Understanding Candidate Fraud: Beyond the Hype
Posted on April 29, 2026 Leave a Comment
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.
Read MoreWhy Career Sites Are the Future of Recruitment
Posted on April 22, 2026 1 Comment
There was a time, not that long ago, when owning ‘career discovery’ was dominated largely by job boards, a “feature” that was less core product functionality than SEO strategy, a convenient way to drive more traffic – and higher ad rates – by targeting ‘passive’ candidates exploring career development as opposed to active applicants browsing active, open roles.
This process was relatively simple and straightforward – you bought more targeted traffic than the competition, designed the UI/UX around conversion optimization, and hoped to drive enough sign ups and applies to their associated ad inventory to keep customers’ pipelines packed with high intent, career focused, highly niched professionals.
This approach wasn’t particularly complicated – and, largely, this approach has historically worked fairly well, sort of like a CAPTCHA for careers. This focus on career development as a shibboleth for job ads, in fact, was the business model that allowed behemoths like Glassdoor and LinkedIn to successfully scale in an otherwise overcrowded, cutthroat market for job seeker traffic.
Those days, however, are quickly coming to an end. As talent acquisition evolves, the structural changes are forcing a fundamental shift in not only how career discovery works, but also, who owns this foundational human capital function, too.
Read MoreSolving Talent Acquisition’s Conversion Problem
Posted on March 24, 2026 Leave a Comment
Here’s a secret that few talent acquisition organizations are aware of, and even fewer would admit to: most every recruiting strategy is predicated on a fundamental fallacy (or a “big lie,” if you’d prefer). See, most TA leaders today – at least when asked about their most pressing hiring challenges – are likely to respond with some vague approximation of what’s been called the “TA Capacity Crunch.”
Even if you’re not familiar with the term, if you’re a recruitment practitioner or talent acquisition leader, you’re probably overly familiar with its implications. Since 2022, recruiter headcount has dropped by an estimated 25%; meanwhile, the average number of reqs per recruiter has more than doubled to 56%.
This means less recruiters handling more roles – and, perhaps most pressingly, a dramatic increase in application volume, too. In the past 48 months alone, the average open role receives a whopping 3x more inbound applicants (currently estimated at 242 applications per opening).
Read MoreUnleash 2026 Preview: The Analyst Economy and the Future of Work
Posted on March 16, 2026 Leave a Comment
A Guest Post by Joe Worsten, founder of The Worsten Institute, a thought leadership platform dedicated to thought-leading the thoughts of other thought leaders.
All his insights are copyrighted, trademarked, and occasionally sponsored by a platform with three capital letters.
This week, the most influential and innovative thought leaders in the human resources industry will convene in Las Vegas for Unleash America. But besides my team and myself, there will also be many professionals there worth meeting, too.
You can tell this by the fact that many of the speakers and attendees work for major brands and multinational corporations.
As I’ve always said, if there’s one rule about building influence while impacting the current state, and future direction, of the HR profession, it’s to hire me for my standard six figure retainer.
But if there is a second rule, it’s this: if someone has a director title or above at a company with over 5,000 employees, then you know that they are truly at the cutting edge of talent and technology today. If someone only has a manager title, works for an SMB or midsize business and doesn’t have the sort of budget they can allocate to analyst briefings and trade shows, then they’re not worth listening to.
Read MoreRevamping High Volume Hiring Strategies
Posted on February 17, 2026 1 Comment
High volume hiring has always been the proverbial red headed stepchild of recruiting – a specialty that’s neither fully appreciated or understood, but easily and frequently forgotten.
The talent acquisition industrial complex has long skewed almost exclusively to high demand, low supply openings, the kind of knowledge workers who ask questions about total rewards, 401(k) matches and hybrid work arrangements.
These roles, after all, target mostly experienced, exempt and executive talent, the reqs a laundry list of minimum basic qualifications and pipe dream preferences whose market value tends to sit well over the hiring company’s comp range.
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