I have sat in hundreds of debriefs where a hiring manager weighed up two candidates. One had the stronger background on paper. The other had prepared, and it showed in every answer, in the questions she asked, in the way she connected her experience to the exact problems the team was facing. The prepared candidate […]
A candidate I remember sent me the most beautiful resume or CV I had seen all year. Clean columns, elegant typography, a design any template shop would be proud of. I opened it with real interest, and inside the lovely frame sat ten bullet points that all began with “Responsible for”. The same week, a […]
Early in my recruiting career, I filled most of my roles without ever posting a job ad. I took the brief from the hiring manager, opened LinkedIn, typed in a job title and a few skills, and went looking. Some profiles surfaced in my results again and again, for role after role. Other people, people […]
Most Monday mornings of my recruiting life started the same way. New role briefed, coffee poured, search opened, and the first filter I applied asked LinkedIn to show me people who had signaled they were open to opportunities. Nearly every recruiter I worked with ran some version of that filter first, because a candidate who […]
A candidate once asked me, halfway through a phone screen, whether I worked for the company or for her. Honest question, and I gave her the honest answer. The employer paid my fee, the employer set the brief, and the employer decided who got hired. I still fought hard for her, because she made herself […]
Early in my recruiting career I was told to keep a job advert live after the hire had been put on hold. The budget had been pulled the week before, the manager was fighting to get it back, and taking the posting down felt like admitting the role was dead. So it stayed up. Applications […]
The offer call I remember best lasted under two minutes. I gave the number, and before I had finished the sentence the candidate said yes. She was thrilled. I was relieved. I also knew, because I had helped build the offer, that there was room above the number she had just accepted, money set aside […]
The role was paused on a Thursday afternoon. Finance wanted to review headcount before anything else moved, so the requisition went into a drawer, and every application already in the system went into the drawer with it. Nobody told the applicants. Nobody ever tells the applicants. I know, because for 12+ years I was the […]
I was sourcing for a marketing role early one Tuesday, working through a page of search results, opening profile after profile. Nearly every About section began the same way. Passionate. Passionate about brands, passionate about storytelling, passionate about driving synergies across cross-functional stakeholder ecosystems. Then one opened with a plain sentence. “I run digital campaigns […]
The candidate had been gone for ten minutes and the panel was still in the room. Someone had pulled up the org chart. The hiring manager wanted the second interview booked before the end of the month, because she was convinced he was about to get an offer somewhere else and she did not intend […]
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