#92: Hiring in 2026: what candidates and companies get wrong

Speaker A: Konstanti, welcome to the Stepsero podcast. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker B: It's such a pleasure to be here. I've been looking forward to this.

Speaker A: You spent over two decades helping leaders get clarity around hiring and performance. You do offer clarity in an area that to me, and I believe to a lot of people can be quite chaotic. And this is both on the hiring manager side and both on the, on the, um, job searcher, so to speak. So there's a lot I can unpack with you in a conversation like this one, if that's all right. I would start by addressing the candidate side of things.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: I hear pretty scary stories from the market about qualified professionals trying to be seen, trying to be noticed. And you hear about them being met with no reply, automated rejection emails, or in the worst case, silence. You have interviewed, if I'm not mistaken, over 12,000 candidates. What do you think stands out these days from a, uh, profile?

Speaker B: I think there is a huge misconception around hiring as a process. It's very much seen as a tactical thing. I'm looking for a job, thus I'm going to go apply for some jobs and I'm going to get hired or I'm looking to hire someone, thus I'm going to post a job and people are going to apply and we will make the transaction of hiring someone. That's actually not what's, what's happening here. You see, at its core, every business is a people business. Without the right people in place, doesn't matter how good your strategy is, doesn't matter how good your financing is, it doesn't matter how good your product is. If you don't have the right people, it's not going to work. And uh, yes of course we can throw AI into the mix and we can definitely increase productivity with AI, but it's still about the people, the people that control the AI that run those flywheels of AI. It's ultimately still people that are your customers. It's not an AI that is going to buy your product, your service. Now why is this important for the candidates? It's important for the candidate because companies are hiring people for a outcome. They're hiring people to bridge a gap that exists within their business. Whether they understand that gap or they do not understand that gap is actually part of how candidates can stand out in an interview in a hiring process. The better someone can explain how their experience is relevant to solving that gap issue that a business has, the better they will stand out as the candidates of choice for a Company. For me, the candidates that stand out are the ones that are curious. Are the candidates that in the interview come prepared with questions. Candidates questions actually tell me more about how the person thinks, how the person acts, how they behave, what competence they bring into my organization than any question I can ask. In fact, it's one of the reasons why I love asking candidates what their questions are at the beginning of the interview.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: So if you are a candidate, if you are looking for a new opportunity for yourself, instead of focusing your time on mass applying to jobs or looking how you can use AI to increase the number of applications, use AI to figure out what are the gaps within the business and look at, ah, how you can help businesses solve those gaps, create the outcomes that they desire as a business. That is the value that you bring. And the clearer you are about this in the hiring process, in the interview, in your interactions with that company outside of the interview, the more value, more perceived value you will bring to the company, the better you will position yourself as a candidate. Now, I know that at this point a lot of people are going, yeah, But I'm doing 100 applications and I'm getting one interview. Very true. But how relevant are your applications to the problem that the company is trying to solve? For how good is your research into the company? What inroads have you made into that business? What connections have you utilized to get yourself in front of that business? If you are just sending out a hundred applications, hoping to get an interview, then I'm sorry to say, in the current market, one out of a hundred is pretty statistically accurate. Hm.

Speaker A: Where does you think personal branding fit in all of this for a candidate? I mean, you're right, this is pretty much the standard. You send out 100 applications, you get one answer. Unless you do something else to stand out, I believe. Do you believe personal branding can help a, uh, candidate stand out before they even send that application?

Speaker B: Look, uh, everyone has a personal brand. The question is, how amplified is that personal brand? If you have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, you have a very amplified personal brand. But the fact that you have 150 followers on LinkedIn doesn't mean you don't have a personal brand. It's just not as loud. The more relevant question is, what is that personal brand? What are you posting? What is the information that is searchable? If I were to search Matteo right now on Perplexity, what would I find out? If I were to ask, what is Matteo interested in? What is the answer that I would get? What are the References that I would get. And you say, oh, people don't do that. Yes they do. It used to be Google. Now they asked chatgpt Claude perplexity with the power of that type of search, with the AI enabled search, it's not so important how big your following is, how amplified your personal brand is. It's about the information that you have put out there, period. And it's about how that information is relevant to the problem I am solving for in my business. If you're looking for a job, that's the question. This is also why I am so adamant that this skills based hiring which has all of a sudden resurfaced like if it was invented yesterday, it hasn't, it's been around since the 80s, is no longer fit for purpose. Because the skills we need in order to deliver outcomes in order to be successful in the work we do are evolving so damn quickly these days. What was relevant six months ago as a designer? I don't know. Using midjourney for example. AI enabled design Midjourney is dying out pretty much because there's new models. There's SORA too, which is phenomenal in image generation. That's a whole new skill set. So what is more important right now is can someone deliver the outcomes for our business and how quickly can they acquire and adapt the skills that will enable them to deliver those outcomes? It's about learning velocity more than anything.

Speaker A: With this in mind, and it's maybe a bit of a rhetorical question, are candidates, and I would throw companies as well in the mix or hiring managers, are they aware mostly of their shortcomings in the process?

Speaker B: Sometimes.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: But their awareness is very often tactical rather than strategic. Let me explain. Most companies you speak to will admit that the hiring process is broken. Mhm. They are aware that it's not giving them the results. They are aware that if they post a job right now, they need to take it down in 48 hours. Otherwise they will get so many inbound applications that this will be unmanageable. Friend of mine, as a case study, posted a job for a technical director. That was the only thing that was actually written on the job. It was just a job title. There wasn't a location, there wasn't a salary, there wasn't a job description. There was nothing. It was just technical director and he received 86 applications in 24 hours. Now that is a problem of the AIH. It is about this creation of volume. If we are solving for volume, of course we can throw AI screening tools at it. We can throw ATS systems that are able to parse CVs and actually keyword search them and based on that, generate lists of more probable candidates. Sure, but that is a tactical approach to a strategic problem. The strategic problem here is that you are not creating an environment where candidates can self select themselves out of the process, where they are provided with enough guidance through the process before they apply to actually make them realize, no, this isn't for me. The chasing of we need more candidates is the wrong question. The right question is who are the right candidates for the context of our organization in which we must deliver these outcomes, these results? The right question is what does success look like in this job in uh, three months, in six months, in 12 months? How do we expect this person to impact the business in 18 months from when they start? And I think those are the questions that are not being asked. In a lot of companies, you look at most job descriptions and I'm talking 99.7%. And they will list skills, they will list years of experience, they will list potentially tasks. They will not define success.

Speaker A: In a way, you led me to a, uh, leading question. It's more of a personal doubt. Maybe, but if you were to explain to people how does a, uh, suboptimal process in the hiring recruiting phase bleed into the company's operation? So you mentioned, you mentioned benchmarks three, six, nine months down the line, which makes perfect sense. What is the cost of a broken, uh, process? And in a way, I guess what I'm also trying to ask is, is a process like that, whether it's perfect or suboptimal, in a way, a mirror of the company itself and the way it operates behind, behind the curtains.

Speaker B: Okay, so there's two things here. Number one, how you hire is a reflection of how you operate as a business. Very often how you hire is the first professional interaction that a candidate has ever had with your business. They will be basing their decision of whether they want to work with you on that interaction. They will also be basing their decision of whether they want to be your customer off that interaction. And if you don't believe me, check out a case of Virgin Media, which a few years back, Virgin Media is a big broadband provider in the uk. And a few years back, someone had the bright idea of running a correlation study between people that applied for positions and interviewed with Virgin Media and people who were customers of Virgin Media. And they found a very interesting correlation, that people who had a bad candidate experience were a lot more likely to leave Virgin Media as a customer. Now, it so happens that roughly a, uh, third of applicants were Virgin Media customers. And bad candidate experience was costing the company £4.2 million per year because of people leaving Virgin Media as customers because they had a bad candidate experience. So that's the first part of it. The second part of this is that people do work with people. So we already see a, uh, correlation between how much AI is used in the hiring process and offer acceptance rates. The more AI interactions people have in the hiring process, for example, AI screening, the bigger the falloff in offer acceptance rates.

Speaker A: I'll, um, need you to elaborate on that a bit more because I want

Speaker B: to make sure that the more you rely on AI screening candidates, interviewing your candidates, interacting with your candidates, interact emailing your candidates, the lower the probability of someone accepting the job offer you make. Now, to answer the second part of your question, hiring is extremely expensive. Not only in terms of the salary you pay someone and the time it takes to hire. It's also expensive in terms of lost productivity, lost opportunity, investment in training, investment in onboarding, investment in culture, team disruption. The cost of making a replacement hire for someone ranges, depending on seniority, between 2 and 20 times the annual salary of the person you are replacing. And I'm not making these statistics up. There's been plenty of studies from McKinsey to Deloitte to BCG to GH Smart on this. 2 to 20 times of annual salary. That's pretty bad. That can be very expensive. Now, consider that 46% of all hires end in failure in under 18 months. That means you are literally flipping a coin when you're making a hiring decision. Unless you have a structured, proven, repeatable process. Let's quantify this. For a company of 100 people with an average salary of 100,000, who has a low turnover rate of 15%, the bare bones minimum financial impact per year is a million euros just on replacement hires. That's expensive. That is a huge hidden cost. And yet we keep treating hiring as this tactical thing, even though, as we've said before, all business is people business. Without the right people, you're stuffed.

Speaker A: There is an undescribable amount of value that I'm getting out of this conversation. We're coming full circle. We're heading towards the end of the conversation. But it wouldn't sit right with me if I didn't ask this one. And maybe on a lighter note, there has been an ocean of lessons, literally, that you have learned across 12,000 plus interviews. Is there any that you believe is terribly underrated, that you feel like sharing here.

Speaker B: There is a lesson that, uh, applies both to candidates and interviewers, be they hiring managers or recruiters. And that is don't wing it. Take the time to truly prepare. I have seen way too many interviews start off with questions like so tell me about yourself. That is a dead giveaway that the person interviewing hasn't actually prepared the questions. They don't know where to start, they haven't properly done a review of the profile. And likewise for candidates. I have seen countless candidates get to the moment where in an interview they're asked, so do you have any questions for me? And they ask something meaningless, something off the cuff. As I said earlier, the thing that positions you as the best candidate is more likely the questions you ask than the answers you give. The thing that positions you as an employer of choice is the answers you give and the thought that goes into the questions you ask.

Speaker A: Constanti, I have nothing else to add except for thank you for your time and truly congratulations for what you are building with School of Hiring with Clarida. With all the incredible output you're sharing online across several channels, hopefully we can do this again at some point in the future. Until then, thank you so much.

Speaker B: Would be my pleasure. Thanks so much, Matteo.