On the surface, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it means the company hasn’t actually figured out what they need. They’re using the recruitment process as a discovery exercise asking us to send a parade of candidates so that eventually, somewhere in the comparison, clarity will emerge.
It doesn’t work like that. Not for candidates, who deserve a process that respects their time. Not for the hiring company, who ends up in endless rounds of “just one more profile.” And not for us and that is why we push back.
We recently had this exact situation with a fast-scaling client. They wanted volume. We declined, delivered one candidate based on a precise read of what they actually needed, and it worked. Speed and quality aren’t in tension when you know what you’re looking for.
You might assume this happens with less experienced hiring managers who are still learning the ropes. Sometimes. But we see it at the most senior levels too, COOs who keep requesting additional profiles to “compare better,” leadership teams that cycle through candidates for months without pulling the trigger.
The issue isn’t inexperience with recruitment. It’s that the organisation hasn’t done the internal work of agreeing on what success looks like in this role. When that conversation hasn’t happened, no number of candidate profiles will make it happen. You just get more rounds, more comparisons, and more delay.
The newer version of this problem involves AI. Companies that can’t define what they need internally are now turning to AI tools to write the job description for them. Which sounds efficient, until you think about what the AI is actually doing.
An AI tool is only as good as the brief you give it. If you don’t know whether you need a product-minded compliance lead or a compliance-minded product manager, your AI prompt will reflect that ambiguity. What comes back will be a well-formatted, confident-sounding description of a person who doesn’t quite exist , or exists in such a rare form that you’ll be searching for eighteen months.
Worse, once a role description is on paper, even an AI-generated one, it takes on a strange authority. People defend it. Candidates get screened against it. And the underlying confusion gets buried under a veneer of process.
If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you cannot be critical of what your AI tool gives back. You have no benchmark. You’re just outsourcing the confusion.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it means the company hasn’t actually figured out what they need. They’re using the recruitment process as a discovery exercise asking us to send a parade of candidates so that eventually, somewhere in the comparison, clarity will emerge.
It doesn’t work like that. Not for candidates, who deserve a process that respects their time. Not for the hiring company, who ends up in endless rounds of “just one more profile.” And not for us and that is why we push back.
We recently had this exact situation with a fast-scaling client. They wanted volume. We declined, delivered one candidate based on a precise read of what they actually needed, and it worked. Speed and quality aren’t in tension when you know what you’re looking for.
You might assume this happens with less experienced hiring managers who are still learning the ropes. Sometimes. But we see it at the most senior levels too, COOs who keep requesting additional profiles to “compare better,” leadership teams that cycle through candidates for months without pulling the trigger.
The issue isn’t inexperience with recruitment. It’s that the organisation hasn’t done the internal work of agreeing on what success looks like in this role. When that conversation hasn’t happened, no number of candidate profiles will make it happen. You just get more rounds, more comparisons, and more delay.
The newer version of this problem involves AI. Companies that can’t define what they need internally are now turning to AI tools to write the job description for them. Which sounds efficient, until you think about what the AI is actually doing.
An AI tool is only as good as the brief you give it. If you don’t know whether you need a product-minded compliance lead or a compliance-minded product manager, your AI prompt will reflect that ambiguity. What comes back will be a well-formatted, confident-sounding description of a person who doesn’t quite exist , or exists in such a rare form that you’ll be searching for eighteen months.
Worse, once a role description is on paper, even an AI-generated one, it takes on a strange authority. People defend it. Candidates get screened against it. And the underlying confusion gets buried under a veneer of process.
If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you cannot be critical of what your AI tool gives back. You have no benchmark. You’re just outsourcing the confusion.