It's interesting revisiting this article from 3 years ago, especially now AI products are more embedded in market. If anything my view on AI is more polarised, bringing many new opportunites, brand new problems, as well as the existential angst many are talking about. For me, codifying my experience with AI tools means I can help more people, while freeing up my time to do more human work. It's certainly helped with job seeker support, and increasingly so in my recruitment work. Mainly it's giving me more time to talk to people, and when homogenous AI applications at scale are one new problem, as well as the increasing threat of deep fake interviews, in person conversations might be a necessary exnovation (just googled that - what a great word that I will now abuse at scale). While the article below has dated somewhat, I think the threat it assesses has never been more pertinent. I've said for some time that AI might be the death of knowledge and judgement, even so far as 'meaning', something that this recent research also indicates . Importantly the research doesn't say the recommendations were wrong, just how they were followed. Read that article and think about how AI recommendations on applications relate. I've certainly found them more problematic, so far, than the old school ATS style ranking and filtering - because of the false confidence they convey, especially when dealing with non-traditional applications. Things may improve, or so is promised. And while words might be the first facility of LLM, they are still the core facility, given all it does is determine the most probable answer in its outputs (I know I'm being reductive, some of the developments from AI are amazing). Whereas words should be the consequence of thoughts, lead to the development of thought, and distil ideas in a way you can act on. Much like job adverts should be the consequence of effective job analysis, rather than a polished word that lacks meaning. The greatest risk for me in recruitment isn't so much the answers AI offers, but that we become so reliant we forget to ask better questions. I've edited down the previous article, but if you're curious, you can see it here . September 2023 I’d commented about my hearing on a social media post on deafness. ‘Have you looked into these hearing aids - they’re designed to overcome head shadow’, came the impromptu reply from a hearing aid specialist. Head shadow? Not a phrase I’d heard before, despite having no hearing on one side, which effectively creates a sound-free shadow to my right. See, when I had mumps at 18 months it killed the vestibulocochlear nerve in my right ear and damaged the one on the left. But it was my balance that showed the nursery assistants that something was wrong - I kept falling over for no reason. I expect they thought my slow response was normal naughty-boyness. Balance, intermittently poor audio processing, energy required to maintain attention in noisy environments and that bloody tinnitus - all these issues are far more annoying than not being able to hear in one ear. That and not being able to tell where sounds come from. “Over here, Greg!” is the most useless call on a football pitch. And the head shadow thing? Well, it’s never been an issue - I just turn my head when in conversation. It might look like I’m turning to kiss you, but it’s just a conversation I want honest. Sure I miss out on certain audio cues, but it’s rarely an issue. Anyway, curious as I am I looked into the £4,000 hearing aid that solves head shadow by placing a microphone on the deaf ear and projecting it into the the good ear. Quite the brute force tech solution and one I’m sure some benefit from. But the key issue is one of reverb. While the product is good, it would impact the quality of sound in my good ear, which seems a pointless trade-off for me, when my process of life is more effective than shiny tech. It’s ironic that I consider myself highly excitable when it comes to technology developments, yet I’m never an early adopter. Because I always ask myself, other than giddiness, what problems does this solve and how will it enhance my life. And so it is for AI in recruitment, and the shininess of tech in general. They are positioned as solving problems, and indeed they do, but in many cases, it’s the wrong problem that detracts us from the real opportunities for better processes. Simpler administration, speed and scale are clear benefits. And some of these AI-branded automations are excellent. The Star Trek-style auto-translator makes me giddy. As does the sales bot conversation-as-a-human sales video that’s doing the rounds. But AI for writing? What problem does that solve? For me, it depends on what you consider sales to be. Is sales pitching a generic message and hoping someone will bite? Or is sales laying out the facts so that the right person can reach an objective decision? A decision which might mean getting in touch, or changing their view on what needs recruiting. For the former AI writing seems to solve a problem. The words are certainly better, but the message is even worse. Yes: prompting. But if you can prompt the right message, why aren’t you just writing it, so that you embed that knowledge for use across other mediums - conversations, meetings and so on? While AI writing does not meet the requirements for the second type of sales. You can only do this by establishing the right facts from a briefing, consultation or interview. Then interpret this with meaning to the right people so that it creates the right impact. Sales as data visualisation, if you will. And if AI doesn’t work for sales in this way, why would it work for content or marketing? I think the answer depends on whether you value contextual insight or not. Until AI is better at asking questions that create meaningful conversation, it’s a non-starter for me. I say until because this hesitation will be moot in the next year or so. Because it isn’t what AI is now that’s the opportunity - it’s what’s coming soon. I can’t wait to see what’s next. Until then, AI, for writing, is a question of in one ear and out of the other. Which, if you’re deaf in the one, is quite the problem. Go learn copywriting instead, and listen to how it transforms your approach to recruitment. Then layer tech on top, when it’s ready. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. If you like good recruitment and you need help with it in the UK, drop me a line. DM on LinkedIn, email greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk , whichever you prefer.

If you ever thought 'outcome-led' was a pretentious headline for a recruiter, it's also how you should think about your job search. Welcome to the 50th edition of Jobseeker Basics. As well as sharing advice that - hopefully - helps you navigate our mercurial jobs market more easily, there's always been a separate utility to these newsletters. I use them to update chapters in A Career Breakdown Kit , so that I can ensure it is always as current as possible. People who've bought the Kindle edition will get an automatic update when the 2027 edition is released in January/February. Paperback owners are invited to contact me for a free digital update. For this newsletter, I've tightened some of the language around accepting job offers - pretty boring update, but maybe necessary for fringe cases. I often talk about outcome-led recruitment. While it might sound pretentious there's a simple reason, which underpins everything I do. Begin with the ending, work back and find the right path. In recruitment this means flashing forward 12 months. What did a successful hire look like? What problems did they solve? What separated excellent from good from adequate from inadequate? What were the outcomes you needed for it to have been a successful hire? Nail these points down and you work backwards. What good actually looks like in viable candidate profiles. What needs to be communicated to them to encourage them to take a step forwards. How we find them - whether in a headhunt, an advert, networking or other. I also talk a lot about why a job search should be the inverse of how that vacancy might be filled. And so it is that the outcome you want in your job search should inform your strategy to find that job. Ironically, On Job Offers is Chapter 31 in A Career Breakdown Kit, slap bang in the middle of the book on page 162. With good reason, given you may find yourself needing to look for work again in future, sometimes by choice and sometimes by the other. All the more reason to have a strategy you can replicate and improve on, time and time again: 31 - On job offers At some point you’re going to get a job offer. It’s helpful to be clear on what this should look like at the start of your job search. Because, if you don’t know your destination, how can you be sure which path to take? Here are the main points to consider. Identity At the start of any job search, remind yourself of your career identity. This may be at the point of an unexpected redundancy, when you’ve decided your current job is no longer right, or if a recruiter contacts you out of the blue with a compelling proposition. Try this once a year, even when gainfully employed, because it’s easy for the path of employment to diverge from where you want your career to go. What is your current context, personally, with family, in life? What do you need and how does work reflect this? What are your core values? The ones that underpin who you are and who you want to see in the mirror. How does work reflect this? What are the things you enjoy, are neutral about, or dislike in your career? What does this look like in your current job? How has your employer changed in the past year? How has the world changed? How does this reflect you as a person? Who do you want to be as a person, family member, friend and peer? What impact do you want to make? How much do you need to earn and by when? These answers aren’t fixed and can change quickly with a change in circumstance, as you change over time, or for reasons out of your control. Clarify what you want and what you need, and therefore what this looks like in your next job. This identity informs your job search strategy, part of which is the roles you go for, part of which is the approach you take, and part of which is what an acceptable job offer is. Total compensation & opportunity cost It's common to see salary as the most important factor in a job offer negotiation. It's better to look at negotiating total compensation and opportunity cost. Total compensation is the overall financial value of a role. It includes: Salary Pension contribution Bonus Commission Car allowance RSUs Some benefits are salary sacrificed or tax efficient - their value goes beyond what they appear on paper. A great pension scheme will save you 20% or 40% on tax payments in the UK across the salary invested. It might even, at a higher salary level, improve access to child benefits. On the other hand, opportunity cost is the consequence of taking an offer, compared to what you might have if you stayed. For example: Moving to a three-day hybrid, compared to full remote. What's the cost of mileage or time commuting? What's the cost of heating your home when fully remote? Or - a role that offers more money now, with no progression in future. Compared to a role that pays less now, and will leapfrog in future, while giving you skills that support career growth. Are these contractual and likely to happen, or are they empty promises? Look for evidence such as a track record with other employees. It's entirely possible to accept an offer with a higher salary and find yourself worse off with take home pay. Establish all the financial implications of an offer. Impact Impact goes both ways. The impact you can have in your new role, and the impact your new role will have on you. A high paying job that takes you away from a young family might be a solution or a problem. A brilliant job that’s an unsustainable commute won’t work long term. Does that matter to you? A well paid job that gives you a good balance at home yet will only be a cog in a machine - a dream for some, unfulfilling for others. Impact also includes trajectory. Are you someone who wants to do the same job over time, in a structured way? Someone who wants regular advancement and career development? Both, and others are fine. Make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. Culture & People It’s at least partly true that people leave bosses, not jobs. While decent people can become bad bosses for various reasons, some of which relate to the environment they manage within. The problem is that people are on their best behaviour in interview processes, while culture as it’s pitched doesn’t always reflect the culture experienced. The interview process should be there for you to gather facts as much as possible. Do your research to get a sense of a company’s values, principles, how it treats its people, and all those other elements that will affect a career with them. This is research to be done at interview stage or before. Ikigai (with a little i) A wonderful Japanese concept. In its original form it means ‘what you get out of bed for’ or ‘those small moments we take pleasure in.’ Rather than the westernised Venn Purpose Diagram many are familiar with as Ikigai (with a big I). If you ask people in Japan what they think of Ikigai they may well say something along the lines of ‘huuunnhh?’ ikigai is a helpful principle when considering a job offer. It’s those qualities unique to you (often defined by your career identity) that you take pleasure in, while others around you may not get it. Sometimes this is gut instinct. Important to listen to, important to challenge. It’s at least part of your decision in a job offer. Even if everything else might be just alright, ikigai in your offered job might be good reason to take it. Or it might be the company’s purpose and what they are doing to improve the world. ikigai is unique to you and it makes everything better if you can find it. Those are the key points to look at if given a job offer. There’s no right or wrong, only right for you and the people you support. Negotiating salary There are a lot of moving parts in any salary negotiation, both at your end and with the employer. There are two main elements. The first is your place in the market - do what you can to find the range of fair pay available to you right now. The second is compensation philosophy - how do companies reach an offer? Both come down to asking questions and research. Assume nothing. I would err on the side of boldness in a salary negotiation. At final interview stage, I’d ask for the top end, based on what I’ve learnt - if they see me as the best candidate, why wouldn’t I? If they offer a little lower than I expect, I’d be positive about it and ask what else they can do to improve their offer. It’s unlikely you’ll lose out on an offer by being clear and respectful. If you want to drill deep into negotiations, I recommend reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. His advice on deep listening, calibrated questions and price anchors are directly relevant to salary negotiation. Negotiating is highly contextual, so you should be careful if following opinion-led advice on what works for that individual. After the offer As with a salary negotiation, the post offer process and run up to employment is different from employer to employer. You can indicate that you're happy to proceed and ask the employer to issue the formal paperwork. Be aware that accepting an offer, even verbally, can create a legally binding contract. If you're not ready to commit, make that clear and reserve your formal acceptance until you've reviewed the written terms. In practice, the legal risk of withdrawing before starting is generally low. Most employers will have little commercial interest in pursuing someone who no longer wishes to join, particularly where they have suffered no demonstrable loss. However, contractual obligations and reputational consequences are worth considering. Treat the Offer Letter as a formal proof of your new employer’s offer of employment. If something isn’t right with the Letter, ask the employer for clarification. Once you've accepted the offer, signed and returned the letter, and any conditions have been satisfied, you can resign and agree a start date with your new employer. Aim to understand their onboarding process. Is there anything helpful you can do before your start date? Make sure you know when, where and any arrival instructions for your first day. As for your wider job search - you should withdraw from other applications when you formally accept an offer. It’s your choice whether you keep your cards close to your chest, accepting a suitable offer with the prospect of something better coming up. You can cross that bridge if you come to it. While this is not something I recommend, a tough job search is as good a time as any to look after number one. 

I've had a couple of conversations with job seekers recently where their common sense has contradicted their professional knowledge. It's so easy to do when there's such a huge volume of information out there that seems to paint a picture. Such as the recently redistributed ragebait about a hiring manager rejected by his own ATS for having the wrong keyword - from a burner account on reddit which has since been banned. It matters not that this story is patently anti-fact, because now its out in the wild. It's the kind of 'insight' job seekers start to believe, such as these two. One a senior HR practitioner who was instantly rejected alongside a shortlist, all presented by an agency. The assumption being it must be AI - though I believe it's more likely someone clicked a mass-reject button at the other end, based on my research of ATS use. I'd love to look inside that black box to see what actually happened, to hear what ATS they used, to look at the track record of hiring decisions from the employer, because anything else is assumption. The second was more pernicious. A Talent Acquisition Manager, those who legend say deploy AI to mass reject candidates. He and his team had their roles made redundant. They all had significant experience implementing, configuring and managing ATSs. All were starting to believe the auto-rejection narrative, despite actually knowing how they work. These are both examples of mental heuristics - rules of thumb - where we try to fathom complex problems with the minimum of energy. Understandable given how draining a job search is. Yet, here's the rub, the longer a job search, the more likely you are to believe apocryphal nonsense - because of the continuous ragebait exposure favoured by social media, and an unfathomable job search. It's where what feels like common sense, yet you must push against it, because counterintuition, and the courage of your first convictions, might be your best tool in your job search tool kit. The truth remains more grim than automation designed to reduce adminsitrative burden - human decision making vs too high a volume of candidates, many of whom use AI to optimise their search. The same humans corrupted by overwork, cynicism, corporate solipsism, naivety, laziness, poor capability or simply a system stacked against them. 24 - Counterintuitive Here's a common journey many people take when a job search that proves tougher than expected: steps that might actually move you further away from your goal and make you part of the problem. Career grief Pick yourself up and decide this could actually be an opportunity for a new start Update CV with most recent job Hit the job boards and contact agencies Pleasant surprise that there’s more out there than you thought Apply, apply, apply Many of these jobs prove: closed, fake, ghosts, scams Not getting much traction, agencies aren’t replying Maybe you’re being too picky Widen the net: more senior, less senior, different industries, roles that use transferable skills Realise you need to customise, but that’s becoming really hard with the volume you’re applying to. ChatGPT? How else can you automate? With all these applications, there must be a reason I’m not getting through. What’s this about the ATS? Is AI really blocking me? The worst-case scenario here are those upsetting posts we read about people applying to 2,000 jobs and not even getting an interview. I expect many people will read these posts and worry they are on the same path. Some may even defer to that possibly Einstein quote, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is the definition of madness.” And as a result they stop applying to jobs and try other measures instead. A TV analogy to illustrate your job search If you were selling a £300 TV who would you sell it to? Possibly too ambiguous a question. First-hand, second-hand? What features does it have? Who should be the buyers for this type of £300 product? Is there any point targeting people who want £1,000 TVs? What about £10,000? What about people who want £300 monitors, not TVs? It’s impossible to know without starting out on the right strategy: Define the product Research the market of ideal customers Set the right price point Sell where the customers will buy from But if things aren’t going well, you shouldn’t simply broaden your horizons and increase your sales approach across demographics that will never buy from you. Instead, you re-evaluate these first principles to make sure you have the right product, for the right people, at the right price point, sold in the right places, with the right message. So, yes there is iteration to do, but it’s your input that needs changing first to generate the output. You shouldn’t only change the steps you take. You might know your TV works perfectly well as a monitor, indeed better, because of its specs. However, if you're marketing a monitor to TV buyers, how well will that go? The problem here is one of definition. Who is your product actually for, and do they understand why yours is a contender? You shouldn't assume they can see your monitor qualities - show them. You might argue that the £1,000 budget holder could benefit from your transferable skills - same size TV, same resolution, pumps out sound, in colour. But if they want OLED when you offer LCD, or if they want a 100w speaker, while yours offers 30w, it’s likely to be a non-starter. Can you show how your 'features' apply for their demands? Do your features actually apply? What if instead you sold at a discount, with your additional features at the same cost as the competition? The difference between people and products is that products won’t change their mind. If an employer doesn’t need the features you offer that are enhanced, these can be seen as a risk, not a benefit. Does this mean you should stay in your lane? Yes and no. It means first you need to understand how your lane reflects the race you are in - your specific jobs marketplace. You should clearly understand what you need and what you offer, while balancing what the market offers and the other good people interested in those offers. But if you apply for vacancies in a domain where you can’t show the applicability of your offering. Or if you apply for vacancies that are too junior or senior, without a clear argument for the specific benefit that employer will have in hiring you. Then you will compete against candidates who have direct skills and experience. These are typically more aligned to the needs of that vacancy. Worse, you become part of the problem, taking oxygen away from more suited candidates who deserve fair consideration - without improving your own odds. It’s unfortunately a simple truth that if everyone didn’t apply for vacancies they weren’t suitably qualified for - everyone’s experience would be better. This may seem to blame you, but consider the opportunity cost, with time and energy better spent on other activities - which might even just be taking a break. I say this from a place of compassion, not criticism. Think about that TV analogy above - when you search for TVs on Amazon, how quickly do you filter out products you will never buy? Do those products make it harder to identify what you do need? I'd wager the answer is always Yes. Why not try that as an exercise now? Write down what you need from a TV, then try and find it without any bias towards brands. Rather than compromise to spread your bets, keep going back to first principles and make sure these are both fit for purpose and clearly communicated. Rather than hope others will see your transferable skills will apply, or your higher level of experience will help - show them how and why it matters. If you can’t, spend your energy on better activity. As for that Einsteinish quote further up. This is only true when the matters outside of your control don’t change. Those steps at the top are a common sense approach to a job search that involves systemic dysfunction, terrible job adverts, overburdened hiring processes, discrimination of all sorts and the simple disaster of too many qualified candidates for too few jobs. Matters which we have no control over. In the changing and mercurial nature of your jobs market, its potential to improve suddenly may be the only change you need to get the job you want. Such as the job seeker I spoke to, who went from 0 interviews from few applications, to having to turn down interviews and choose between multiple offers. Debbie said that she refocused on her expertise, and why it mattered, using that to inform what she applied for and how she communicated. Points in her control, with a changing market that helped. 

The other day I read a LinkedIn post about the iron triangle as it relates to recruitment. That you can be fast and good, but it will be expensive. That you can be fast and cheap, and it will be bobbins. Or that you can be cheap and good, but it will take longer than the heat death of the universe. At first glance it’s always made sense, with caveats, though that sense has been ablated with the promise of AI. Something that promises to be quicker, cheaper and better than people can manage. The only thing this triangle lacks is judgement-with-responsibility, something AI-style LLMs are currently incapable of, which is why they can be such problematic technology for recruitment. Though if your priority is speed, saving money, and filling jobs, the lack of judgement in even those algorithms that promise black box bias freedom might not be a problem you’d think much about. And when the top is spinning in an elegant way this might seem a standardisation you can apply everywhere, while you get on with your day job. Sadly the only place a spinning top doesn’t stop is when you were dreaming all along. AI has made me think about why the fundamentals of recruitment are so important, using judgement before we launch our projects. Which is why I like the 5Cs of project management as a way to look at recruitment: complexity, criticality, compliance, culture, compassion. With an adaptation and an additional C to be fit for purpose. It’s a great way to consider what approach to deploy: Complexity: the number of moving parts in a role, supply and demand in the candidate market, resources required to engage and bring forward the right people Criticality: the impact a vacancy has on the organisation. The opportunity a great hire brings. The damage the wrong hire can cause. And everything in between Channels: we go where the candidates are, whether at the end a headhunt, from an advert, from sourcing across LinkedIn Recruiter/equivalent tools, CV Databases, ATS records, other platforms, internal applicants, suppliers, consultants, temps, networking, referrals or even from a little black book, which I suspect will become more relevant again when data becomes noise Compliance: not just employment law, but how technology is used to find, engage and assess candidates in a fair, equitable and inclusive way Context: the full picture of the company – its organisational and local cultures, principles and values, mission, vision, goals, challenges and trajectory. The nuts and bolts, what that means for your candidates, and trying to understand the same in them Compassion: recognition of the impact a vacancy has on the employer and its team, balanced with how everyone can be brought together. And compassion for everyone that interacts with our recruitment, in process or invisibly Yes, I swapped context for culture. Hiring for context necessarily includes culture, and goes much further. And I've added Channels, which should always be established before going to market. I like these because they’re a way to ensure that how you recruit is proportionate and appropriate. They may even highlight you shouldn’t hire at all. But what you shouldn’t do is assume one recruitment process is the same as the next, nor that the investment made in reaching desired outcomes should be. What may seem expensive to you might bring an unexpected return on investment. What seems slow at the outset might bring a starter quicker than hoped – proper planning and all that. What seems good quality might fall apart, when the promises prove inadequate. That’s why it’s so important to diagnose first, before standardising. Greg p.s. You're welcome to try my free Hiring Diagnostic & Plan . It's not based on the 6Cs, which I think require more depth than a free tool can reasonably provide. Instead, it draws on principles from other disciplines: True and Fair from accounting, and Suitable and Sufficient from health and safety. It's free and private. Give it a go, and let me know if you'd like to chat through how the 6Cs might apply to your recruitment and enhance the resul 

On Wednesday 21st, I'll be doing a LinkedIn Live on The Hidden Jobs Market, joined by Paul Woodhouse. Paul is a marketing leader who has been looking for work in our challenging market. A previous role was a Hidden Job, and has also hired people himself. We'll be looking at his experiences to give a little substance to what can be a nebulous term. I'll show the steps anyone can take to become available for unadvertised vacancies, and for advertised vacancies that are filled by other means - after all employers consider more than only applications when taking a standard approach to recruitment. As a recruiter I don't advertise around half my vacancies, which might be for reasons of confidentiality, a lack of definition in the brief, a on the QT replacement for someone about to be dismissed, or mass availability of candidates. I'll use LinkedIn Recruiter to look for potential candidates, CV databases that can be more effective for immediate hires, my network for referrals and recommendations. My previous candidate pools for other vacancies - some of whom might have once open a time been applicants. Indeed, that last point shows the absurdity of much job search advice. If you apply for a vacancy on an ATS, you might be rejected, yet still be considered for future vacancies in the same employer. A hidden job hidden by an advertised job, where tailoring your CV with AI might make you less likely to be considered. Join us on Wednesday, or if you aren't free, the recording will be available immediately. Both can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7516049669924225027?viewAsMember=true . The chapter below from A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) shows a simple metaphor for the hidden jobs market, why it's such a silly term, and a better way to think about your own job search. 3 - The hidden jobs market In most of the calls I have with job seekers they will ask me about The Hidden Jobs Market. What is it? Is it real? How can I access it? Before we get into that, we should talk about tomatoes. As you read this next section, imagine a tomato is a job. So, you want to procure some tomatoes. How would you? Your local farm shop. The supermarket. Wednesday’s stalls. Maybe you subscribe to a weekly box of veg. Maybe you grow your own. Maybe you trade for the tomatoes from Tim’s allotment. Maybe you look at people funny when they ask for an intro to Tim because his tomatoes are wonderful. You likely wouldn’t buy some from Amazon - they don’t sell fresh food. Not to me anyway. Though you might buy tomato seeds from Amazon if you grow your own. Maybe even cans of crushed tomato, sauce, puree, or whatever meets your needs. As the channel you use to source tomatoes isn’t the only consideration, so too is the configuration of what you need. While you and others all access tomatoes in different ways, some of which overlap, and some of which are mutually exclusive - none of these channels are hidden. It’s just that you may not know how to access some channels, while others won’t be available to you. Now I want you to read that section again. Instead of being your desired job, you are an employer whose desired tomato is a candidate of choice. While recruitment is the inverse of a job search (more on this later), the analogy is better from the employer perspective because they are on a buyer’s journey where you are the product. Employers want to fill their vacancies through the best means. Some vacancies are easy to fill, others not so, and they will access the channels necessary to find the right people. In many situations, they won’t advertise a vacancy, which might be for reasons of confidentiality or convenience. Some say this is as much as 80%, a flawed figure which comes from a flawed survey, or perhaps it comes from a newspaper article in 1974 before computers were a thing. In my recent small-scale research, it was indicated more than 62% of vacancies are advertised. 53% responded they advertise more than 75% of vacancies. Many of the respondents were headhunters, whose business may be based on not running public adverts. I expect this will have skewed the results lower than the true figure. What employers don’t do is hide vacancies systematically. To access these vacancies, you need to understand the channels through which employers hire and invert these channels to form your strategy. Much like how tomatoes are sold through channels which consumers buy from. Is the hidden jobs market real? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that not all jobs are advertised. Some are confidential, some for reasons as mundane as not wanting to deal with hundreds of advert applicants. No, because it isn’t a term that has inherent meaning. Speak to people who advocate for it, often a career coach, and they’ll tell you it’s anything from personal branding and networking to going direct and being referred in. When vacancies aren’t advertised by employers, they often fill them through sourcing - this is a specialist skill related to finding people where they may be found: LinkedIn, CV databases, corporate databases, GitHub, Facebook, YouTube. These are all channels you can access as part of an appropriate multichannel strategy. Which means if you have the right multichannel strategy (I call this Through-the-Line, which we’ll cover in parts 2 and 3), you access all jobs available to you, including those which are hidden and those which are in witness protection on another continent. Who are the headhunters that specialise in your domain? Who are the people who can refer you to jobs? How can you be more discoverable on LinkedIn and CV databases? How can you gain an understanding of the ways in which your ideal job is recruited, so you can take advantage of those channels? Those are better questions to answer to allow an effective through-the-line, multichannel strategy involving outbound and inbound leads. Despite me being vocal about why Hidden is a flawed notion, two people have thanked me for advice that led to their new roles claiming they’d accessed the hidden jobs market. As I gritted my teeth in hidden rage and congratulated them on their success, they unveiled the truth. What they actually did was map out their real life network of people they’d worked with and got in touch. If the people you know don’t know that you are looking for a role, what reason would they have to tell you about a vacancy? It’s simple marketing - right place (LinkedIn), right person (ex-colleague), right message (looking for work), right time (we’ve a vacancy). Of course, that takes a bit of luck to achieve the right congruence. Odds you increase through volume and follow up. And when you do find those opportunities, they are easier to win because you are a known name, not another unknown CV. There it is, the hidden tomato market. 

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.