR. It doesn’t necessarily mean they have specialist knowledge of the roles they recruit, although this can be the case. It means more that they regularly recruit a specific type of role. Generalist These won’t have one specialty and may work closer with certain employers across a variety of vacancies. They might be pure scattergun. You may find them excellent for the one vacancy you are in discussion for, yet that’s the only time they’ll have something for you. Headhunter This can mean many things. The idea is that headhunters access passive candidates who don’t apply for jobs. Although many use the same tools other recruiters do. Some won’t advertise at all. Others might advertise alongside other activities. The crux of the message for employers is that they have a capability beyond what employers can achieve themselves, which can be true. Executive Search Typically, this works on a retained basis for board level appointments. It’s rare to see these roles advertised. They use many of the same proactive channels others do and may cultivate a specific network of contacts who are go-to candidates. Some are so niche they may not go outside of their network. And many more It doesn’t matter so much how a recruiter works, more that they can be a conduit to your next job. Two points come from the sections above: 1/ that candidate experience is hard to deliver consistently when dealing with the volume of vacancies you see in a contingency model, and takes intent in other models, 2/ that agencies are paid to fill jobs, not explicitly to help find people jobs. That second point can cause much frustration if you assume it’s the job of a recruiter to help you find a role, especially when our marketing talks about how we help candidates. Recruitment is often a short-term business. It’s rare that you’ll see recruiters cultivate long-term relationships with job seekers if they can’t help you directly. This is ironic, considering many job seekers will reciprocate the help they’ve received with people they’ve built trust with. Doubly ironic, when it’s someone with hiring authority that gets radio silence from previous suppliers. It’s common to hear of job seekers blacklisting agencies for poor service - frustrating, demoralising and occasionally crushing to be on the end of bad experience. Don’t let a bad process get in the way of what might be good employment. This is as true at the employer end as with agencies. With agencies, the onus is often on winning the next vacancy, rather than giving service to people who may or may not be candidates. Their client may not even know how those agencies work with candidates. These same agencies may have further vacancies you could be seen as a good candidate for with different employers. At the same time, many hiring managers have never been trained on recruitment or interviewing, while being busy at work. This can lead to a poor experience as a candidate compared with what they would be like to work with. The internal recruiter These are recruiters employed directly by the employer to fulfil their recruitment. Often these are called Talent Acquisition Managers, Internal Recruiter, or Recruitment Manager. More than filling vacancies, they manage the system of recruitment. There are many specialist domains within talent acquisition including workforce planning, retention, enablement, marketing and branding. It’s a field that is overwhelmed by a large number of redundancies and where internal recruiters are often overburdened. When working on vacancies, the priority is to fill them. This can lead to frustration if you ask corporate recruiters, ‘Do you have any jobs I might be suitable for?’ Whether or not there is an argument that they could help you, it’s more effective to do the work yourself. Research the business areas they recruit for and ask directly ‘could you tell me who is the best contact for ‘ or ‘when are you likely to recruit for these roles?’ Help them help you. Takeaways There’s much to talk about on this subject and I’ve no doubt I’ve missed glaringly obvious topics. Equally, it’s easy to oversimplify what is a huge and complex industry. It’s worth learning the rules of the recruitment game when you can. Be curious and ask questions. While we should be criticised for poor behaviour, if you don’t understand why a recruiter works in a certain way, please don’t assume it’s for bad reason. Recruitment is a stressful job at the best of times. This can lead to thick skin and callous behaviour. It’s not an excuse, more a symptom of the system we all work in. 

What follows is Chapter 49 in A Career Breakdown Kit (Summer 2026) . It's like many other chapters in that I've tried to make it stand alone, yet it's deeply connected to the rest of the book. For example, if you accept your job search is equivalent to launching a product to market - where you are the product and your next employer the buyer - then a sensible strategy is also equivalent. You execute an appropriate multichannel sales and marketing plan, where you focus on the steps in your control, with considered action and follow up. An interview process is an ongoing negotiation, with each interview equivalent to a consultative sales meeting. And like any good sales professional, you know that the steps preceding, the steps in-between, and the steps after all have a part to play. In my last three offers these have all been contributing factors: The relationship nurtured by the hiring manager led to their new employee hitting the ground running The private information withheld by the candidate that led to an offer rescinded because she could never have fulfilled the role in the first place The enthusiasm shown by a candidate in post interview communications tipped a decision in their favour Recruitment is risk, filled with bias - that doesn't mean you can't make that work for you. 49 - After the interview In a tough job search, getting to an interview can feel a real achievement. If you’ve been accountable in your applications, only going for roles where you are a strong fit, these are tangible opportunities to secure employment. The interview itself isn’t the be-all and end-all. It’s better to see them as the start of a conversation, one that’s only complete when you either have an acceptable employment contract in your hand, or if it’s an unequivocal no. Continuing this conversation in the right way, and in ways other candidates may not think to, can bring hoped for and unexpected gains. A few weeks back I filled a vacancy which had a strong shortlist. The final three were all employable, and the company would have taken all three had they been able to. The second choice candidate was disappointed and took it well, responding professionally. I worked hard to give all three a good experience with regular updates and constructive feedback. I too was genuinely disappointed for the ‘unsuccessful’ candidates. Two weeks after accepting the offer and returning the signed contract, the first-choice candidate withdrew. She’d received a significantly improved offer having been headhunted. Within two hours of passing the news on to the hiring team, the 2nd choice candidate was offered the role and accepted. How she had responded to her initial disappointment was a key element in this offer being put forward. The same was true of her experience with us in her decision to accept the offer. In many ways an interview is like a sales meeting. One party pitches their offering which might be customised against the questions asked. The other party makes a decision on whether and how to proceed. In an interview both the candidate and employer act as both seller and buyer. As a job seeker you get the final say on whether you say yes, no or something in between. Your decision is influenced by factors you may not divulge to the employer, such as an unexpected intervention (illness, accident, family), personal circumstances or other offers that may come up. It’s the same for the employer. They may have a hierarchy of decision-making, changes in the business and changes outside of the business - many things that can influence an interview decision or time frame, different from what was initially agreed. In sales we know that a deal isn’t agreed upon until the invoice is paid. Even if there is an initial ‘yes’ in a meeting we follow up suitably. Follow-up email to confirm details of the conversation and next steps. Thank you for your time Follow up at the appropriate time to check progress If it’s ‘no right now’, follow up over time to build a relationship until they are ready to buy If it’s ‘no answer’, find appropriate reasons to follow up, ending in a breakup email What this actually looks relates to what their sales (hiring) process is, playing to their rules and breaking those same rules in an appropriate way. In the UK, 61% of private sector employers are SMEs, whereas the vast majority of money is in the corporate space. The differentiator in recruitment is that the more corporate you get, the more transactional and matrix-led recruitment often becomes. Some of the rules of the game will be different. This illustrates how and why things are different depending on the context. Public sector, charities, geography, bias, habit, strategy - these all affect the rules of what appear similar processes from the outside. It’s important not to be cynical or come across as coercive. Respect the process and any rules you learn about. Thank you notes Most of the employers I partner with are interested in candidate feedback and interest post-interview - to help them reach their decision for the right reason. Were you applying directly, their interest in your view would be the same. A naturally written thank you note sent appropriately should not work against you. It might work for you and it’s a situation where someone’s bias can be a benefit. ‘Dear Greg, I wanted to thank you for your time today and the opportunity to interview at ABC Corp. It was a pleasure to meet you and Gary and helpful to understand more about your role and environment. I remain keen and would be delighted to return for the next stage. You mentioned you’ll make a decision by the end of next week and I look forward to hearing from you. Do let me know if I can help with anything - my number is …. Kind regards,’ It’s an opportunity to build on or mitigate inconclusive points in an interview if there’s an example you neglected to share or if you didn’t convey information in the right way. Maybe they let slip they’d be concerned if the role would keep your interest in the long term - why not own this? ‘During the interview you asked if I could see myself in this role long-term. It’s a role I’d enjoy - taking on a hands-on role I can get stuck into is an exciting challenge, while my experience in xxx would be beneficial for yyy.’ Keep it more succinct than my email though. Write it in your own words in a similar tone to how you came across in the interview. Will it make a difference? Only marginally, in some situations. Is it worth doing as a natural way to continue the conversation? I think so. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t get a reply - they may have a policy to follow. And to that coercive point above don’t say ‘I’m the best candidate. You’d be a fool to miss out,’ or something more subtle that might suggest the same. Additional interviews In an ideal world you’d get a full view of the interview process before the interview. Unfortunately some employers enjoy playing a game of interview chicken, revealing more and more interview stages as you go through them. Most are somewhere in between. Try to establish the full process as early as possible in case there is anything that is non-negotiable for you. For example, I know some people categorically do not want to do technical tests or ‘business plan’ style presentations, having had their fingers burnt in the past. It’s your choice what might be a non-negotiable - for any reasonable employer these are typically used as a means for fair assessment. Treat any interview in the same way as the first interview: prepare as fully as possible and assume nothing. Unless you know their hierarchy of decision-making, that new person you meet at fourth stage for an informal chat might well be the person with the final say. Even a social get-together after an offer is put forward might be seen as an assessment. Appropriate follow-ups It’s a careful balance. You want to show you are interested, not desperate. You need an answer, not to be inappropriately intrusive - even if that’s not your intent perception holds weight. Following up in the right way is a good tactic. If you can gain an understanding of their time frames or process work to that. Anything and everything can happen behind the scenes, including unexpected absences. Things can slip in a way employers may not see as notable. A few work days after you were expecting to hear, drop them a polite line. ‘Hi Greg, I wondered if you had any news on how you want to proceed with this role. Is there any update you can share? Kind regards,’ You can play a bit of keeping up with the Joneses if it’s true - ‘I remain interested - I do have two interviews this week with other employers. Would you like me to keep you updated?’ Sometimes no news is no news and you might need to be patient. Eventually you may come to a point where you need a decision from them - such as if your 2nd choice company gives you a job offer. A breakup email can be a good thing. Even if this doesn’t prompt an update or decision from them, you give yourself agency to walk away with no ‘what ifs?’ And if they do come back later, you can make a separate decision on whether to revisit them. One such email might be: ‘Hi Greg, I enjoyed our interview on May 21st. You mentioned you’d reach a decision the following week. Can I assume you have moved forward with another candidate? I’ll draw a line through my application for now and will be happy to pick up our conversations at a later date, if appropriate. Kind regards,’ Written appropriately, there are three outcomes: You get a reply confirming they have appointed You get no reply and can move on You get a reply with more information That last point may be ‘no news’ or something actionable. Sometimes it might even prompt good news. Whatever the outcome, you can move forward. Keeping in touch long-term Sometimes a no might be a ‘no for now’, especially when you are later on in the process, such as being pipped to the post at final interview. If yours is a business as usual role where there are a number of employees fulfilling similar duties in the same company, you may well be suitable for other roles that come up in future. How can you keep in touch appropriately so that you help their decision making when another vacancy comes up? Find reasons to occasionally keep in touch (maybe once every couple of months). If they are active on LinkedIn you could follow their content and add constructive comments. It may come to nothing but it may give you early sight of a new vacancy. If you see another vacancy advertised check it out. Drop them a line directly rather than just apply given you are continuing a conversation rather than coming in cold. And if they reply to say ‘don’t bother’, at least you know. 

I'm doing a lot of networking at the moment, both in setting up conversations and in agreeing to have conversations. My goal typically is to plant the seed for a relationship where we might be able to help each other at some point in the future. That help might be sharing knowledge, helping directly in business, making a recommendation, or even just sharing a load. Of course it's a little easier when we already know each other. Then there is already an element of trust, and we have a reputation with each other. I also know that new conversations are just as important, and it takes more work to build those points above too. Though I have found that sometimes when people ask for calls with me, they have a clear if hidden agenda - they want to see how I can help them. And they seem disappointed when I don't have anything for them. Seems like they aren't interested in a relationship after all, just what a relationship might give them. Two types of networking, where one isn't networking at all, in my book - it's prospecting. Speaking of which, the below is in A Career Breakdown Kit (Summer 2026) - a strategic approach to networking that can pay off long-term and, if you are so lucky, in the short term as well. If you need something more specific to you, try this tool, which is free and private: Your networking plan . And don't forget all the other free tools on www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources . 43 - How to network for a job Who are the two types of people you remember at networking events? For me two types stand out. One will be the instant pitch networker. This might work if you happen to be in need right now of what they have to offer or if mutual selling is your goal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but it’s a selling activity pretending to be networking. If you want to sell, go and overtly sell rather than disguise it with subterfuge. Lest we mark your face and avoid you where possible in future. The second is the one who gets to know you, shows interest and tries to add to your experience. You share ideas, and there’s no push to buy something. They believe that through building the relationship when you have a problem they can solve, you’ll think to go to them. It’s a relationship built on reciprocity. One where if you always build something together there is reason to keep in touch. And where the outcome is what you need if the right elements come together: right person, right time, right message, right place, right offering, right price. Job search networking is no different. The purpose of networking in a job search is to build a network where you are seen as a go-to solution should a suitable problem come up. In this case the problem you solve is a vacancy. Either because your active network is recruiting, or because they advocate for you when someone they know is recruiting. It is always a two-way conversation you both benefit from. Knowledge sharing, sounding board, see how you’re doing - because of what the relationship brings to you both. It is not contacting someone only to ask for a job or a recommendation. A one-way conversation that relies on lucky timing. That second approach can be effective as a type of direct sales rather than networking. If you get it wrong it may even work against you. How would you feel if someone asked to network with you, when it became clear they want you to do something for them? You might get lucky and network with someone who is recruiting now - more likely is that you nurture that relationship over time. If your goal is only to ask for help each networking opportunity will have a low chance of success. While if your goal is to nurture a relationship that may produce a lead, you’ll only have constructive outcomes. This makes it sensible to start by building a network with people that already know you: Former direct colleagues and company colleagues Industry leaders and peers Recruiters you have employed or applied through Don’t forget the friends you aren’t in regular touch with - there is no shame in being out of work and it would be a shame if they didn’t think of you when aware of a suitable opening. These people are a priority because they know you, your capability and your approach and trust has already been built. Whereas networking with people you don't know requires helping them come to know and trust you. Networking with people you know is the most overlooked tactic by the exec job seekers I talk to (followed by personal branding). These are the same people who see the hidden jobs market as where their next role is, yet overlook what’s in front of them. If you are looking for a new role on the quiet - networking is a go-to approach that invites proactive contact to you. Networking with people who know people you know, then people in a similar domain, then people outside of this domain - these are in decreasing order of priority. Let's not forget the other type of networking. Talking to fellow job seekers is a great way to share your pain, take a load off your shoulders, bounce ideas off each other, and hold each other accountable. LinkedIn is the perfect platform to find the right people if you haven't kept in touch directly. Whatever you think of LinkedIn, you shouldn’t overlook its nature as a conduit to conversation. It isn’t the conversation itself. Speaking in real life is where networking shines because while you might build a facsimile of a relationship in text, it's no replacement for a fluid conversation. Whether by phone and video calls, real life meetups, business events, seminars, conferences, expos, or in my case - on dog walks and waiting outside of the school gates. Both these last two have led to friends and business for me though the latter hasn’t been available since 2021. Networking isn’t 'What can I get out of it?' Instead, ‘What’s in it for them?’ The difference is the same as those ransom list job adverts compared to the rare one that speaks to you personally. How can you build on this relationship by keeping in touch? Networking is systematic, periodic and iterative: Map out your real life career network. Revisit anyone you’ve ever worked with and where Find them on LinkedIn Get in touch ‘I was thinking about our time at xxx. Perhaps we could reconnect - would be great to catch up’ If they don’t reply, because life can be busy, diarise a follow up What could be of interest to them? A LinkedIn post might be a reason to catch up When you look up your contact’s profile look at the companies they’ve worked at. They worked there for a reason, which may be because of a common capability to you Research these companies. Are there people in relevant roles worth introducing yourself to? Maybe the company looks a fit with your aspirations - worth getting in touch with someone who may be a hiring manager or relevant recruiter? Maybe they aren’t recruiting now. Someone to keep in touch with because of mutual interests. Click on Job on their company page, then "I'm interested" - this helps for many reasons, including flagging your interest as a potential employee Keep iterating your network and find new companies as you look at new contacts. This is one way we map the market in recruitment to headhunt candidates - you can mirror this with your networking The more proactive networking you build into your job search, the luckier you might get. While you might need to nurture a sizeable network and there are no guarantees, think about the other virtues of networking - how does that compare to endless unreplied applications? I often hear from job seekers who found their next role through networking. This Includes those who got the job because of their network even though hundreds of applicants were vying for it. While this may be unfair on the applicants sometimes you can make unfair work for you.  It can be effective at any level.

What follows is Chapter 18 from A Career Breakdown Kit (Summer 2026 edition) . It's a chapter I was thinking on, when I heard from a connection last week. "I respect you Greg, but you really don't know what you're talking about with ATSs rejecting people." From a job seeker who's followed me for a few years, even when employed. It does sadden me a little, but I've chosen to share insight I know can be unpopular, because it goes against the grain of popular assumption. Can anyone be an ATS expert? Given there are hundreds on the market, and a nearly infinite number of possible configurations, balanced with what may be unknowable employer intent, it seems unlikely. Of course you can be an expert on some ATSs, and an expert on recruitment. While others might borrow expertise from what they've heard and read. For my part, I've created two basic ATSs from Access, Outlook/Word macros and an off the search file searching software, around 25 years ago. I've used multiple ATSs as a fractional Talent Acquisition Manager, and logging applications as a third party agency recruiter. I've written guides on aspects of ATSs such as how to do Boolean sourcing. And I'm relatively technical, tending to pick up knowledge to serve my needs. The AI tools on www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources are a good example of this. But I wouldn't say I'm an ATS expert. That's why when I debunk false narratives, I rely on my research of how peer recruiters use their own. Something I've been investigating since 2020, when my immediate reaction was "What's that now?" when job seekers told me they were being rejected by automation. The question should be, whose advice should you take? And how does that apply in your unique job search? Something this chapter seeks to answer. 18 - An advice advisory There’s a huge amount of advice out there, isn’t there? Even this book. Spend half an hour trawling social media and you’ll no doubt find many different hacks that will transform your job search. Much of it is contradictory and some that are plain awful. Consider what follows meta advice on what to look for when reading or taking advice. Advice context Today I read a post from a LinkedIn Top Voice on something who said something along the lines of ‘Tell them today is your last day,’ when you resign. The idea being that you don’t owe your employer anything - you need to manage your own risk in case they let you go without paying severance. Terrible advice if you are in the UK. Our notice periods are different to the US, where the thought influencer is based. I can’t tell you if it’s good advice in the US, although it seems to lack integrity to me. If you are a UK reader and come across such a post, how are you supposed to know it’s for a US audience? How are you supposed to know it is most certainly not for you? Hers is a post that highlights an issue with how social media works. By breaking down geographical and cultural barriers, it can become hard to know who advice is for. Legislation will differ from place to place, with variation across demographics. Then you have transadaptation, where lingo that makes sense locally and may have a different meaning elsewhere, even though the language is the same. Context fit When taking advice, the first thing to check is whether that advice is suitable for your context. What expertise does the advisor have that relates to your job, your market, the channels you have access to, your seniority, where you are based, or these many other variables that make up your context? What about the hiring process an employer takes? SMEs, corporates, public sector, government, civil service and more may have different rules of play. A 22 year old data scientist in Birmingham, UK, will need a fundamentally different job search approach from a 52 year old CFO in Birmingham, Alabama. The 4 Advice functions Opinion-led advice is typically given when someone strongly believes that what worked for them once is viable advice generally. There’s one question you might ask. Is it replicable for me? Often it’s tethered to words like Always or Never. Make sure passion is backed up by logic and evidence. Examples might be: ‘Always have a 2 page CV’ ‘Never use #OpenToWork’ ‘Don’t use job boards, they don’t work’ How does the hiring manager for your next role view these statements? My favourite line about opinion-led advice is this: ‘Ask 9 people for advice on your CV and you’ll end up with 10 CVs.’ Tactical advice works in a specific context. For example, if a cover letter is given priority in an application process for UK Civil Service, read up on how to write cover letters for the UK Civil Service. The chap I spoke to yesterday rightly pointed out that the article on this topic he read had no bearing on his applying to private sector companies, many of whom will never even read a cover letter. Tactical advice can be great because it’s advice you can act on straight away. What experience does the advisor have in your domain? Strategic advice works in any context. For example, advice that makes you ask the right questions… about advice. Or which helps you put together an informed job search strategy based on your market conditions. While strategic advice is potent, it takes agency and commitment to apply. It’s rarely a short fix. Selling advice is when someone gives advice to support their agenda. Such as a CV writer who tells you they can make your CV optimised for the ATS. Or how to access the part of the job market hidden from you through paywalled means. Or that classic, ‘My client wanted £100k, I got him $250k. She’s over the moon!’ If you are prepared to invest, ask yourself, ‘What evidence is there this seller can help me.’ Ask for testimonials and ask to speak to current clients. ‘Is this person going to do the work or outsource it?’ Understand what you are signing up to if money or commitment is involved. Remember that any advice you encounter - whether opinion-led, tactical, strategic, or selling - should be filtered through the lens of yourunique context and needs. Does this apply to me? What’s the motivation behind it? Evaluating advice in this way can keep you focused and help you make better decisions on which to follow. 

I thought it would be helpful to provide an overview on AI and tech in recruitment, with the areas that directly affect you as an applicant. I'm a bit short on time this week, due to an urgent work requirement, so I've used Claude to build on previous posts, research current stories and link it together. In a sense this is a useful way to do it, because many such articles are written by AI, and many are flawed by hallucinations, flattening nuance, and overstating claims. So you should challenge this in the same way you apply critical thinking to any 'thought leadership'. That said, it covers the points I intended, and you can read previous articles in this series for my own researched takes - Some Truths about the ATS and AI ; De Facto Automation and You are a good starting point, including explanations for what you may be experiencing, and how assumptions may hold you back. I've also cross checked against ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, which flagged minor overstatements around the Pymetrics study and technical omissions around Eightfold. But then those same inaccuracies are why professional talent acquisition functions are building safeguards in how AI is used. Don't forget the Summer update to A Career Breakdown Kit is out now. Buying a copy supports my work, complements the frees tools and resources available on my website, and will improve your odds. AI in Recruitment: What It Actually Does, What It Doesn't, and What Jobseekers Need to Know 1. How AI Is Currently Used in Recruitment The phrase "AI in recruitment" has become so broad as to be almost meaningless. It covers everything from a spellchecker in an email template to a neural network scoring your personality through browser games. To make sense of it, it helps to separate AI from the technology it sits alongside, and both from the marketing language wrapped around them. Workflow automation. The most widespread and least controversial use of AI in recruitment is the automation of administrative tasks. Scheduling interviews, sending confirmation emails, parsing CVs into structured data fields, generating interview summaries from transcripts — these are genuine productivity tools. They reduce the time a recruiter spends on process and increase the time available for judgement. Automated transcription of interviews, powered by speech-to-text models, falls into this category. It is mundane, useful, and rarely the thing anyone means when they say "AI is screening you out." AI-assisted sourcing. Some recruitment platforms use machine learning to suggest candidates from databases or professional networks. LinkedIn Recruiter, for example, uses algorithms to surface profiles that match a search brief based on historical engagement patterns and role data. The sourcing layer is probabilistic — it suggests who a recruiter might want to look at, but a human still decides whether to make contact. This is AI as a recommendation engine, closer to how a streaming service suggests a film than how a judge passes sentence. Generative AI in candidate communications. A growing number of recruiters and in-house teams use large language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to draft job advertisements, outreach messages, and rejection emails. This is widespread, lightly regulated, and — depending on the competence of the person prompting the model — ranges from genuinely helpful to transparently generic. Candidates are increasingly doing the same thing in reverse: using AI to tailor CVs and write cover letters. The result is a kind of AI-on-AI performance, where neither side is entirely sure what was written by a person. 2. The Technology AI Sits Alongside It is important to distinguish AI from the broader recruitment technology stack, because the two are routinely conflated — often deliberately. The Applicant Tracking System (ATS). An ATS is a database. It stores applications, organises them by vacancy, tracks candidate status, and allows recruiters to search, filter, and communicate. The core function of an ATS — receiving and storing applications — is not AI. It is data management. Workable, Greenhouse, Bullhorn, Lever, and dozens of others all perform this function. The ATS does not, by default, make decisions. It stores decisions made by people and, in some configurations, applies filters set by people. Automated communications. Most ATS platforms allow automated email sequences: acknowledgement of application, invitation to interview, rejection notification. These are triggered by a recruiter changing a candidate's status, not by an algorithm deciding the candidate's fate. The automation is in the sending, not the judging. Ranking, filtering, and knockout questions. Here the picture becomes more nuanced. Many ATS platforms allow recruiters to set mandatory criteria — often called knockout questions. "Do you have the right to work in the UK?" "Do you hold a valid HGV licence?" If a candidate answers "no" to a mandatory question, the system may automatically reject or deprioritise them. This is filtering by rule, not filtering by algorithm. The rule was written by a human. Whether that rule is sensible, lawful, or proportionate is a question about the person who configured it, not the software that executed it. Some ATS platforms also offer keyword matching or scoring, where applications are ranked by how closely the CV text matches the job description. This is closer to AI in the technical sense, but it is crude pattern matching, not deep learning. It rewards candidates who mirror the language of the advert, which creates a perverse incentive to keyword-stuff — a behaviour that helps no one and which much of the career advice industry actively encourages. 3. Niche Applications: Pymetrics, Eightfold, and the Assessment Layer Beyond the ATS and its associated tooling sits a smaller but more consequential category: third-party AI assessment vendors. These are the tools that genuinely attempt to make or influence hiring decisions using algorithmic models, and they are the ones generating the most significant legal and ethical scrutiny. Pymetrics (now part of Harver). Pymetrics asks candidates to play a series of 12–16 online games designed to measure cognitive and behavioural traits such as risk tolerance, processing speed, and altruism. A machine learning model, trained on the gameplay data of a company's existing employees, then scores each candidate as "recommend" or "do not recommend." The model does not assess CVs. It does not read cover letters. It plays games with you and decides whether you resemble the people already doing the job. The training methodology deserves scrutiny. The "good" benchmark is whoever currently holds the role — not top performers, not people independently assessed as effective, just incumbents. The "bad" benchmark is not people who failed in the role or were dismissed; it is random profiles. The model therefore learns one thing: do you look like the existing workforce, or do you look like a stranger? This is similarity matching dressed as science, and it carries an obvious risk of reproducing whatever demographic composition already exists within the client organisation. Your gameplay score is also cached for 330 days, meaning a single session can follow you across multiple applications to different employers. Eightfold AI. Eightfold operates a "Talent Intelligence Platform" that claims to maintain data on over one billion workers globally. It scores job applicants on a scale of zero to five based on their perceived likelihood of success, drawing on scraped and aggregated personal data. Unlike pymetrics, Eightfold's legal exposure centres not primarily on bias but on transparency — or rather, the absence of it. A January 2026 class action (Kistler et al. v. Eightfold AI, Inc.) alleges that Eightfold operated as an unregistered consumer reporting agency, compiling and using personal data to score candidates without the disclosures, consent mechanisms, or dispute rights required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The lawsuit was brought by former EEOC Chair Jenny R. Yang and the nonprofit Towards Justice. HireVue. HireVue provides automated video interview technology used by over 60% of the Fortune 100. Its platform has used automated speech recognition to generate transcripts and, historically, facial expression analysis to score candidates. In March 2025, the ACLU filed charges with the EEOC and the Colorado Civil Rights Division on behalf of a deaf, Indigenous woman who alleged that HireVue's platform discriminated against her when she applied for a promotion at Intuit. She requested real-time captioning accommodation, was allegedly denied, and subsequently received feedback to work on "effective communication." HireVue dropped its facial analysis feature in 2021 following sustained criticism, but the speech recognition and transcript-based assessment remain. A separate 2024 lawsuit alleged that CVS required applicants to take HireVue video assessments that amounted to an unlawful lie detector test under Massachusetts law; CVS settled privately. Aon Consulting. In May 2024, the ACLU filed a complaint with the FTC challenging three of Aon's AI hiring tools — ADEPT-15, vidAssess-AI, and gridChallenge — as discriminatory against people with disabilities and certain racial groups. The ACLU also challenged Aon's marketing claim that its tools were "bias-free." 4. Marketing Versus Usage: The AI Bandwagon There is a considerable gap between what AI vendors claim their products do, what those products actually do, and what employers understand they have bought. This gap is not accidental. It is commercially useful. The recruitment technology market is crowded, and "AI-powered" has become the default differentiator. A platform that sends automated emails now markets itself as using AI. A Boolean search with a drag-and-drop interface becomes "intelligent talent matching." A chatbot that asks three screening questions becomes "conversational AI." The inflation is so routine that the label has lost most of its informational content. When everything is AI, nothing is. For jobseekers, this creates a specific problem: it is nearly impossible to know, from the outside, what technology is actually being applied to your application. You might be told a company "uses AI in hiring" and reasonably conclude that a sophisticated algorithm is scoring your CV. In practice, the "AI" might be an automated acknowledgement email. Or it might be a pymetrics game that decides your fate before a human sees your name. The marketing makes no distinction, and the companies buying these tools often do not fully understand the distinction either. The World Economic Forum's widely cited claim that "over 90% of employers use AI in hiring" illustrates the problem. The underlying data, drawn from an Accenture survey, found that 90% of employers use recruitment software — an ATS or recruitment marketing system — to filter or rank candidates. That is not the same as saying 90% use artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense. An ATS is a database with search functionality. Calling it AI is like calling a filing cabinet a robot because it has a label on the front. This matters because the gap between marketing and reality feeds directly into jobseeker anxiety. If you believe sophisticated AI is screening you out, you will spend time and money on "ATS-beating" strategies, keyword-stuffing services, and resume optimisation tools — many of which are sold by the same ecosystem that created the anxiety in the first place. The commercial incentive to overstate what AI does in recruitment is enormous, and it runs in both directions: vendors overstate capability to sell to employers, and career coaches overstate threat to sell to jobseekers. 5. The Origins of ATS Mythology Few statistics in recruitment have done more damage than the claim that "75% of CVs are rejected by ATS before a human ever sees them." It is repeated on LinkedIn, in career coaching courses, on TikTok, in national media, and in the marketing copy of resume optimisation services. It has shaped how millions of jobseekers approach applications. And it is, as far as anyone can determine, entirely made up. The Preptel origin. The 75% figure has been traced, through multiple independent investigations, to a company called Preptel — a resume optimisation service that used the statistic in its sales pitch around 2012. Preptel went out of business in August 2013. No research methodology, no sample size, no survey, and no peer-reviewed source were ever published to support the claim. Career consultant Christine Assaf documented this origin in her investigation and concluded that the statistic was created without any study, survey, or context. The figure drifts between 70%, 75%, and 88% across different sources precisely because there was never an original value to anchor it. A real statistic has one number and one method. This one has three numbers and no method. The citation chain runs from Preptel's marketing through an uncited Forbes mention, then through CNBC, Yahoo News, CIO, and an expanding network of career advice blogs — each citing the one before, none citing a study. It is a textbook example of circular citation: a marketing claim repeated often enough that it acquired the appearance of fact. The Hidden Workers report. The claim is frequently bolstered by reference to the Harvard Business School and Accenture report Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent (2021). This is a serious piece of research, surveying over 8,000 workers and 2,250 executives across the US, UK, and Germany. It does find that 88% of employers agreed that qualified, higher-skilled candidates were being screened out. But it attributes this to overly rigid hiring criteria set by people — not to autonomous algorithmic rejection. The report found that employers configured their systems with excessively narrow requirements (specific job titles, precise years of experience, zero tolerance for employment gaps) and that these human-defined rules excluded capable candidates. The software executed the filter. A person wrote it. The critical distinction, which the career advice industry almost universally ignores, is between the ATS as a tool that stores and organises applications and the ATS as an autonomous gatekeeper that rejects candidates without human involvement. The Hidden Workers report describes the former being badly configured, not the latter making independent decisions. Knockout questions — "Do you have the right to work in the UK?", "Do you hold a CSCS card?" — are the most common form of automated filtering, and they are binary eligibility checks set by recruiters, not algorithmic judgements made by machines. An Enhancv survey of 25 US recruiters found that 92% confirmed their ATS does not auto-reject on formatting or content. Only 8% configured any form of content-based auto-rejection at all. Jobscan, the largest ATS optimisation vendor, states plainly that an ATS does not reject resumes — it stores them and allows recruiters to search using keywords. How the myth sustains itself. The 75% figure persists because it serves multiple commercial interests simultaneously. Resume optimisation services need jobseekers to believe their CVs are being machine-rejected so they will pay for "ATS-friendly" formatting. Career coaches need a dramatic hook. LinkedIn influencers need engagement. And AI vendors, paradoxically, benefit from an inflated perception of their own products' power, because it makes their offering sound more consequential than it may be. The myth is self-reinforcing because everyone in the supply chain profits from it. 6. The Stanford Study: What It Found, What It Didn't, and How It Was Misrepresented In May 2026, a Stanford-led research team published Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). The paper examined 4.2 million job applications submitted through pymetrics between 2018 and 2022, across 156 employers and 1,746 positions. It generated immediate and extensive media coverage, much of which treated it as a verdict on AI hiring as a whole. It is not. What the study found. Pymetrics had previously audited its own fairness by pooling all applicants together across all employers and positions. Pooled like that, it passed the standard adverse-impact screen: Black applicants were recommended at 52.5%, white applicants at 58.3%. The Stanford researchers correctly observed that this is the wrong way to audit a selection tool. US employment discrimination law evaluates adverse impact position by position, not as a company-wide average. When they split the data into individual roles, bias that the average had concealed became visible: approximately 10.6% of positions showed adverse impact against Black applicants, and roughly a quarter of Black applications landed in those affected roles. The researchers estimated that if the tool had recommended Black and Asian candidates at the same rate as the most-favoured group, approximately 40,000 additional applications would have advanced. This is a genuine and important finding: company-level audits can mask position-level discrimination. It applies to any selection tool, not just pymetrics, and any organisation auditing hiring fairness only at the aggregate level should take note. What the study did not find. The paper's central concept is "algorithmic monoculture" — the idea that when multiple employers use the same AI vendor, a single biased model can lock a candidate out of the entire market. The headline version of this claim — that candidates are being "rejected everywhere" by the same algorithm — barely survives contact with the study's own data. 84% of applicants in the dataset applied to exactly one position. Over 95% applied to one or two. Only 0.02% (522 people out of 3.4 million) applied to ten. When the researchers directly simulated the worst case — running 1,000 applicants against all 495 pymetrics models — not a single person was rejected by every model. The worst-off individual was still recommended for 52 roles. The monoculture mechanism exists in theory, but the data shows it affecting almost nobody in practice. The specificity problem. The study examined one vendor: pymetrics. It did not examine any ATS. It did not examine CV screening. It did not examine keyword matching, ranking algorithms, or any of the other technologies that the phrase "AI in hiring" is routinely taken to mean. Pymetrics is a niche behavioural game platform, acquired by Harver in 2022, that trains its models on current employees as the benchmark for "good" and random profiles as the benchmark for "bad." There is no evidence in the study — and the authors acknowledge this in their limitations section — that the tool predicts job performance at all. It is a similarity matcher. It measures whether you resemble the existing workforce, not whether you can do the job. The paper's opening cites HireVue's market dominance — used by over 60% of the Fortune 100 — to establish the scale of algorithmic hiring. But HireVue is a different product, a different company, and a different technology category, and it does no work whatsoever in the study's analysis. The citation creates an impression of ubiquity that the data does not support. The media amplification. The researchers were careful. Their limitations section acknowledges that their findings may not generalise beyond one game-based tool, that they never measured whether pymetrics predicts performance, that they cannot determine whether rejected candidates would have been good hires, and that nothing in the paper proves illegality. The problem is not the research. It is what happened after publication: abstract became press release, press release became headline, headline became influencer thread, and each stage dropped a qualifier the authors had deliberately included. "May be a distinctive feature of centralised algorithmic assessment" became "AI is rejecting you everywhere." A study of one niche vendor became a referendum on recruitment technology as a whole. For jobseekers, the practical takeaway is narrower than the coverage suggests. If you encounter a pymetrics-style game assessment, know that the tool has documented fairness issues and no published evidence of predictive validity. If you are applying through a standard ATS, this study tells you nothing about what is happening to your application, because it did not examine that process. 7. AI Hiring in the Courts: The Cases That Matter The legal landscape around AI in recruitment is developing rapidly, with several significant cases establishing precedents that will shape how employers and vendors use algorithmic tools. Mobley v. Workday, Inc. (Case No. 3:23-cv-00770, N.D. Cal.) — This is widely regarded as the bellwether case for AI hiring discrimination. Derek Mobley filed a class action in February 2023 alleging that Workday's AI-powered applicant screening system discriminated on the basis of race, age, and disability. Mobley had applied to over 100 jobs through Workday over seven years and was rejected within minutes each time. The case has survived multiple attempts by Workday to secure dismissal and has escalated significantly through 2026. Key rulings include the court's acceptance that Workday can be considered an "agent" of employers — meaning it is not merely a neutral tool provider but is acting on employers' behalf in making hiring decisions, which triggers direct liability under anti-discrimination law. In January 2026, Workday argued that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) does not cover job applicants, only current employees. In March 2026, Judge Rita Lin rejected this argument, pointing to legal precedent and EEOC guidance interpreting the law as covering candidates. Preliminary collective action certification was granted in May 2025, and applicants had until March 2026 to opt in. In May 2026, a discovery ruling denied the plaintiffs' attempt to compel production of Workday's bias-testing data (protected by attorney-client privilege) and Workday's customers' applicant data, but ordered production of Workday's EEO-1 and OFCCP documents as relevant to the company's knowledge of potential demographic disparities. Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint in March 2026 reasserting dismissed California state and disability claims. The case now presents exposure not only for Workday but for the more than 10,000 employers using its AI-powered hiring tools. Kistler et al. v. Eightfold AI, Inc. (Contra Costa County Superior Court, filed January 2026) — This case takes a different angle from Mobley. Rather than alleging bias in outcomes, it alleges secrecy in process. The plaintiffs argue that Eightfold AI operated as an unregistered consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act by scraping personal data on over one billion workers, scoring applicants from zero to five on their "likelihood of success," and discarding low-ranked candidates before any human review — all without the statutory disclosures, consent, or dispute mechanisms the FCRA requires. The suit was brought by former EEOC Chair Jenny R. Yang and the nonprofit Towards Justice. The distinction matters: Mobley attacks discriminatory outcomes; Eightfold attacks opaque process. One says the algorithm was biased. The other says the algorithm existed in secret. Both point in the same direction — that AI hiring vendors cannot avoid accountability by characterising themselves as passive tool providers. iTutorGroup (EEOC Settlement, August 2023) — The first EEOC settlement involving AI hiring discrimination. iTutorGroup, a virtual tutoring company, had programmed its recruitment software to automatically reject female applicants over 55 and male applicants over 60. This was not subtle algorithmic bias; it was explicit age-based exclusion coded directly into the system. The company settled for $365,000. EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows stated that employers cannot rely on AI to make employment decisions that discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics, regardless of whether the discrimination is carried out by a person or a machine. ACLU v. Aon Consulting (FTC complaint, May 2024) — The ACLU challenged three of Aon's AI hiring assessment tools as discriminatory against people with disabilities and certain racial groups, and disputed Aon's marketing claim that its tools were "bias-free." ACLU / EEOC charges against HireVue and Intuit (March 2025) — Filed on behalf of a deaf, Indigenous woman who alleged HireVue's automated video interview platform discriminated against her when she applied for an internal promotion at Intuit. The platform's automated speech recognition allegedly performs worse for speakers with different speech patterns. Both HireVue and Intuit denied the allegations. Harper v. Sirius XM Radio (ongoing) — Arshon Harper, an African American applicant, alleges that 149 of his job applications to Sirius XM Radio were rejected by the company's AI hiring tool, despite his qualifications meeting or exceeding the listed requirements. The case is ongoing. 8. What This Means for Jobseekers The honest summary is less dramatic than the headlines but more useful. Most recruitment technology is administrative. Your CV is stored in a database, searched by a recruiter using keywords, and filtered by eligibility criteria that a person configured. The ATS is not reading your CV and passing judgement; it is filing your CV and making it searchable. The quality of the search depends on the quality of the person searching. Where genuine AI assessment exists — pymetrics games, Eightfold scoring, HireVue video analysis — it is concentrated in large-volume hiring at major employers, not across the market as a whole. If you are applying to an SME with 200 employees, the chances of encountering algorithmic screening of any sophistication are low. You are far more likely to encounter a recruiter who has not read your CV properly than a machine that has read it too precisely. The 75% rejection statistic is a commercial fiction. The Stanford study is about one niche tool, not about recruitment technology in general. The court cases are real and important, but they concern specific vendors and specific practices, not a universal condition. What you can usefully do: write a clear, well-structured CV that describes what you have done and what you are good at, in language that relates to the roles you are applying for. Do not keyword-stuff. Do not pay for "ATS-beating" services built on a debunked statistic. Do not assume that silence after an application means a robot rejected you — it is far more likely that a person has not yet looked, or has looked and chosen someone else, or has been pulled onto a different priority and will never reply. These are human failures, not algorithmic ones, and they predate AI by decades. If you are asked to complete a game-based assessment, a video interview scored by software, or any process where a third-party tool appears to be making decisions about your candidacy without human review, you are entitled to ask what technology is being used and how it informs the decision. In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 and GDPR's provisions on automated decision-making provide some framework for challenge, though enforcement remains limited. In the US, the legal landscape is evolving rapidly through the cases described above. The best defence against bad technology in recruitment is not better technology on the candidate side. It is transparency, regulation, and the kind of scrutiny that the Stanford researchers, the courts, and — occasionally — the industry itself are beginning to apply. Sources consulted: Bommasani et al., "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring," FAccT 2026; Fuller & Raman, "Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent," Harvard Business School / Accenture, 2021; Placementist, "Fear-farming the Stanford AI hiring study," June 2026; Christine Assaf, "Your Job Application Was Rejected by a Human, Not a Computer"; Mobley v. Workday, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-00770 (N.D. Cal.); Kistler et al. v. Eightfold AI, Inc. (Contra Costa County, January 2026); EEOC v. iTutorGroup, August 2023; ACLU complaints against Aon Consulting (May 2024) and HireVue/Intuit (March 2025); Enhancv recruiter survey; Jobscan ATS documentation. 

What follows is Chapter 20 of A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . While I've updated a number of chapters for the Summer edition, this is one of many strategic chapters that will be unchanged. Though it may seem conceptual, it's actually one of the most practical steps everyone should do at the start of their job search. Because it informs the steps you should take in a jobs market that is individual to you. 20 - An inverted job search So, your broad approach to looking for a job is based on a product marketing strategy. How does this link to your job search and how companies hire? The next step is to recognise a job search is an inverted recruitment process. Whatever you can learn about the actual workings of recruitment, the better armed you are to navigate them. The first way in which this is true is around the routes to market employers take to fill a job. Employers want to fill vacancies in the most economical and efficient means possible. Sometimes they’ll rely on external advice, sometimes they’ll figure out their own way, and sometimes they’ll employ people to do it for them (such as a Talent Acquisition Manager or internal recruiter). When they rely on external advice, it may not surprise you it’s as varied and contradictory as job seeker advice. Take this nugget of wisdom: 80% of suitable candidates are not actively looking for work. By advertising, you’ll only have access to the 20% that applies to adverts. Hang on a minute! Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the hidden jobs market? Of course, candidates aren’t hidden - much like hidden jobs, the priority is to understand the channels through which candidates are found. These channels directly mirror the channels through which you look for that job: Job boards; LinkedIn; Recruitment agencies; Confidential headhunting; Internal promotions; Secondments; Temp-to-perm hires; Consulting-to-perm hires; Referrals; Networking; Speculative approaches; Careers pages; Talent pools; Candidate databases Every job is different, dictated by principles like supply and demand, confidentiality, reputational risk, wherewithal, budget and capacity. The hiring process of a Software Developer is different from that of a Sales Director. If an employer only hires through an advert - this means if you don’t apply for adverts, there’s no way in which you can be considered for that vacancy. A second way it’s accurate is the notion that what’s true for one may not be true for others. This relates to candidate resentment . You may read online that some recruitment behaviours are signs of a bad employer. Yet, you should always follow the instructions given when applying for an advert or through an agency. They may instruct you to: 1/ Write a CV, cover letter and duplicate it on their ATS 2/ Tell them your salary when they don’t list theirs 3/ Do 17 interviews before reaching a decision 4/ Deliver a 6-month strategy plan by presentation 5/ Or any other request deemed unreasonable by Career Coaches, Job seekers, or people otherwise uninvolved in that process What some consider red flags, others will deem acceptable practice. It becomes your choice to play the game or not. Either follow their instructions or step away. You don’t have to apply if you don’t want to. In a similar vein, if you hear a hiring process has a preference, or if there are gaps in their employment armoury - these might be biases you can lean into. The hiring manager loves Arsenal Football Club and is biased towards people who love the same? Now might be the time to switch allegiance, if you can fake it or make it. They love a one page CV? Apply with a one page CV. You know the hiring manager of an advert with 400 applications? Give them a call - they might give you an unfair advantage. Poor practice from the employer, yet these are problems you can turn into opportunity. A third way in which this is true is by comparing inbound and outbound activity Outbound activity is where you go to your prospect (phone calls, messaging). Inbound activity is where the prospect comes to you (job adverts, content). Yet an outbound activity for a recruiter is an inbound activity for you (you receive phone calls and messages). While an inbound activity has you getting in touch because of their advert or content. When we talk about optimising your work, whether your CV, profile or interviews, it has to give the process what it needs. How can you be more discoverable, so you receive more relevant calls and messages? How can you improve your return on applications and your outbound messages? What about inverse non-recruitment? A brilliant, if strange question, with the same answer. When networking, going direct, seeking to become a referral, doorknocking, or other, what is the inverse of that activity? How does that person find or recommend people, if they become aware of a vacancy? How might they see you as a person to solve their problems, even if it isn’t a vacancy? You do these activities because of how they might help you and because of the benefit the other party experiences. What’s in it for them? If there isn’t anything in it for them, why should they help you? For each and every stage in recruitment, there is an opposed force, as candidates and the hiring process meet each other. It’s rarely an equal force, because every vacancy has supply and demand, resource, skill level, biases and intent at play. This is why each type of role has a different method of looking for work. Executive vacancies typically prioritise headhunted candidates, with fewer public adverts. Here the priority shifts towards building relationships with, and being discoverable by, Executive Search recruiters. If executives rely mainly on job boards, they may never think to focus on more suited channels. If you can learn what the other needs for that process to be successful, you can deliver the same. Speak to peers, speak to hiring managers you know, speak to recruiters, speak to former job seekers. How have they found work, and how would they recruit for your roles? Research your market to find viable employers, to identify recruiters and to build your network.  Then execute an appropriate strategy to access these channels.