Root Canal - No problem, pt 2
Greg Wyatt • June 4, 2026
Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity.
I do find it interesting go through my older articles. How has my thinking changed? Has it improved? How was I so cringy?
Looking at this article in its August 2023 form, I hadn't yet focused on Candidate Resentment as an opportunity to improve how we recruit. Not because it's decent to treat people better, but because that is a happy byproduct of strategically assessing our work as it supports our goals.
Whether that's filling vacancies or finding people that meet our goals long-term and flourish doing so.
Root canal
If you recognise that speaking to the potential problems of the people you want to engage is a good idea, you may also recognise why you shouldn't create any problems that push them away.
Engagement is an ongoing process that carries through every stage of recruitment, even into employment.
Yes, bring your candidates forward, in part by showing how you solve their career problems.
But, don’t throw up unnecessary issues that undo your good work.
Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity.
Why did that candidate proceed? Why did another withdraw? What raised concern?
What about the potential candidates we don’t even know about? What influenced their decisions?
I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of candidates, prospects, applicants, and everything else, during my career.
Out of curiosity, I’m always interested in what influences their decisions in their pursuit of a new career.
What fascinates me is that these are the Gemba, the unknown unknowns that we can extrapolate into our own recruitment processes.
What problems do they encounter elsewhere, that discourage them from applying, that encourage them to withdraw, and why?
And how might we be guilty of the same?
While if we are guilty, how can we fix these problems, so that the objection never comes up?
Imagine that - the reader that might have walked away, who instead chooses to engage. This may seem an unknowable unknown, but one of the benefits of my job seeker work is hearing about the issues they encounter on their side of recruitment and how that may influence their decisions.
Considering these are people that are very problem aware, their appetite for bullshit is in some ways higher than the problem unaware (passive in old speak). While in others, what you may consider normal behaviour, they consider red flags.
While we can’t control the behaviour of candidates, we can learn what influences their behaviour and form a process that nudges, draws forward or mitigates when needed.
What are we accountable for that might present a problem for a candidate we want to employ?
Especially when, in normal life, moving jobs is one of the biggest stresses?
How might we unnecessarily cause scepticism or anxiety?
Auditing your own recruitment process as a mystery candidate is one opportunity.
As is surveying your staff for their experience - with the caveat they are happy to be working for you, skewing their perception. Or perhaps they're terrified of losing their jobs. Do they really want to rock the boat with criticism?
But it’s the candidates who withdraw, who hesitate, who object that can be the source of the biggest improvements.
What would you say their common complaints are?
You can look to LinkedIn for the answer, in their high-engagement posts.
- Salary on the job description (they mean the advert)
- ATS data duplication
- Responsiveness and transparency
- Tardy, bloated and unnecessary recruitment stages
- A robotic process that forgot they are human
Which becomes your choice. Do you look within and challenge yourself with 5 Whys to see how you can improve?
Do you take away problems before they can occur?
Saving your candidates unnecessary toothache?
Or do you lay blame on the areas you can’t control?
Those are the questions.
Regards,
Greg
p.s. I’m available for interesting work - UK key hires, fractional talent acquisition and recruitment writing. Maybe we can talk.
p.p.s. A Recruitment AiDE is out now - the discipline for UK key hire recruitment
What follows is Chapter 43 from A Career Breakdown Kit. Is it a magic salve guaranteed for success? No of course not. But much like anything in a job search, nothing is guaranteed. What we do is identify which avenues can be effective for your context, and form an appropriate strategy. LinkedIn optimisation is great if people search for you on LinkedIn. Except speaking to my recruitment peers, fewer and fewer rely on it. Would it surprise you if I told you I rarely invested in at all before 2019? I've been working in recruitment since 1996 including at CEO level. Applications, networking, referrals, content, CV databases. All have a place and a purpose. Doorknocking on the other hand - some would tell you it has no place in the modern job search. If my daughter*, her friends and other 18 year olds can get a job from an old school technique, while those employers say "only through Indeed" then that might be a hint it still works. Some of whom are socially anxious, but then it's a replicable process, not a cult of personality. Or the periodic messages I get from CxOs who made their own jobs from direct outreach. Not forgetting Granovetter's seminal research and recent LinkedIn-specific studies in Science journal showing weak ties drive more job mobility than strong ties. And why wouldn't doorknocking work on LinkedIn, when you have a weak tie that suggests a viable employer? But no, it's not a guarantee. It's just an arrow in the quiver of a multichannel job search. 43 - How to doorknock Doorknocking is an old-school sales approach you may well have experienced, such as when a salesperson with a clipboard rings your doorbell and asks you to change electricity provider. My wife even once bought from exactly this scenario. While it’s not uncommon in a business-to-consumer situation it can also work business-to-business… if you can get past security. Although technology has moved on, the principle is the same whether in person, by phone, email, letter or LinkedIn: You approach someone cold and create your own opportunity. This isn’t an approach for everyone and requires chutzpah. If you are used to a high failure rate in applications - what do you have to lose by being proactive? More than that - look at all the advice on LinkedIn on how to improve your odds in a job search. It’s all transactional and applicable, available to everyone - if you all follow it, everyone takes the same step forward. While taking steps others are less prepared to do means the approach alone may stand out. If you encounter the equivalent of a sign which says, ‘Trespassers will be shot!’, pay attention. My own career of looking for work includes many non-transactional approaches: Walked into the local Cinema and asked for a job Walked into Office World and asked for a job Worked for Dad Talked to one of my ex-colleagues and gained some by-the-call phone research work Temped through an agency Walked into an Inn and asked for a job Referred to a publishing, training & consulting company In managing their small-scale recruitment alongside my day job I got to know the MD of a recruitment firm as a supplier. I went to work there Tapped up to return to a more senior role Started my business upon being given the boot - thanks Dave! It’s true I did apply through job boards and agencies. It’s mainly through my own means that I have secured my employment. *My daughter even tried doorknocking for her first job in our local town last summer. It didn’t work for her - she found a nice retail job through an application on Indeed. Her experience was positive enough that she helped a friend do the same - who got a job at the first shop they tried. Doorknocking is about approaching companies by category not because they are recruiting. These categories can be: All the employers in your local business park (often they have websites, with directories and job adverts) Companies listed in local newspapers, directories or platforms (local to me this could be Cambridge Evening News, Bury Free Press, Cambridge Network or Business Weekly) Top 100 employers in your domain Companies that have recently had funding and are about to scale Doorknocking companies you’ve come across through networking and its resulting market map Make contact and make a case for yourself on the principle of the right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. There’s an element of luck involved for these elements to all come together. A disadvantage is that they may not be recruiting or ever have a need to employ you and even if they do have a vacancy, you still have to establish the right fit. That means a logically low hit rate. Your threshold for an acceptable failure rate will inform whether this is the right approach for you. The difference is the anonymous rejection of a volume-based application versus the ‘personal rejection’ from your direct outbound approach. Right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. Let’s reorder and examine this marketing principle: Right Place Those Categories above. The place is the Company, and how you contact them. You can go in blind if you are a bold prospector or research them in advance. ‘site:’ is a useful command in Google. You can search on specific websites: ‘site: linkedin.com ACME jobs’ Right Person Typically this will be the ‘next one up’ - Head of department, Director, CxO or Owner. Who would be the budget holder at work? Those are prospects. Look them up on LinkedIn, PR, news, video platforms. What can you find out? Right Time While time can be happenstance, can timed factors create opportunity? What might be a hiring trigger? Perhaps you could contact a list of companies that have recently announced funding or a big win - news that may lead to hiring additional people. Or maybe you hear through the grapevine that Janine is about to go off on maternity leave. If their process isn’t time-bound, can you make it time-bound? ‘We aren’t hiring right now’ might mean they’ve run out of headcount in the January to June period and may have a new budget in July. What can you learn that helps you both? If you have radio silence, why not try again in a month or three months? Think about how you buy. If you don’t need something how likely are you to respond to a message no matter how well crafted? If you do need something you might think first of someone who keeps in regular touch. Right Offer You have more opportunity for career creativity in being unemployed than someone entrenched in a 9 to 5 permanent job. What problems can you fix for a company in a non-traditional employment capacity? Let’s say an employer has a problem that needs fixing. They don’t have capacity to do it right now. It isn’t burning enough to seek professional help and there isn’t sufficient work in view to make it a job. What if you caught them at the right time? An out-of-work TA Manager who offered to revamp an onboarding process. A web designer who notes lots of issues with their website. A strategic operational issue that is their unknown unknown identified by your expertise. A swamped team that could benefit from their admin burden being reduced. An orchard that needs pickers at harvest time. What starts out as a short-term, project, or part-time piece of work can become proof of concept. While rare, I know a few people whose permanent full-time jobs have come about this way, including at a senior level. Right message This is both specific and crude. It’s specific because nailing the message CAN create an opportunity a poorly written message may miss. It’s crude because sometimes you can catch people at the right time, no matter how cruddy your message is. This is the case in recruitment - I’ve picked up several senior appointments by calling at the right time. ‘I’m glad you called Greg, I’m starting to think about my maternity cover in June.’ Had I not called, that HR Director may well have gone to the specialist HR recruiters she is also in touch with. If you have a strong hook in your message - such as a key area of rare expertise or a clear issue you’ve identified which companies may have - go in with that. If you don’t - done is better than procrastinating: ‘Hi Greg, I live locally to Bircham Wyatt Recruitment. Love what you do. I wondered if you might be recruiting for an apple picker at any point. If you can’t help, could you point me in the right direction?’ Right price I’ve left this until the end because much of this is variable and subjective. What are your needs? What can they afford? What does the market say? How flexible can you be? Research will help if you can get a sense of what they generally pay through Indeed, Glassdoor or others. Or maybe what comparable companies that are advertising will pay. One approach might be to pro-rate your salary over the period you’ll work there. Doorknocking can sometimes give you access to jobs that are being actively recruited. It’s a happy byproduct of your work, if you find yourself in this situation. It’s worth persevering. Otherwise, it’s too easy to think after 10, 20, or 100 unsuccessful efforts that the approach itself is at fault. There is always an element of luck in any activity. This may be out of your comfort zone, in which case it’s an opportunity to grow. The only certain thing is that if you don’t try you definitely won’t benefit.
What follows is an updated chapter for the Summer edition of A Career Breakdown Kit (2026). Two main changes: A range of free resources available to boost your job search - you can access them on www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources . These are not generative tools - they are diagnostic tools. Feedback has been fantastic so far, including a message yesterday that attributes advice from one of the reports helped them secure a job offer Insight into an emergent situation that means the myth of ATS compliance is now actively working against you. It's a good thing the tools above are designed to help you better stand out in a way that is ATS hygienic and puts your best foot forward If you've already bought the book, DM me when the new edition is published and I'll send you a free digital copy. It's my commitment to any buyer, for as long as I update it. 31 - AI or no? I often see discussions on the uses and perils of AI in a job search. There are many wonderful applications for AI inside and outside of a job search. Some automate and take away the burden of the more painful aspects of looking for a job. From writing CVs to applying at scale for you. And potentially doing the interview for you, with burgeoning deepfake technology. Should you use AI in your job search and how? Ask yourself these questions: ‘Will it be seen as cheating, if the employer finds out I’ve used AI?’ And ‘What are the unexpected consequences that wholesale adoption of new technology creates?’ Using AI in place of truth, whether in a customised CV, to game interviews, or deepfake candidacy - I see this as fraud, and it should be treated as such. You aren’t just cheating the employer, you’re cheating other candidates who have better integrity. Given recruitment processes are in part designed to extrapolate how you might behave and perform in a role, the sense of cheating can lead to an instant ‘no.’ And with the advent of an AI arms race, you should be careful in what you choose to use. I know the odds are stacked against job seekers through a combination of the market, systems and philosophy. Do you want others to make arbitrary decisions over your application, only because you’ve used AI? What do I mean by arms race? Let’s look at using AI to write a CV. In one sense it’s no different to paying someone to write your CV for you, such as a CV Writer. And it’s free. No problem, right? Let’s set aside the argument “Employers filter with AI so why can’t we use AI to get ahead?” for now. Especially because Some Truths About the ATS and AI (p32) and its follow up chapters show what’s really happening. The problem isn’t so much employers as it is how your CV sits alongside other applications. Many applicants who are wholly unsuitable can use the same AI to write a customised CV that paints them as someone worth assessing at interview. A waste of time for the employer, or worse which could lead to a mis-hire and also take attention away from suitable candidates such as you. This creates suspicion over the veracity of AI written CVs. For each development in job seeker AI, you’ll see an opposing one come up at the hiring end. And because these are all based on the same principles, they are relatively simple to develop. An emerging consequence of the arms race This arms race has a consequence worth taking seriously, because it's starting to affect everyone. Automated tools let candidates fire CVs at two thousand vacancies overnight. The same tools can optimise CVs against each advert at scale. For an overwhelmed jobseeker this might seem the golden ticket. But the increasingly reported result is that recruiters now open their ATS to find a pile of CVs that look structurally equivalent: the same section orders, the same keyword density, the same generic achievement bullets. The features that were supposed to make a CV stand out, its mirroring of the advert language and its claimed compliance with the system, become the very features that make these applications indistinguishable from each other. With the additional problem that many applications lie at scale to beat the system. Recruiters must adapt to what they experience, and often it will be by finding the shortcuts experienced humans take when they're drowning. It's a sad state of affairs that this pain is the same one that drives automated applications. Recruiters look for signs that a CV represents an actual qualified candidate rather than a machine-tuned approximation of one. Specificity beats generic mirroring. Context-rich achievement statements beat keyword-dense bullets. Inconsistencies between the CV and the candidate's LinkedIn profile become disqualifying, because they suggest the CV was tuned for the advert rather than the truth. Moreover, signs that applications are driven by an automated service might be discounted at scale, such as one international Talent Acquisition Manager who has set filters to discount applications from LoopCV – because his experience is that they are mainly spammed applications. And while this situation forces employers to reassess how they administer applications, it also leads to the question of whether advertising is a viable channel at all. Especially when other channels are more specific and controllable, such as using LinkedIn Recruiter Licence to find people directly. This news is from June 2026 and things are moving fast. For now, the practical point is that the case for a good-enough CV that's genuinely yours gets stronger as the volume of customised CVs increases. And the case for a well-specified LinkedIn profile that anchors the CV becomes essential, because the profile is what recruiters will compare your CV against when they want to know whether it's real. And because the profile is what may come up in recruiter searches when the jobs they used to advertise aren't advertised any more. I cover the customisation question in more detail in Should I customise my CV? (p178). I cover the LinkedIn profile configuration that anchors the CV in LinkedIn profiles that convert (p204). Does that mean you shouldn’t use AI optimisation at all? It’s situation dependent and you should think about the consequences. If I were looking for an early career job that paid the bills and was aware of the huge competition for a wide number of vacancies – I might consider automation to do this at scale. However, in this case I’d do the opposite of automation and doorknock instead. If I were only receptive to a unique opportunity, AI wouldn’t be relevant. A more straightforward discussion is the uses where AI augments your own intelligence, rather than automates manual processes. Here, I wholeheartedly recommend looking into options and being creative: · Tools to check spelling & grammar, used judiciously (I ignore most of Grammarly’s advice on how to improve my writing style) · Compare your CV against a job description. Check for gaps, synonyms, how you might articulate your experience · Ask for examples of achievements you can use as collateral to support your documentation and interviews, then replace those examples with the facts of your experience · Build a keyword thesaurus to aid in searching for, applying for and being found for vacancies · Use for ideation and sense checking. I’ll paste content into Claude and ChatGPT and ask for its ‘thoughts.’ Some of its feedback is helpful. Sometimes it lies and gaslights me · Ask questions around your career path - job titles, industries to look at; qualifications to underpin your experience · Use as a buddy to ask questions of, help with research and interview preparations (e.g. what questions might I be asked in an interview for a CTO; the company is a venture funded start-up with 30 employees, operating in SaaS) · Purpose specific tools that have been error checked. Such as those that share market insights in your domain - prospects for speculative approaches, networking opportunities, knowledge sharing, etc None of these can be seen as cheating, given it’s invisible behind the scenes work that supports your candidacy. Additionally you can google or AI search for how others have solved their job search applications with AI – there are many case studies in the wild including open source access to their prompts and apps. However, you might prefer to have unlimited free use of tools I have developed to support your job search. Go to www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources These tools are based on the principles set out in this book, the associated CV template (which you can download here too) and my new book on effective key hire recruitment – A Recruitment AiDE. They are diagnostic, not generative, therefore have a different use than AI optimisation. Here are the tools available right now, which I may add to over time: · CV template and guide · CV diagnostic – assess where your CV sits right now and how you can better articulate your candidacy. A structured report you can act on immediately · CV-Vacancy analysis – assess whether and how you should apply, SWOT analyse your CV against expected competition, scraped inferred pain that informs why the vacancy is actually recruited, company context and relevant information, and potential interview questions that may come up · Rejection decoder – plausible analysis of why you may have been rejected. This may give constructive advice, it may just help you move on. · Is it a scam? Paste a suspicious message and it will highlight how suspicious it actually is · AI interview practice – infer questions that are likely to be asked from a job description. Practice, transcribe and record your answers to review. Plus an AI analysis of your answers. Nothing is stored outside of your browser session. · LinkedIn profile optimiser – get more easily found by Recruiters including for jobs that aren’t advertised. Optimised for Recruiter Licence: the number one tool on LinkedIn for sourcing potential candidates. · Salary negotiation insights – an advisory analysis to help you determine whether an offer is fair, and whether and how you might negotiate I’ve designed these so that nothing is stored outside of your browser session. Nothing is visible to me. Full instructions on the resources page. There’s a wider discussion to be had, outside of the purview of this book, which is that of reasonable adjustments. Such as for disability and neurodiversity. What about for non-English speakers when fluent written English isn’t necessary? How about someone with limited time that happens to be the perfect candidate? Shouldn’t we enable candidates to put forward the best version of themselves straightforwardly? If you are someone with hiring authority reading this, let me add this. AI in itself isn’t a cheat, if what is represented is true. When you catch a candidate out for using AI, ask why, instead of assuming. The process of securing a new role is a skill, much of which can be learnt over a long-term job search. In some situations, people can afford CV Writers, LinkedIn profile upgrades, career & interview coaching. All these do is allow them to provide a better version of themselves. AI is no different, albeit less effective on an individual basis. If you see use of AI as problematic, this may discriminate against people with less means to pay for support, the same people who likely need the most help. Don’t be too quick to judge. Don’t you use similar tools to enable your work? At the moment, what matters is how hiring processes might view the use of AI. This is a key consideration.
