The Hiring Pipeline Is Broken. Both Sides Know It. Nobody's Saying It.
I've applied to 500+ jobs in the past several months.
Senior roles. Fractional CMO engagements, Growth Director positions, RevOps leadership — the kind of work where you'd assume the hiring process would be built around real signal. Conversations. Demonstrated thinking. Proof of work. The kind of things that actually tell you whether someone can do the job.
Instead, what I've encountered — consistently, across companies of every size and sector — is a process that has optimised itself into absurdity. A pipeline where both sides are performing for an audience that isn't there, answering questions nobody will read, sending emails nobody means, having conversations structured around the pretence of due diligence rather than the substance of it.
So let me just say the quiet part loud.
The Screening Questions Aren't Producing Signal Anymore
Here's what happens when I see a job application with a 20-minute supplementary questionnaire.
Option one: I skip it. You've just added enough friction that a qualified candidate bounced before reaching the interview stage. That's on the process.
Option two: I route it through AI. I get a polished, competent, technically accurate answer back in under a minute. It hits your keywords. It probably sounds better than what I'd write manually under time pressure. It is completely hollow.
Option two is what's happening. Not just me — everyone operating at any meaningful volume. The people who are answering your screening questions by hand, carefully, thoughtfully, with genuine effort? They're either not volume-applying, which means they're not the people you need to worry about screening, or they're doing it as a performance — which is its own problem.
What you're collecting is AI output. Filtered by your AI screener. Ranked by your ATS. The human in your funnel has been optimised out of stages one through four. You are not learning anything about the candidate from this process. You are learning about their prompting skills, or their willingness to perform effort-theatre.
The extra questions didn't add signal. They just added latency and encouraged both sides to automate faster.
Easy Apply Created the Problem It Was Supposed to Solve
You lowered the barrier to application. Volume went up — massively, and then massively again as AI tools made programmatic job applications trivially easy. Your inbox became unmanageable. So you added screening questions and supplementary forms to create a filter.
Which are now being answered by AI.
So the sequence is: automated job post, automated application, AI-answered screening questions, AI screener, ATS ranking, automated rejection email. Somewhere in this chain there is a person who could actually do the job, who may or may not survive to the phone screen.
The system has eaten itself. What you're now selecting for is not best candidate. It's best AI-assisted applicant — someone who knows how to frame context well enough to get a decent output from a language model. This is a specific, learnable skill. It is not the same skill as the one you posted the job for.
The Rejection Email Is a Lie. A Small, Meaningless Lie. Still a Lie.
"After careful consideration, we regret to inform you..."
I want to just sit with each of those words for a moment.
Careful consideration. An algorithm processed my CV against a keyword list. It happened automatically. No human was involved in this decision, almost certainly. There was no consideration, careful or otherwise.
We regret. You don't. The system sent this at 9am because that's when it was configured to send follow-up correspondence. Nothing about this sentence is true.
I want to be clear: I'm not bothered by the rejection. Rejection is a normal and necessary part of a job search. The numbers mean most applications end in rejection. That's fine. What's disrespectful is the theatre.
The language creates a fiction of human deliberation over a decision that was automated. It makes me scroll past three paragraphs of corporate compassion-washing to find the actual information — am I rejected, am I on hold, is there a next step? That information is buried below the fold, beneath language designed to perform empathy that isn't there.
All you need to say:
You didn't pass this round. If another role comes up that might be a fit, we'll be in touch. If you'd like to flag your interest in future roles, here's the jobs page.
Done. Thirty words. Honest, clean, genuinely respectful of the candidate's time. The current format is the opposite of candidate experience — it's the appearance of care masking the absence of it, and most candidates can see through it, which makes it worse.
The First Interview Opener Is Telling You More Than You Think
If we make it to a call — past the ATS, past the screening questions, past the rejection email that apparently wasn't for me — the question I hear most often as an opener is:
"So, tell me what you know about the role."
I want to explain what this question does from the candidate side.
I'm running fifteen conversations this week. I don't always remember what day it is. I absolutely do not have the 5,000 words below the fold in your job description memorised — the section about team culture, company values, the mission statement, the bullet points about "exciting opportunities to make your mark in a fast-paced environment."
This opener is a test of research compliance. It is checking whether I did homework — whether I spent time before this call reading about your company, learning about your product, preparing talking points about why I find your particular corner of the market compelling.
Here's the problem: for commercial roles especially — sales, marketing, growth, revenue — the ability to do research compliance on a cold call is not the most important signal. And the inability to do it at volume is a feature, not a bug, of how good commercial operators work. They qualify fast, they triage ruthlessly, they go deep when there's genuine heat.
Someone running 15 interviews in a week, operating their job search like a pipeline, routing low-signal stages through automation, conserving real attention for the real conversations? That person is showing you exactly the operational mindset you need in a growth hire. You are screening them out.
The question that would actually produce signal: "Here's what the role involves and what success looks like in 90 days — tell me how you'd approach it." Now we're having a real conversation. Now I can show you how I think, not just whether I Googled you.
The Honest Answer to "Why Do You Want to Join Us?"
There's a clip that went around — an interview setting, an earnest question, and the candidate just looks at the interviewer and says:
You posted the job.
That's it. That's the complete honest answer.
I want a job. I want to be paid well for work I'm good at. I can do what you listed. I have a track record that says I can do it, and I'm here to talk about whether the specifics of your situation match what I do best.
Somewhere along the way, the hiring process decided that this honest answer was insufficient — that candidates needed to perform enthusiasm for the company itself, to have an emotional story about why this particular organisation called to them, to demonstrate cultural alignment through the quality of their pre-interview research.
Maybe this made sense when the volume was lower and the stakes of each individual application justified the investment. It doesn't make sense now. The honest answer is the right answer. The performance it's replaced with is just that — a performance, increasingly delivered by AI, increasingly screened by AI, and informative to nobody.
What Would Actually Work
None of this is unsolvable. It requires honesty about what the process is actually for.
If you want to screen for basic competence, a short task or case study is infinitely more informative than a 20-minute supplementary form. If it takes five minutes and shows me thinking, you've learned something. If it takes 20 minutes and asks me about company values, you've learned nothing and added friction.
If you want candidates to be genuine in applications, lower the volume of applications per person by making roles more specific and processes faster. The reason people run high volume is that conversion rates are low and process timescales are long. Fix the funnel and behaviour changes.
If you want good first conversations, come prepared. Tell me what the role involves. Tell me what you've tried. Tell me what success looks like. And I'll tell you what I'd do about it. That's a conversation worth having.
And for the love of efficiency: fix the rejection email. Be brief. Be honest. Respect the candidate's time by not making them parse corporate sympathy to find the actual information. We can all handle a clear no. What's tiring is the elaborate performance of a no dressed up as something more considerate than it is.
The pipeline is broken. Both sides know it. The AIs are talking to each other and the humans are watching. That's not a criticism of any individual recruiter or hiring manager — most of them are working within systems they didn't design and can't unilaterally change.
But someone has to say it out loud.
I'm still in the pipeline. Still applying. Still having the conversations worth having.
If you're reading this and you've got a senior commercial role that needs someone who runs things at scale — you know where to find me.