Warts and all. A recruitment AiDE, pt 2

Greg Wyatt • October 30, 2025

Welcome to the 2nd edition of AntI Recruitment.


When I concocted the title, one of its whiffiest elements was using the word 'human'. Human first, human-centric - there were a few iterations.


But there's no denying that at some point in recruitment, you're going to come face to face with the people you might want to employ, however you use technology.


Unless you're going to replace meatbag jobs with droids, you should probably consider our needs. Especially when that serves the outcomes you want from your recruitment.


So while it's whiffy, it's a suitable and sufficient part of the newsletter name. A term I use throughout my recruitment consulting, and explain in the Innovation from Iteration series.


If you agree that creating the right Experience for your ideal potential employees is a reasonable idea, then you'll probably want them to stick around long enough in post to make a difference.


One of the ways you do this is to set the right tone from the outset, which is I why I always recommend to my UK clients to go:


Warts and All


If ye olde LinkedIn were around in the 17th century, it wouldn’t have been selfies that drove the algorithm.


Instead, it would have been the form of portraiture that makes people taller, wealthier, younger and more attractive.


Not so for Oliver Cromwell. Virtue signalling was not something he valued, preferring the truth, unvarnished.


Thus, he verily didst say unto Peter Lely:

“I desire you would use all your skill to paint your picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughness, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me; otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”


I imagine if you look at all of the portraits of his peers, it would be his that most resembled the truth.

From this came one of my favourite expressions.


I show a warts and all picture of the vacancies, employers and candidates I represent.


Honesty is a good reason to do this, with a candour that can be disarming.


It’s also about good marketing.


Recruitment is unique in how employers, vacancies and candidates are all types of products, each of whom can change in nature.

To have a truly good outcome in recruitment, it’s not just a question of filling a vacancy but also finding the right person who can thrive in that role long enough to see a return.


Whether that return on investment is in terms of things done, goals reached, salary achieved, career developed, or something else. It’s an ROI for the candidate as much as the employer.


Having clarity on the unvarnished truth of capability, attitude, trajectory and add is the best way to find the right hire.

‘Warts and all’ isn’t just moral, it’s an effective way to recruit.


Here’s a shoe-horned analogy to show why.


If you’ve had the good fortune to find love, it may be because of all their qualities including their flaws, not despite them.


Okay, you probably have a form of personal development plan in there to upgrade your partner and be upgraded by them, but the nuts and bolts are pretty much fixed.


How about those aborted long-term relationships that fell apart because of a disagreement on babies, marriage or Brexit?


Might have been handy to find out before it got serious.


While perhaps you have a friend whose love-at-first-sight partner is highly irritating to you.


Horses for courses.


It’s funny how many parallels there are between dating and recruitment. Haven’t you noticed?


Assuming you aren’t a toxic or discriminatory employer, that what you propose is relevant, and that you don’t have confidential plans that can’t be divulged, showing the full truth of a vacancy does two things:


  • Gives honest insight into what you are like to work for, what the role entails and what a candidate should expect. The features.
  • Allows you to establish the genuine reasons your ideal candidates will want to romance you. The benefits.


This will attract more suitable candidates and dissuade less suitable candidates.


A bit like how Marmite owns its delightful grossness, and the experience of its consumers, to create a memorable brand.


For example, the ambiguous and organised chaos common to a growing SME won’t suit people who need structured workloads. Why wouldn’t you highlight that?


However, to show this insight, you need to have found that insight in the first place:


  1. Establish and interpret context with meaning
  2. Audit your job description, and other documentation, to ensure accuracy. You may recall my previous post on “True and Fair” which has a similar meaning to Warts and All. The difference is that true and fair relates to factual descriptions in documentation, whereas warts and all is about showing this with meaning in your marketing.
  3. Correctly defining what good looks like in your ideal candidates.


This requires vulnerability and recognising you aren’t the perfect employer for everyone. If you have difficulty overcoming your blind spots, good recruiters can help.


Once you have these points nailed down, your ‘warts and all’ will be clear.


You won’t rely on bog standard bullet points that say nothing more than your job title might have said on its own.


After all, most people know what their own jobs entail, and your <job title>’s duties will come as little surprise on their own.


Alternatively, you can ignore your ‘warts and all’ and lead with generic wordage (innovative market leader / ninja rockstar) or bullshit (we’re a family / level up your career).


You can also choose to sweep them under the carpet and hope no one notices or complains.


The problem here is that inevitably they’ll come out in the wash, through unconscious statements that raise alarm, or worse still when someone leaves three months into their new job.


As a comparison, my typical advert gets around 40 applications with 30%+ being suitable enough to warrant a call. In a normal market, I hear other recruiters getting 100-400 applications with less than 5% suitability.


(This article from March 2023 is showing its age - you can multiply these by 5, though my 30%+ is the same)


I’ve filled around half of my vacancies from advertising in the past couple of years, including those considered hard to fill, as part of a multichannel approach. The rest through other means.


For permanent management and leadership hires, my average retention is 4 years.


Warts and all is one good reason for this.


Get the ‘warts and all’ right and you’ll have cast iron features to underpin your product description.


From there you can show why it matters, which is what next week is about.


Thanks for reading.


Regards,

Greg

De Facto Automated Rejection & You

By Greg Wyatt • November 12, 2026
While 2027 remains surprisingly far away, with plenty of time to start applications, attend interviews, gain an acceptable job offer and even start work, I'm already thinking about the biannual update to A Career Breakdown Kit. Only, nothing's really changed in terms of what might affect the steps you take, overall, since the last update, so any changes are likely to only be minor. This might surprise you, if you feel that AI has increasingly eaten into how applications are administered and assessed. While the changes that are actually happening make the treatise of this article more important, which is to look at how recruitment actually happens in informing your strategy. Changes that may not be widespread but are emerging - deprioritising advertising roles in favor of sourcing (looking for candidates), because of the volume of applications; adding extra friction into applications, penalising relevant candidates because of AI applications made automatically; even discounting applications wholesale if they come from they are sent by a mass-apply service. I do see people regularly showcasing features of various ATSs over the years that seem to show automated rejections, yet these features rarely worked well, and haven't changed much in two decades. As I mentioned to Martyn, at a recent Recruitment Technology standards launch in the UK, "it doesn't matter how good the technology layer is, if the human layer is the problem". Martyn Redstone is Head of Responsible AI at Warden, and I'm fortunate that he will be joining me and Simon Ward on a LinkedIn Live as we discuss what this topic means for job seekers. I'll update this newsletter with the event when it's live. In the meanwhile, Martyn is well worth following to understand what's actually happening with AI in recruitment. It's still important to acknowledge the poor experiences job seekers have, and to try and shed light on what is happening, in what I call: 6 - De Facto Automated Rejection and You When there’s any discussion over Beat the Bots, job seekers often assume they are unfairly treated, while people from the recruitment profession deny it happens at all - “that’s not how the ATS works”, “we don’t use AI that way”, and so on. The best objection I see to the common recruiter stance is, “What does it matter how we are rejected, if we were never fairly considered?” That question is the heart of this chapter and, to answer it, I need to propose a new term: De facto automated rejection. Definition: where an element of a recruitment process leads to an application being either rejected or not considered, irrespective of capability, contribution, or potential alignment. That may sound an awful lot like Automated Rejection, yet it isn’t the same thing. Examples: No application after number 100 considered Illegal discrimination Legal discrimination - location, salary, industry, qualification, etc - legally permissible decisions driven by assumption Relying on configured ranking within an ATS to prioritise applications Not considering candidates who aren't picked up by a Boolean search (sourcing) Filter questions at advert stage (e.g. do you have a work permit?) Applying after the vacancy is at interview stage And many more All de facto automated rejections have one thing in common, and it isn’t automation - it’s human decision-making, including shortcuts and assumptions. Some of those examples above are cited when talking about auto-rejects. However, these are all consequences of human intervention and the choice not to intervene. There are an increasing number of AI products that automate these steps, with the requirement of human oversight - I've yet to speak to a recruiter that wholly relies on them, and few who don't view every application. This is one reason why ATS Compliance and Beat the Bots are a red herring. The advice fails not because it’s wrong, but because it optimises the wrong layer. The system is only a component in the process, governed by humans. If you misdiagnose de facto automated rejection as a technical problem, you’ll keep trying to outsmart systems instead of changing how you’re seen, found, and prioritised by people. Understanding how recruiters handle their process and giving them what they need in an application has to take priority. While the same steps that “optimise human compliance” are implicitly system-compliant. The challenge is that human compliance relies on what makes us individual: our skill level, our insight, our psychology, our biases, our resources and the time available to us. As well as how you navigate these. Without forgetting that we are people like you, often trying to do too much with too little. It’s no wonder our frustrations mirror yours, with the difference that we earn a salary for our experiences. ATS Compliance feels more comfortable, because it gives a clear direction, even if it’s the wrong one. It is true we use filters and keywords to prioritise how our applications are presented to us. We do the same when we look for candidates, whether on LinkedIn, job boards, our ATS or other means. All this does is present results in a way that allows us to spend more attention on those that meet the criteria we have set. When we review those results, the way that information is presented informs whether we progress them or not. To be human compliant, your application has to be discoverable, then it has to convert interest. Fail on either front and you’ll either be rejected or you won’t hear at all. If humans are the reasons you are rejected for reasons unrelated to capability or contribution... well, I think that’s rather more problematic than technology. Beat the Bots and ATS Compliance aren’t just a red herring - they can actively hold you back. Because they place the wrong priority by presenting a strategy, rather than simple hygiene. Your wider strategy should encompass far more than applications - getting found, starting conversations, doorknocking, networking and all these other opportunities that can get you closer to a job: These are fundamentally covered in a human compliance strategy. I just happened to call it A Career Breakdown Kit instead, with how to do these in Parts 2 and 3. I realise this may create a feeling of overwhelm, when you realise there is much more to a better application than the transactional steps of ATS compliance. Yet these same steps will improve every aspect of your job search and some are straightforward to take - go to www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources for the free CV template that is an easy starting point. 

Salary on the job description

By Greg Wyatt • November 11, 2026
I've written many variations on the article below, over the years, and it seems sensible to revisit given the UK government's announcements around salary transparency. On the whole, I'm for it, with the many advantages it brings. But like a lot of things in recruitment, there is a more involved discussion to be had, especially when this fix treats the symptoms, not the rot. That's not to say the fix isn't worth doing, just that it won't fix many of the problems underlying a lack of transparency. This article is a little dated, in terms of the research shared, but I think the points are as relevant as ever. Originally published May 2023 Salary on the Job Description? Yes, the headline is trolling. The question should be ‘salary on the job advert?’ You wouldn’t confuse a job description with an advert, would you? This is a subject rife with disagreement around ethics and practicality, and worth broaching again considering recent campaigns in the UK to increase salary transparency and ban the ‘what’s your current salary?’ question. Let’s focus on some practicalities first, based on UK research I ran last year for my “Accessing a Candidate Short Market” guide:  Job boards can penalise you for not listing salary. As of December 2021, Totaljobs penalises adverts that don’t list salary, and these aren’t sent out as job alerts to candidates (who may be passive). These adverts are considered sub-standard. Unlisted salaries attract fewer qualified applications. This was estimated to be between 20% and 45% fewer, across the job boards I talked to. LinkedIn reported that not only can you expect more applications, you may also expect better-qualified applications when the salary is advertised. My work supporting senior job seekers confirms this - many would not apply to adverts that had no salary or "competitive salary" because they felt this was a waste of their time. There is less emphasis on salary negotiation from the candidate side, due to transparency in pay. This is a key part of equity, relating to gender, race and intersectional identity. According to Payscale 's research, white men are most likely to negotiate the highest salary. It’s simple – if you advertise vacancies and don’t list salary, you risk receiving fewer, less suitable applications. Then there’s the ethical question, where a common argument is that there is ‘no ethical reason that salaries can’t be listed’. Now, while I’m a proponent for advertising salaries, where possible, I think this ethical argument isn’t the right one - ‘can’t be’ is a strong statement. I think a better question is ‘how does this do harm’ when establishing reasons for not listing salary. This balances pragmatism with the most important aspect of ethics. It can be a complicated question too in scenarios like this: How do you establish salary transparency for job families across multiple regions where the local pay is established by HQ in one country? Currency exchange rates and cost of living mean that a fair salary one day may not be the next, therefore flexibility in not listing salary may be ethically the right thing to do if the intent is right. What about new vacancies that serve to solve a business problem and can be recruited at different levels? What about practical situations like recruiting hard-to-fill vacancies during a wider redundancy programme, whereby listing a salary would create concern in unrelated areas of that unsettled business? It's not always as simple a question as we’d like to think. If you’re facing a complex situation in advertising a role, I recommend describing your stance in the advert itself, if you legitimately can’t state the salary. At the same time, as we’ve seen in the US, legislation to enforce salary transparency creates situations such as Netflix apparently advertising a range of $90-900k. Who does that help? The problem with this kind of legislation is that companies can comply while continuing the behaviour that led to the legislation in the first place. It’s palliative, rather than treating unfairness at its root. We should also consider the unforeseen consequence of salary transparency, such as this research which appears to show a reduced link between performance and pay: Influence of Pay Transparency Helping candidates negotiate better pay or terms is a privilege I enjoy. And there's more to understanding someone's existing remuneration than simply establishing whether they can afford to move. Sometimes these conversations reveal that someone is being underpaid. With evidence of what their experience and contribution might command elsewhere, they can go back to their current employer and make the case for a pay rise. That might mean they decide not to move at all. Which is a perfectly good outcome for them, even if it isn't for the vacancy in the short term. It also opens up the counteroffer conversation early. If their employer could resolve the reason they're considering leaving, I'd rather understand that before they accept an offer elsewhere. There's a benefit for prospective employers too. A new employer may budget £52,000 for a role, believing that to be market rate, based on historic data. But if conversations with suitably experienced candidates reveal that their existing remuneration, expectations and other opportunities consistently indicate otherwise, there's good reason to revise either the budget or the requirements. If that budget does prove unrealistic, and it's the same budget other team members are measured against, it can also create the argument to revisit everyone's salaries - subject to affordability, of course. After all, it's cheaper to retain fairly paid staff with all the knowledge they have than to replace them. Of course, conversations with candidates aren't a substitute for proper salary benchmarking. But they can reveal problems that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. There are also situations where understanding the whole package matters. What if someone currently receives a 16% pension contribution and moves to a role offering a 10% pay rise but only a 5% pension? Car allowances, RSUs, tax-efficient packages? Remuneration is a more involved conversation than simply salary. And none of this means someone's existing salary should determine what they're worth to their next employer. If their previous salary was unfair, using it to determine their next salary risks perpetuating that unfairness. And if an employer routinely offers a 15% increase on previous earnings, the new salary may have little relationship to the contribution that person can make. It makes sense to pay commensurately with contribution and capability, rather than what may be irrelevant history. So I understand the reasons for wanting to ban questions about previous salary. They're often used badly. But I think there's an important distinction between asking to establish someone's worth and asking to understand their circumstances. One can perpetuate unfairness. The other can help identify and correct it. If legislation restricts these conversations, I'll adapt how I offer this support. But I'd hope any restrictions recognise the difference between using salary history to determine an offer and voluntarily discussing remuneration to help someone make better decisions. I hope you’ve found these thoughts helpful to start a broader conversation in your business. My thoughts aren’t set in stone, so please let me know your opinions if you disagree. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services: Commercial, operational and technical leadership recruitment Manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client Outplacement support Email me on greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk if you'd like to discuss.