Everybody Bought the Future. Who Made It Work?
Posted on October 21, 2026 Leave a Comment
Nobody has ever watched an HR tech demo go badly, which is sort of the point of a demo. The data is clean, the workflow is tidy and the hiring manager in the sample scenario responds to feedback requests within the hour (a detail that, on its own, should get the whole thing reclassified as speculative fiction).
Then the contract gets signed, and the product goes from the People function to the people who actually need the product to function. And that’s where the real mess usually begins.
That gap, between what looked enticing before the contract was actually signed and which feature actually exists when that contract is up for renewal, is the subject of my session at UNLEASH World in Paris this week, “Beyond the Demo: Spotting the HR Innovation Worth Betting On.”
Thousands of HR leaders will spend the next couple of days walking the expo floor at Porte de Versailles, and just about every one of them will be told, repeatedly and with tremendous conviction, that they’re looking at the future of work (which, let’s face it, probably involves a combination of prompt engineering and skilled trades).
A few of them actually will be something innovative (at least by the modest standards of our industry); the hard part is figuring out which ones are telling the truth, and which ones are selling a roadmap to nowhere.
Read MoreThe Work Between the Work: The Rise of Vibe Recruiting
Posted on October 20, 2026 Leave a Comment
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about modern recruiting, one that most talent acquisition leaders already know even if few would put it in a QBR deck: a recruiter can put in a full eight-hour day, touch dozens of tasks and log off exactly as far from filling an open role as when they logged on.
Look at where that time actually goes. An interview gets negotiated back and forth across three time zones before anyone finds a slot that works. A hiring manager gets a gentle reminder about feedback, then a slightly less gentle one, then a third that’s written in all caps demaning a response, followed by one final, desperate and defeated cry for help.
Given how fast candidates go cold, that’s not hyperbole. It’s reality..
In a recent candidate survey, 62 percent of professionals said they lose interest in a job if they don’t hear back within two weeks of an initial interview, and that figure climbed to 77 percent at three weeks.
Meanwhile, every system dutifully logs all of this activity. The applicant tracking system looks delightfully productive and the activity report is spotless; the req, of course, is still open. It’s the recruiting equivalent of piling up 400 yards of offense and losing 10-3.
And it’s that gap between motion and progress is precisely where the concept of vibe recruiting comes in.
Read MoreHumanly Bought CareerArc. The Staffing Business Is Next.
Posted on October 15, 2026 Leave a Comment
The recruiting industry has spent years selling employers software that helps them do more work. Humanly would rather sell them the candidates.
That’s the more consequential, if somewhat buried, story behind Humanly’s acquisition of CareerArc. The announcement describes recruitment marketing meeting AI-powered hiring, which sounds sufficiently familiar to disappear into the usual acquisition coverage. Another platform gets bigger; another funnel gets consolidated. Somewhere, someone updates a sales deck and messaging framework.
In our briefing, Kumar described a much more explicit ambition: building a technology-enabled staffing business, with AI doing more of the work and employers buying access to qualified, engaged candidates.
CareerArc gives Humanly another way to find those people. Social is one channel in that strategy, and an intermediate step toward a business that doesn’t have to buy a fresh introduction every time a customer needs to hire. The immediate target is job advertising spend. The longer-term ambition, Kumar said, is to compete for budgets going to companies like Manpower and Adecco. That should get considerably more attention than the integration roadmap.
Read MoreWhy I Ghosted My Own Blog (A Boomerang Hire Returns)
Posted on October 15, 2026 Leave a Comment
On April 29, I published a post about candidate fraud and then disappeared for almost six months. Somewhere, a vendor is turning that sequence of events into a case study, I’m sure.
The argument, as I remember it, was that job seekers have always embellished their experience, and recruiters who’ve described a dysfunctional workplace as “fast-paced and entrepreneurial” might want to put down the stones before inspecting anyone else’s glass house.
Then I stopped showing up to my own website. Apparently, my commitment to covering the candidate experience extends to reenacting it. So, yes, I ghosted my own blog. Consider this post the content equivalent of a boomerang hire, complete with a suspicious employment gap and the expectation that onboarding will be abbreviated because I already know where everything is, who to avoid and what to expense. That’s probably an imperfect metaphor, but you get the idea.
I do owe you an explanation, even if you likely didn’t notice. Unfortunately, it involves admitting that I spent six months giving people advice I wasn’t taking. Business, on the plus side, has been better than expected. My time management skills? Not so much.
Read MoreUnderstanding Candidate Fraud: Beyond the Hype
Posted on April 29, 2026 2 Comments
Let’s start with the awkward truth. Candidates have always lied – or at least, hyperbolized a tiny bit. This is something widely considered a best practice – taking the mundane, back office BS every worker has to deal with and making it sound impressive.
For example, you didn’t have to distribute handouts or make copies; you created and scaled an enterprise wide document management process.
You didn’t roll phone calls; you served as a technology liaison between executives and company stakeholders. And you never had to manage meeting room availability and coordinate schedules; you oversaw facility operations and created/implemented internal processes.
You get the picture. Every recruiter (who know a thing or two about, uh, little white lies, like total rewards, company culture or “it’s not a job – it’s a career,” or that whole “work family” cliche) is familiar with situational subjectivity, to put it innocuously.
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