Let's talk abut olives....

In 1987, Robert Crandall, who ran American Airlines at the time, was looking at the first-class salads (as you do).

Someone worked out that about 72% of folk never ate the olive. It just went back to the galley on the plate. It also happened to be the fifth most expensive ingredient in the salad. So Crandall had one olive taken off every salad across the airline, and it saved them around $40,000 a year.

It's a nice story and it gets taught in business schools as a clever bit of waste-spotting, which is fair, because it is. But I think it's also the thin end of a smelly wedge. (side note, Smelly Wedge would be a great name for a 2010s british indie band)

The problem is what an organisation learns on the day the olive works.

It learns that trimming the service costs nothing. Nobody missed the olive and the numbers got better, so why stop at the olive? Next it's a bit less legroom. Then the checked bag becomes an extra. Then you pay to choose your seat, and pay again to print your boarding pass at the airport because you didn't do it at home.

The far end of all this is Michael O'Leary at Ryanair, banging on the door of the airplane toilet shouting "Is it a number two!?!? Because number two is extra!!!!"

The olive and the toilet charge are the same thing at two different ages. One is so small nobody notices and the other is brazen profiteering.

There's a word for this now (which I love)

Cory Doctorow gave it a name, and the name won word of the year: enshittification.

It's the slow decline of a service that starts out genuinely good so you'll commit to it, gets worse once you're locked in and it's a hassle to leave, and eventually squeezes everyone involved to move as much value as possible up to the shareholders. The version of the thing you first fell for is long gone by the end.

Which is what got me thinking about us.

Recruiters....Are we enshittifying recruitment?

Look at the last five years.

AI made applying almost effortless, and volume went through the roof. Applications are up something like 45%, and at the busy end that's roughly eleven thousand a minute across the market. Nearly four in ten job seekers are applying with AI now.

So we did the obvious thing and bought tools to cope. Tools to pull in more applicants, tools to filter them faster, screeners, AI interviewers. The top of our funnel got 10x larger so we used tools to manage 10x better.

I build in this space, and I love to explosion of tooling for recruiters, they are useful and recruiters really are drowning. Efficiency matters.

But I keep coming back to one question. Efficiency for who?

Because recruiter tooling has exploded while the candidate side has quietly gone backwards. People report longer waits, less feedback, and applications that vanish with no reply at all. Nearly four in ten candidates say they've dropped out of a process the moment they realised an AI was interviewing them, and most of them were never told it would be. Entry-level postings are down a long way. By their own account, the people we're supposed to be serving are having a worse time than they were five years ago.

Now obviously no recruiter sat down and went "I shall make things harder for candidates...MUAHAHAHAAAAA!!!"

Crandall wasn't aiming for a coin-operated toilet door either. It just happens on its own whenever the only thing you're measuring is your own cost and your own time, and there's nobody in the room whose job is to protect the experience of the person on the other end. That's what enshittification actually is, and it's turning up in hiring right now.

So here's what I'd ask

None of this is an argument against tools. Pull in the applicants, filter the noise, use the AI, buy your time back.

But decide first what a candidate always gets, no matter how efficient you become. Is it a reply? A reason? Maybe a human being..just for sake of it?

Write it down and then hold to it as seriously as you hold to your time-to-hire. Enshittification of recruitment won't be all at once. It's going to start with a slower reply, email feedback for candidates in late stages....wee things like that.

And if we don't watch it, it ends the way these things always end. With someone knocking on the bathroom door, asking for a pound.

Right, I'll shut my trap for a bit and ask you, what's the one thing we should always do for a candidate, however busy it gets? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Have a cracking week,

Luke

Well... that's issue seventy seven! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Sometimes I imagine my mind like a house. Not like a "mind palace".. if you know someone who talks about their "mind palace", just know they are desperately sad and need a hug.

No, the house I imagine is an old two up two down terraced fixer upper. Some rooms are clean and functional, others have mould and damp. If I ever had the spare time and money, I'd do up each room in turn, but for now, I'm just happy I've got a working kitchen.

There are a few books that I've read that have basically demolished a hitherto useless chunk of my brain, and replaced it whole sale with a functioning new skill and ability.

This puts me one step closer to staying in the workforce, and one step further from being institutionalised. Which is good.

Deep Work was one of them. But the one I want to talk about is The First 90 Days by Michael D.Wartkins. It is my blueprint for starting new roles and I want to share it with you.

Michael Watkins' work on transitions makes a clear point: the goal of onboarding is to reach the breakeven point quickly, the moment when you contribute more value than you consume.

For us super-sonic talent warriors, that means moving from learning to filling roles and shaping hiring strategy as fast as the context allows.

Here is how to structure the first 90 days.

Diagnose the situation before you act

Not every recruiting role is the same problem. Watkins separates situations into distinct types, and the type determines your strategy. Map yours early.

A startup desk means you are building process from nothing. No ATS hygiene, no scorecards, no intake standard. Your value comes from installing structure.

A turnaround desk means hiring is broken. Time-to-fill is high, hiring managers have lost trust, candidates drop out late. Your value comes from fast, visible fixes and rebuilding credibility.

A realignment desk looks healthy on the surface but is heading for trouble. Pipelines are full but quality is slipping, or the team is filling roles that no longer match where the business is going. Your value comes from naming the problem others are avoiding.

A sustaining-success desk means you inherited a high-performing function. The risk is breaking what works. Your value comes from understanding why it works before you touch anything.

Misreading the situation is the most common early mistake. A turnaround recruiter who acts like a sustaining-success recruiter will move too slowly. A sustaining-success recruiter who acts like a turnaround recruiter will damage a functioning team.

Secure early wins that hiring managers can see

Credibility in recruiting is built on delivery, not process documents. Pick one or two visible wins in the first 30 to 45 days. A hard-to-fill role closed. A stalled search restarted and moved to offer. A hiring manager who was skeptical of the function getting a strong shortlist faster than expected.

Avoid the trap of spending the first month rebuilding the careers page or rewriting templates. Those matter, but they are invisible to the stakeholders judging you. Internal infrastructure work should run underneath a visible delivery win, not instead of it.

Negotiate expectations with your manager

Have the direct conversation early. Recruiting leaders often assume a new hire understands the priorities. They rarely state them clearly. Establish four things in your first weeks:

What does success look like at 90 days, in specific terms (roles closed, pipelines built, a process fixed)?

Which open roles are genuinely urgent versus which are aspirational?

What is the real state of the relationships with key hiring managers, including the ones who are difficult?

What resources do you actually have: sourcing tools, agency budget, headcount support?

Do not assume the job you were sold is the job you have. Verify it.

Read the stakeholder map

Recruiting runs on relationships you do not control. Hiring managers, the people team, finance for headcount approval, and in some cases external partners. Identify early who holds decision power over offers, who blocks process, and who will advocate for you. The hiring manager who responds fastest is not always the one who matters most.

Spend the first weeks in listening mode with these people. Ask how hiring has worked for them, what has frustrated them, and what a good recruiting partner looks like to them. This is intake at the relationship level, and it pays off across every search you run afterward.

Build your learning plan deliberately

Watkins frames the early period as a learning sprint, not a performance sprint. For a recruiter that means three areas:

Technical learning. The ATS, the existing pipelines, the comp bands, the approval workflows, the data on what has and has not worked.

Cultural learning. How hiring decisions actually get made here, how candidates are treated, what the unwritten rules are about who gets hired and why.

Political learning. Where the real influence sits, which hiring managers carry weight, where past recruiters lost credibility.

Set a structured cadence for this. Treat it like a sourcing project with a defined endpoint, not open-ended observation.

A note for those preparing for promotion

Promotion into a lead or head-of role is also a transition, and the same logic applies. The most common failure is staying in the previous role while holding the new title. A recruiter promoted to lead keeps recruiting full-desk and never builds the team. A TA leader promoted to head keeps managing searches and never engages at the strategy level.

The shift is from doing the work to setting the standard for the work, from filling roles to deciding which roles get filled and how. Diagnose this transition the same way you would a new job. Secure an early win at the new altitude, not the old one.

The breakeven point is the goal

Everything above serves one outcome: reaching the point where you contribute more than you take. For a recruiter, breakeven is usually visible. It is the first quality hire delivered, the first hiring manager who starts coming to you instead of waiting, the first search where you set the strategy rather than receiving the order. Aim for it deliberately. Structure the first 90 days around getting there, and the role establishes itself.

Luke Update

Currently on the train to London. the person next to me is trying desperately to contextualise what I'm writing with pictures of otters which I'm quite enjoying.

I'll be hanging our with the incredible Joe Atkinson, Co-Founder of Prompt Mates and breaking bread with a few TA leaders in this swelterting heat.

Well... that's issue seventy six! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

I had a conversation recently where someone senior, with great confidence, told a room full of recruiters what their jobs would look like in five years.

No recruiters were consulted in the making of that prediction.

So given that everyone and their dog, including every Silicon Valley psychopath, is telling us what our jobs are going to look like, why don't we have a crack at it ourselves?

What does a recruiter actually look like in the future?

We have been told recruitment is broken for the better part of a decade. Mostly by people trying to sell us something. CEOs have declared the function obsolete. Various Silicon Valley types have redesigned the profession from the outside without speaking to anyone who actually does it.

That does not mean we get to ignore the question. It means we should answer it ourselves.

SHRM's 2026 TA Trends data shows only 24% of TA leaders expect headcount increases this year. The recruiters who remain are taking on more reqs, more strategic work, and higher pay. The profession is concentrating around people who are genuinely good at it. Here is what being good at it looks like going forward.

1. They will be more systematic

The role is shifting from task execution to orchestration. Recruiters configure what AI evaluates, set the criteria, define the rubrics, and own the quality of what comes out the other end.

That requires understanding your process well enough to design it. Recruiters who have never mapped their funnel, never tracked conversion rates, never questioned why a stage exists will struggle to configure systems that do those things on their behalf.

2. They will produce richer candidate-facing content, faster

There is a reasonable expectation forming that recruiters can generate high-quality, branded content without waiting three weeks for marketing. Job posts, sourcing plans, candidate information packs, role overview pages, hiring manager bios.

The tools to do this are free or nearly free. Pull your ten worst job posts from Google Drive. Feed them into your AI tool of choice along with your marketing team's style guide. Start generating single-page HTML files, candidate info packs, and role case studies from that base.

Employer branding at the recruiter level.

3. They will extract more value from data than from software

Most sourcing tools charge a subscription to sit on top of data you could access yourself. LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, People Data Labs, the data is there.

Gem's 2026 Benchmarks data shows direct sourcing already delivers 11% of hires from just 2.6% of applications, a 4x yield over inbound. That ratio improves when you get better at using data you already have access to, rather than buying another layer on top of it.

The recruiter who can build a search, understand a data source, and engage a candidate intelligently from that research is more valuable than one with a long list of vendor subscriptions.

4. They will invest more in genuine relationships

Everything above just gets you to a conversation.

Siadhal Magos at Metaview has made the point that recruiters will not spend their days moving candidates between stages or logging notes. The administrative layer goes. What remains is engaging hiring managers properly, pushing back on bad processes with confidence, and building real relationships between candidates and the brand.

Recruiters who have been hiding behind busyness, volume of screens, open roles, hours on admin will not have that cover anymore. The ones who were always good at the human stuff will be fine.

Do not wait for a CEO who has never hired anyone to define our profession. More rigour, richer output, smarter use of data, deeper relationships. That is the direction in my humble opinion.

See you next Wednesday!

Well... that's issue seventy five! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Recruiters!!! I have a mad idea. Shall we, for five minutes, just STFU about AI? What do you think? Five Minutes. then we can get back to AI.

We've spent years now banging on about AI. Agents this, auto-screeners that, MCP the other. And I do still think AI is genuinely changing the job and I'm all over it!

But while we're all heads-down "building the future of TA" the basics of candidate experience are slipping. So here's a wee detour back to the low tech, low level stuff that we love. making candidates happy. Here's five low-effort moves, all backed by data.

Then we crack straight back on with the AI chat...

Let's start at the beginning, why does candidate experience matter?

52% of candidates have declined an offer specifically because of a poor candidate experience. They cleared every round and still walked. 70% of rejected candidates say detailed feedback would leave them with a positive impression of the company. 78% have never been asked for feedback themselves. 72% of candidates with a bad experience told someone about it or shared it online. 56% of candidates with a bad hiring experience are less likely to buy from that company. And most importantly, it's good for the old character! You get to make other humans happy

Five Candidate Experience Tips. None of them need AI

1. Run a proper kick-off with the hiring manager

This is the root cause of a ton of downstream CX failures. If you and the HM aren't aligned, candidates end up doing four stages they didn't sign up for, or waiting a fortnight for feedback that doesn't arrive, and being asked salary questions you can't answer.

A proper kick-off makes you much more likely to reduce time-to-hire and improve quality of hire.

30 to 45 minutes. Calibrated profile. Scorecard. Process map. Salary band. Decision criteria. Who else is on the panel and what they're assessing. If you can't get that level of detail in one meeting, book a second one.

2. Friday decisioning, so no candidate waits the weekend

Really simple ritual. Thursday afternoon, you build a one-page doc with every active candidate, where they're at, and the decision you need. Friday, you do a 15 minutes sync with the HM. Walk through it. Leave with every yes, no, or next step locked in.

No candidate sits over the weekend wondering. No HM hides behind email. Speed of decision after a final stage is one of the strongest predictors of offer acceptance.

15 minutes and a Google Doc. That's the whole thing.

3. Give actual feedback. not bullshit....feedback.

70% of rejected candidates say detailed feedback would leave them with a positive impression of the company. Most TA teams send "we've decided to move forward with other candidates" and wonder why their Glassdoor is in the gutter.

Two sentences per rejection. One thing they did well. One thing that was the gap. Takes 90 seconds. Candidates who receive specific feedback give a 50% higher NPS for willingness to refer. Your future pipeline runs on this.

4. Pick up the phone

A call lets you give context, answer questions, and read the room. An email gets screenshotted into a WhatsApp group with a caption that makes you look like a right pudding.

Top reason candidates withdraw mid-process? Poor communication and feeling their time isn't respected. A five-minute call fixes both.

5. Salary up front

44% of candidates won't apply to a job that doesn't list a range. 82% are more likely to consider a role when the range is visible. 73% trust employers more when they post ranges. this isn't marginal.

Put the band on the ad. Confirm the band again on the first call. If the band moves during the process, tell them the day it moves, not at offer stage. The fastest way to lose a great candidate is to ambush them on money at the eleventh hour.

There we go. Felt good right?!? I really enjoyed that! Reconnecting with the emotionally intelligent bits of my job for a sec.

None of these are clever. None of them need a new tool, an agent, or a budget line. They need about 90 minutes a week of recruiter discipline and one well-run conversation with your hiring manager.

Run all five and your offer acceptance goes up, your time-to-hire comes down, and you stop bleeding pipeline

Well... that's issue seventy four. If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Howdy Recruiters!

I'm writing this while chasing princesses around Disneyland with my daughters so excuse the brevity.

Mary Kate Stimmler attended a talk last week from Iain Roberts at Airbnb, and posted the best summary I've seen of what an actual, working AI-for-HR operating model looks like.

Five concrete moves Airbnb is making right now.

This is the playbook. Let's go!

Trade your PDFs for .md files

Markdown. Plain text. Machine-readable.

Every policy doc, every interview guide, every playbook, every job spec template. Out of the locked PDF, into a markdown file that an LLM can actually parse, reason over, and quote back to you accurately.

You cannot have an AI-enabled TA function on a foundation of locked PDFs.

This is the cheapest, highest-leverage move on the list. Do it this week.

Turn your best presentations into "skills"

Take the decks your TA function has built over the years. Your best onboarding deck. Your hiring manager training. Your interview calibration session.

Convert them into a structured "skill" that an AI agent can call.

The agent doesn't need to relearn how Airbnb does interview calibration every time it gets asked. The skill is the canonical reference. Build it once, reuse it forever.

For recruiters this means: your hiring manager training scales infinitely overnight

Use meeting recordings to measure rhetoric-to-reality distance

This one's spicy.

Record your meetings. Transcribe them. Use AI to compare what leaders SAY they want, with what they actually approve, hire, and promote.

Distance = your culture problem.

For TA specifically, run it on intake calls. Compare what the hiring manager said they wanted on Monday with what they actually shortlisted on Friday. The gap tells you everything.

Leaders must not delegate. They must build.

This is the one I've been banging on about for months.

If you're a TA leader and you've delegated the entire "AI strategy" thing to a junior on your team, you've already lost.

You learn by building. You learn the limits, the prompts, the workflows, the failure modes. Then you can lead.

Stop reading thinkpieces. Pick a workflow this week. Build it yourself.

Hire and train "embedded organisation architects"

This is a new role.

An organisation architect sits inside a business function and redesigns the workflow for an AI-native world. They're part operator, part engineer, part change manager.

In TA, this is the person who looks at your sourcing → screen → interview → offer flow and rebuilds it with AI in the middle. Not someone who slaps a chatbot on top of your existing process.

If you're a recruitment leader, you should be writing this job description right now. Or arguing that the role exists in your team already and just needs a new title.

Pick one.

If you can only do one thing this week, do number 1. Convert one policy doc to markdown. Stick it in a folder your team can access. Tell people to use that one instead of the PDF.

its not sexy, but it compounds.

Luke Update

Out of office this week. I'm at Disneyland with the family, eating overpriced churros and queuing for things.

Replies will be slow. If the world ends, please leave a note.

See you next Wednesday.

Luke

Well... that's issue seventy three! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Last Tuesday Amazon launched Amazon Connect Talent.

It runs voice interviews with your candidates. 24/7. Adaptive questioning. Full transcripts. Anonymised competency scores. Plugs into your ATS.

It is built on the same hiring science Amazon used to recruit 250,000 seasonal workers last Christmas.

And it sits on top of an AI infrastructure stack Amazon is pouring $200 billion into this year alone.

LinkedIn has lost its collective shit this week. Half my feed is "recruiting is over." The other half is sponsored posts from vendors trying to look bigger than they are.

Take a breath. BREEEAAATHE.....The actual story is much narrower than the headlines. Uncle Luke's got you ....

REASON ONE: IT IS NOT BUILT FOR THE WORK MOST OF YOU DO

Read every breathless take from this week and you'd think recruiting is over.

It's not.

Amazon was very explicit. Connect Talent is for HIGH-VOLUME, HOURLY hiring.

Manufacturing. Logistics. Retail. Hospitality. Seasonal.

It is NOT pitched at your senior software engineer search. Or your VP of Marketing. Or your sourcing-led specialist hires.

GeekWire's coverage spelled it out plainly. "Aimed at high-volume hiring in industries like manufacturing, logistics, retail, and hospitality, rather than corporate recruiting."

If you do agency tech recruitment? Your week hasn't changed. If you run senior in-house searches? Your week hasn't changed. If you run a 200-person seasonal hiring drive? Your week just got VERY interesting.

The market this product is going after is the bit of recruitment most LinkedIn voices don't actually do. Yet they're the loudest about it.

REASON TWO: CANDIDATES DO NOT WANT THIS

This is the data Amazon's marketing team really doesn't want you reading.

Gartner Q3 2025 (n=2,901 candidates): 68% prefer human interactions over AI/chatbots, up from 58% two years ago. 26% would drop out of an interview process entirely if forced to interact with AI. Of the 9% who'd actually done an AI interview, only 31% were told in advance.

Fortune ran a piece last August where candidates said outright they'd rather stay unemployed than do another robot interview.

Holly Richardson, who literally works at Amazon, posted this week:

"Sales and Marketing teams have always run this kind of advertising and outreach, but they have consistently relied on recruiters to close candidates. Recruiting is nuanced. As are people."

Bang on.

In a competitive talent market, an AI gating step is a hiring funnel killer.

Connect Talent works in the segment where candidates have FEWER options. That is why Amazon picked high-volume hourly. The market chose itself.

REASON THREE: THE REGULATORS ARE NOT HAPPY

If anything is going to slow this down, it's the lawyers.

Hiring AI is now classified as HIGH RISK under the EU AI Act. Full enforcement August 2026.

In the US the patchwork is already biting:

NYC Local Law 144 requires annual third-party bias audits, public disclosure, candidate notification, opt-out Illinois HB 3773 came into effect 1st January 2026 Colorado SB 24-205 lands 30th June 2026

A recent New York State Comptroller audit found NYC's enforcement had been "ineffective" up to mid-2025 and DCWP has now committed to ramping up. Daily penalties are on the table. The lawyers are coming.

Amazon hasn't said much yet about how Connect Talent ships its bias audit data to its customers. Buyers should ask before signing anything.

REASON FOUR: WORKDAY AND ORACLE ARE NOT GOING TO ROLL OVER

Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research had the sharpest analyst take this week.

Her quote: "The question isn't whether Amazon can build better AI. The question is how Connect Decisions and Connect Talent interact with the systems enterprises already have."

If your candidate data already lives in Workday Talent or Oracle HCM, Connect Talent is the second mover. Workday has its own agentic strategy. Oracle has its own agentic strategy. SAP has its own agentic strategy.

The integration ugliness is going to determine who wins. Not the demos.

REASON FIVE: TOOLS DON'T FIX GOVERNANCE

Bad intake calls don't get better because the AI is doing the screening.

Slow hiring manager feedback doesn't speed up because there's an AI brief on the desk.

Misaligned headcount planning doesn't suddenly resolve.

Connect Talent is downstream of the actual problems most TA functions have. If you're already a high-functioning shop with clean processes, this is a force multiplier. If you aren't, you are buying a faster way to do the wrong thing.

I'd argue that for most of you, fixing your intake process this quarter would deliver more ROI than any AI tool you can buy this year.

WHERE THIS PRODUCT IS GENUINELY DIFFERENT

I am not going to pretend Amazon has built a toy.

This is a serious product. Three things make it different from HireVue and Paradox:

1️⃣ Domain expertise baked in. Twenty years of Amazon's actual hiring data, not a general LLM with a recruitment skin.

2️⃣ The AWS distribution channel. Your CIO can add Connect Talent to an existing AWS contract without going to procurement. HireVue cannot match that.

3️⃣ Scale. The original Amazon Connect platform handled 20 million customer interactions PER DAY in 2025. Connect Talent runs on the same infrastructure.

If your competitors hire 100,000 hourly workers a year and you hire 100,000 hourly workers a year, this product changes the unit economics of that race. Not in a "recruiting is over" way. In a "your CFO is going to ask you about this in your next budget review" way.

WHAT YOU SHOULD ACTUALLY DO

1️⃣ If you do high-volume hourly hiring, get on the preview waitlist. Don't commit. Just look. Demand pricing clarity. Ask about bias audit data export.

2️⃣ If you do not, get back to your day. Genuinely. The panic is not for you.

3️⃣ Whatever bucket you're in, ask your ATS vendor what their agentic strategy is. Workday, Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters. If they don't have a coherent answer, that is a signal.

4️⃣ If you use ANY automated employment decision tool today, get your bias audit and candidate notification process tight. This is the bigger story.

So.

Recruiting is not over. It is not even a wee bit over.

A specific corner of high-volume hourly hiring just got a fancy new tool. Everyone else can carry on with their week.

Luke Update

I'm in San Francisco next week for AshbyOne. I'll be hanging out with TeamOhana and also my amazing team at AVA Labs. Any recruiters in and around San Francisco want to talk shop over a coffee or a beer, hit me up.

Well... that's issue seventy two! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Recruiters, remember templates?

You have one for rejections, one for recruiter screens, one for the day-7 "just checking in" nudge to candidates. Write it once, save it, and from then on a 4 minute email is 2 clicks.

A good recruiter with a template library was miles ahead of a good recruiter without one.

Most recruiters are using AI now. And most are re-typing the same prompt every single time.

Every candidate outreach starts from scratch. Paste the JD. Paste the profile. Re-explain the tone. Re-explain the role. Re-explain what good looks like. Tomorrow, do it again. Day after, do it again until the inevitable slow descent into madness that all recruiters eventually suffer.

So take that old habit of building templates, and apply it to context. Context is what templates were before AI.

The reusable unit has changed. You're not saving finished outputs anymore, you're saving the raw material the AI needs to generate them.

A template gave you one email. A context file gives you every email, in your voice, fitted to the situation. But only if you build the context files correctly.

How I run it

I have a digital twin. I called him Luke E-Tron (hehe) It's a highly contextual version of Claude that knows:

1️⃣ My writing style, fed from my newsletter back catalogue and LinkedIn posts

2️⃣ The people I talk to day in day out, who they are, what they do, how I speak to each of them

3️⃣ How my business runs. Cash flow, invoices, current priorities, live projects

4️⃣ MCP connections into Notion (to-do list), Granola (meeting notes), Slack, Gmail, Calendar

Each of those is a context file or a connection I set up once. I don't re-explain any of it in the morning.

The morning routine

Most mornings I have 15 to 25 small communications to send. Slack replies, email follow-ups, a kickoff to a hiring manager, a nudge to a candidate, a quick update. None of it needs my undeniable genius, but never the less, it still needs doing.

That's 20 tasks, 20 context switches, 20 micro-decisions about tone. An hour and a half gone before I've done any actual work.

So I built a context file called morning-routine.md. It says, roughly:

Go through my to-do list in Notion. For anything that's a communication from me to someone else, check if you have enough context to write it. If yes, draft it in Gmail or Slack. If no, list the ones you need more context on and ask me here in one batch. When the drafts are done, tell me.

My morning prompt is now three words. "Run morning routine."

20 tasks become 1. The hour and a half becomes 5 minutes of reviewing drafts and hitting send. The drafts Claude can't write, it asks about in a single batch, so the questions I actually answer are the ones that needed my brain.

What this looks like for recruiters

Here's the context file library I'd build if I was running a desk full time:

1️⃣ One context file per open req. JD, hiring manager preferences, screening criteria, interview panel, salary range, previous rejections and why

2️⃣ One per hiring manager. How they communicate. What they care about. What they've said yes and no to in the past. What "good" looks like to them

3️⃣ One for your tone of voice. Pulled from your best outreach, best rejections, best Slack updates. So every message sounds like you, not ChatGPT's idea of a recruiter

4️⃣ One for your weekly reporting. Metrics you pull, where they live, how you format the update, who it goes to

Build them once. Reference them forever.

The rule is, every time you give AI the same context twice, stop. That's a context file waiting to be written. Five minutes to save it. Next time, you reference the file instead of retyping 400 words of background.

This is the groundwork for something bigger I'll get into soon. The shift from doing things one at a time to doing them all at once. Serial to parallel. But you can't run parallel if every task still needs you to explain the setup from scratch.

With AI, context comesfirst. Everything else gets faster after that.

Well... that's issue seventy one! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Howdy Recruiters!

89% of HR people say AI saves them time. Only 17% say their org's AI rollout has been highly successful. Nearly a quarter have no way to measure ROI on the tools they've already bought.

So we've got high adoption, good vibes, but not much evidence of ROI.

The price of the vibe

Per-seat AI tooling adds up fast. Sourcing copilots, screening tools, scheduling assistants, summarisation layers. Stack three or four and you're looking at £150 to £300 a month per recruiter before your ATS, LinkedIn licences and job boards.

Then factor in the verification tax. The time spent checking outputs, rewriting outreach so it doesn't read like a chatbot school reunion, and chasing down the errors your hiring manager spotted before you did.

That "20% time saving" can quietly become 5% once you do the actual arithmetic. And most teams can't tell either way, because nobody clocked the baseline before the tools went live.

So what do we do Luke? Mr Doomy Gloomerson!

Three things actually....

Set the baseline before you buy

Time-to-fill, sourcing yield, recruiter throughput. Pick three you trust, write them down somewhere you'll actually find in six months. No before means no after.

Track verification time

One week. Ask your recruiters to log the minutes spent correcting AI output. That number is your real productivity figure. It tells you whether the tool is saving hours or just moving work around.

Kill what doesn't earn its seat

If a tool can't shift your baseline metrics in 90 days, cut it.

Why Everything I just said doesn't matter

The productivity gap is real. The measurement problem is real. But I'm not particularly worried about either of them.

This technology is in its early generations. It is going to get significantly better. The efficiency curve is only going one direction. The tools that feel clunky and expensive to verify today are going to look primitive in three years.

The recruiters and TA leaders who come out of this period well aren't going to be the ones who waited for proof before they engaged. They're going to be the ones who got stuck in now. Who ran the experiments, shared what they found, built the muscle, deployed imperfectly, and kept iterating.

There's an upfront efficiency cost to learning anything new. AI is no different. The people building a moat around "we don't need this yet" are storing up a much bigger problem for later.

So yes, set your baselines. Track your verification time. Cut the tools that don't pull their weight. Do the maths properly.

But do it as someone who is actively in the game, not standing at the side waiting for the results to get tidier.

That's where the compounding happens.

Big tip of the cap to Hung Lee and the Brainfood team for the source material. If you don't subscribe, you're missing the best curation in the industry.

Luke Update

Week of May 5th I'll be in San Fransisco for the AshbyOne conference. If you're kicking about, hit me up! We can go look at bridges and eat seafood or... something

Well... that's issue seventy! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Howdy All!

There's a piece of economic theory rattling around my head that might apply to us in the future. Especially if you've been reading the doom takes about AI replacing us.

It's called Jevons' Paradox. And it's the counterargument to AI will replace recruiters.

Here's the short version.

When things get cheaper, we use more of them. Not less.

In 1865, a British economist called William Stanley Jevons noticed something weird. Steam engines had become dramatically more efficient. Less coal needed per unit of work. The logical assumption was that England would use less coal overall.

The data said the exact opposite.

More efficient engines made coal-powered work cheaper. That unlocked entirely new applications that were previously too expensive to bother with. New industries. New use cases. Demand that didn't exist at the old price point.

Total coal consumption soared.

That's the paradox. When the unit cost of a fundamental input drops far enough, total consumption goes up, not down.

One more example to hammer it home, because this one's almost funny.

The price of light fell 3,000 times over two centuries. You'd expect people to use roughly the same amount of light and pocket the savings.

Per-capita consumption of light rose 13,000 times. Total consumption rose 40,000 times.

Nobody looked at cheap light and said "brilliant, I'll use the same amount." They lit up everything. Streets, stadiums, screens. The demand was always there. Cost was the constraint.

Now apply it to recruiting.

Job boards made posting jobs and finding candidates dramatically cheaper than newspaper classifieds. The prediction: fewer recruiters needed. The result: the US staffing and recruiting industry grew to $220 billion by 2022.

LinkedIn gave recruiters access to hundreds of millions of passive candidates. The prediction: recruiters will find people so easily they won't need as many of them. The result: an entirely new job category called "sourcer" was invented. Recruiter headcount expanded.

AI sourcing tools now. Same prediction. Same pattern emerging.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 6% growth in HR specialist roles — the category that includes recruiters — from 2024 to 2034. Faster than average. Roughly 81,800 openings per year over the next decade. After AI tools are already widely adopted.

What this actually means for you.

Three things.

1. Stop preparing for a world with less recruiting work.

The macro data doesn't support it. Every technology that made recruiting cheaper made it bigger. The energy you're spending worrying about whether your role exists in five years — redirect it into positioning yourself for the version of the role that's expanding.

2. Figure out what's "coal" and what's the "new application."

The coal is the stuff getting cheaper. Sourcing names. Writing boolean strings. Drafting outreach. Screening CVs. Scheduling. These are the tasks where AI is collapsing the unit cost.

The new applications are the work that only becomes possible because the basics got cheap. Strategic workforce planning conversations. Multi-market talent intelligence. Advising hiring managers on whether they actually need a hire at all versus a contractor, an internal move, or automation.

When sourcing took 80% of your time, you had no capacity for any of that. When AI handles sourcing, you do. That's the Jevons shift. The total demand for recruiting work goes up. The composition changes.

3. Become the person who directs the agents. Not the person who does what agents do.

The recruiters who struggle will be doing what AI does cheaper. The recruiters who thrive will be doing work that only became possible because AI made the basics cheap.

Think about what happens when you hand a hiring manager a tool that maps an entire talent market in 30 minutes instead of three weeks. They don't say "brilliant, we need fewer recruiters." They say "can you also map these five adjacent markets? What about compensation benchmarking for this new geography? Can you build a pipeline for a role we haven't opened yet?"

Cheaper inputs create more demand.....hopefully

Luke Update

Next month I'll be in San Fransisco for the AshbyOne conference. If you are in SF the week of May 5th, hit me up!!

Well... that's issue sixty nine! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Righty ho. This week's topic came from something I read that made me sit up properly. Not in a doom-and-gloomy way. More in a "well, that changes a few things" way. We're going to talk about what your candidates are doing before they walk into your interviews.

Your candidates are coached by AI....Cool!

70% of job seekers now use AI to research companies, draft cover letters, and prepare interview talking points. That's not a prediction. That's the current number.

But what caught my attention wasn't people using ChatGPT to tidy up their CV. That's been happening for years. What caught me was how far ahead of us some candidates have gone.

Noam Segal, the Community Research Lead at Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter (Lenny's Newsletter, 1M+ subscribers, one of the biggest product and tech newsletters going), interviewed over 30 tech professionals about how they use AI in the interview process. The findings were published in February 2026 and they're worth your time.

Here's what the best candidates are now doing.

They're building entire prep systems.

The candidates Noam spoke to aren't asking ChatGPT "how do I answer a competency question." They're building structured AI workflows that cover the full interview lifecycle:

Feeding their actual interview transcripts (recorded via Granola, Zoom, or Google Meet) into Claude and getting line-by-line feedback on what they said versus what they should have said.

Pasting a job description alongside their CV and having AI surface the exact gaps a hiring manager would flag, before the review happens.

Simulating full mock interviews in advance, testing which career stories land, and refining them before the real thing.

Building "story banks" of 8-15 indexed career stories, tagged by skill and impact, with rehearsed opening lines and rapid retrieval drills.

One candidate who hadn't interviewed in eight years landed a senior role at Anthropic with two weeks of prep. He credited his AI workflows as the primary reason.

Noam took everything he learned from these 30+ conversations and built a free, open-source AI interview coach using Claude Code. It scores candidate answers on five dimensions (substance, structure, relevance, credibility, differentiation), runs company-specific prep with predicted questions, does full mock interviews, and even coaches salary negotiation with exact scripts. It's on GitHub for anyone to use.

So what does this mean for recruiters?

Firstly I think this is a great development but heres three practical things.

Your questions need to go deeper.

If candidates can predict your interview questions using AI (and they can), your questions are too generic. "Tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult stakeholder" is now a rehearsed answer with a polished STAR structure before the candidate walks in.

Go deeper. Ask follow-ups that go past the rehearsed layer. "What specifically went wrong?" "What would you do differently now?" "What did you learn about yourself?" That's where real experience shows up, because AI can prepare the headline answer but it can't fabricate the nuance underneath.

A polished answer is no longer a reliable signal of depth.

This is the calibration challenge. A candidate with two weeks of AI-assisted prep can now present as smoothly as someone with months of genuine preparation. That's good news for talent quality overall, but it means interviewers need to probe for specifics rather than being impressed by structure.

The data backs this up. 77% of hiring managers say they can now detect AI-assisted candidates, up from 53% two years ago. But detection isn't the point. The point is that preparation quality has gone up across the board, and your interview process needs to assess capability, not just presentation.

Build your own feedback loop.

Candidates are now analysing their own interview performance with AI. They record, transcribe, and review. They know which answers were weak. They iterate. By their third interview, they're significantly sharper.

Meanwhile, most recruiting teams have no structured feedback loop on their own interview quality. We don't record our debriefs. We don't track which questions surface the best signal. We don't know which interviewers are calibrated and which ones aren't.

If candidates are using AI to get better at interviewing, we should be using AI to get better at assessing. Feed your interview notes into Claude. Ask it to find patterns. Which questions consistently surface strong signal? Which ones are a waste of time? Which interviewers flag the same concerns every time regardless of who they're speaking to?

The feedback loop has flipped. Candidates have one now. Most recruiters still don't.

So....

This isn't about candidates cheating. Using AI to prepare is resourceful, not dishonest. BUT..is your interview process designed for a world where prep doesn't indicate quality?

HUGE Credit where it's due

This issue was heavily inspired by research published by Noam Segal, Community Research Lead at Lenny Rachitsky's Newsletter. Noam interviewed 30+ tech professionals, synthesised their AI interview techniques, and built a free Claude Code-based interview coach available at: https://github.com/noamseg/interview-coach-skill

The original article was published on 24 February 2026: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-use-ai-in-your-next-job-interview

Additional data sourced from: https://resumegenius.com/blog/job-hunting/hiring-insights-report and https://www.demandsage.com/ai-recruitment-statistics/ and https://www.socialtalent.com/blog/interviewing/ai-candidates-are-already-here-your-interviewers-arent-ready

If you want to go further down this rabbit hole, check out the Prompt Mates community a Slack group run by Jason Miller and Joe Atkinson where recruiters are building AI tools, sharing workflows, and generally being the sort of people who make this industry better.

Well... that's issue sixty eight! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Howdy Recruiters!

The bajillion AI recruitment vendors on the planet tell us the same thing.

"Don't worry. There's a human in the loop."

It sounds reassuring. It's supposed to make you feel safe.

"oooh human in the loop, its ok, theres human in the loop, don't ask questions...human in the loop!!!!"

And for a lot of companies right now, it is COMPLETE NONSENSE.

Because most people, including the vendors saying it, have no idea what "human in the loop" actually means in law.

Or what it takes to prove it. Or what happens to your company if you can't.

This issue is your practical guide to where you actually stand. its a big boring bastard of a newsletter but its necessary, so strap in, or just save it for later

I'm not a lawyer. Nothing in here is legal advice. But this stuff is your job to understand, and I'm going to make it as clear as I can.

The Law: What It Actually Says

Let's start at the top.

GDPR Article 22 (EU and UK) says that individuals have the right NOT to be subject to a decision made "solely by automated processing" that produces a "legal or similarly significant effect" on them.

Recruitment is explicitly named in the regulation's own supporting text (Recital 71) as a use case. Specifically: "e-recruiting practices without any human intervention."

So if your AI tool screens, ranks, or rejects candidates — that's in scope. Full stop.

The EU AI Act, which is already live and phasing into full enforcement from August 2026, goes further. It classifies AI used for recruiting, filtering applications, and evaluating candidates as high-risk AI. That brings a whole additional layer of requirements on top of GDPR.

The UK is broadly aligned with the EU via UK GDPR, though the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 does relax some restrictions on automated decision-making for non-special category data. The principle of meaningful human review still applies.

In the US, it's a patchwork:

New York City (Local Law 144): mandatory annual independent bias audits for any automated employment decision tool (AEDT), plus 10 business days' advance notice to candidates. Already enforceable. Illinois (HB 3773): prohibits AI-based employment discrimination under the Illinois Human Rights Act. California: employers must retain "automated decision data" for four years. New rules from October 2025. The trend is clear. More states are following. If you're hiring across the US, assume this will apply to you eventually.

So...What Actually Counts as "Human in the Loop"?

Under GDPR Article 22, a decision doesn't count as "solely automated" IF there is meaningful human involvement. That's the escape hatch everyone's using.

But the EDPB (European Data Protection Board) is very specific about what "meaningful" means. And most companies are not meeting this bar.

For human review to count, the reviewer must have:

The actual authority to override the automated decision Access to ALL the relevant data the system used Enough understanding of the logic to be able to interrogate it The ability to factor in information the system DIDN'T consider

So If your recruiter is just looking at an AI score and clicking "approve" or "reject" in an ATS, that is not meaningful review. That is rubber-stamping. And regulators have said, explicitly, that rubber-stamping does not get you out of Article 22.

But wait, the dumpster fire gets even more...dumpster fiery

The ICO guidance says that "the sequencing of human and AI factors is crucial." A human uploading data into a system that then makes a decision is NOT a human in the loop for the purposes of the decision. You were in the loop for the data entry. You were not in the loop for the decision. These are different things.

And if your recruiter is approving 200 AI-screened applications per hour under KPI pressure? One legal commentary put it bluntly: "Speed is evidence against meaningful oversight." A human forced to approve decisions in seconds is not exercising judgment. Courts and data protection authorities are starting to look at the ENTIRE organisational environment — including reporting lines, training standards, and whether overrides actually happen — when determining if a decision was truly automated or not.

The Gap Between Vendor Claims and Reality

Here is a direct quote from a major HR software company's public legal position:

"[Our] AI does not make hiring decisions… Customers retain full control and human oversight."

This is now standard vendor language. And it is technically designed to push ALL the compliance responsibility onto YOU.

When a vendor says "you retain control," what they mean is: you are the data controller. You are the deployer. The liability is yours.

The research bears this out. When a NY State Comptroller audit reviewed 32 companies for Local Law 144 compliance, the city's enforcement body found ONE instance of non-compliance. Independent auditors reviewing the SAME companies found SEVENTEEN potential violations. The enforcement gap is enormous right now. But it won't stay that way.

And the Workday lawsuit (basically like a soap opera for recruiters...i love the drama) is a preview of what escalation looks like. If plaintiffs succeed, every AI recruiting company will have to answer questions about training data, validation methodology, and the actual gap between marketing claims and operational reality.

The vendors will not be standing beside you when that happens. You will be.

What This Means for Your Decision-Making Process

If you are using AI to screen, rank, score, or reject candidates, you need to answer these questions. Now.

1️⃣ Can your reviewers actually override the AI?

Not theoretically. In practice. Does your system allow it? Is there a workflow for it? Are there any audit logs showing it HAS happened?

If the answer is "the AI recommendation almost always stands," you may be operating a solely automated system with a human sticker on top.

2️⃣ Do your reviewers understand the logic?

Not the marketing version. The actual logic. If a candidate was ranked low, WHY? Can your recruiter articulate that reasoning independently? Or are they just seeing a score?

3️⃣ Have you done a DPIA?

Under GDPR, automated decision-making processes that produce significant effects require a Data Protection Impact Assessment. This is not optional. It's a documented process where you assess the risk, the necessity, the proportionality, and the safeguards. If you haven't done one, you're already out of compliance.

4️⃣ Are your candidates being told?

Under GDPR Articles 13 and 14, candidates have the right to be informed that automated processing is taking place. Under NYC Local Law 144, they need 10 BUSINESS DAYS' notice before an AEDT is used on them. Under the EU AI Act, they have the right to know AI played a significant role in a decision about them.

"We use AI tools in our hiring process" buried in a privacy policy is probably not going to cut it.

5️⃣ Is your vendor contract actually protecting you?

Review it. Specifically look for:

Who bears liability if the tool produces discriminatory outcomes Whether the vendor will support an independent bias audit What data the tool was trained on and whether they'll document it What their obligations are if the tool is found to be non-compliant

If "the vendor did it" is your compliance strategy, that is not a compliance strategy.

What Good Human in the Loop Actually Looks Like

Here's the practical model. It's not complicated. It IS operationally demanding.

Recruiters reviewing AI recommendations document their reasoning. Not just "approved" — WHY. Override rates are tracked. If no one ever overrides the AI, that's a flag for your DPO, not a celebration of tool accuracy. Reviewers receive training on how the system works, where it's likely to fail, and what bias signals to look for. Candidates can request human review of automated decisions — and that process is real, not a dead email address. You have a DPIA. It's reviewed annually. If you're in NYC, you have an independent bias audit completed in the last 12 months, published on your website.

That's the bar. It's doable. Most companies are nowhere near it.

The Timeline You Need to Know

Feb 2025 — EU AI Act: emotion recognition in hiring banned. AI literacy obligations for employees using AI systems kick in.

Aug 2025 — EU AI Act: GPAI (general-purpose AI) obligations go live for vendors.

Oct 2025 — California: automated decision data retention rules active.

Aug 2026 — EU AI Act: full high-risk AI requirements enforceable. This includes ALL AI used in recruitment. This is the big one.

Aug 2027 — AI systems embedded in regulated products: extended compliance deadline.

Jeez, I'm sweating after that...SO.

The law on this is not ambiguous. It's just uncomfortable.

If your AI tool is making or substantially influencing hiring decisions, and you cannot demonstrate meaningful human review of those decisions, you are exposed. In the EU, that's potential GDPR enforcement. Under the EU AI Act, fines for high-risk AI non-compliance go up to €30 million or 6% of global annual turnover. In NYC, it's compounding daily fines and the reputational exposure of a public bias audit you didn't prepare for.

And if a candidate challenges a decision? You need to be able to explain the logic. Not the vendor's marketing. The actual logic. If you can't, that's your problem.

The vendors will keep saying "human in the loop." That's good marketing.

Luke Update

For enterprise businesses, how do we deploy AI safely? How do we build good governance? And then how do we build a narrative that the whole business will respect, rather than specific building tools

Well... that's issue sixty six! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

One of the most rewarding parts of my role, something that stays with me and provides personal wellbeing, is helping recruiters to succeed.

It also happens to be one of the most valuable parts of any manager's role from a business perspective. If a manager's job was to fire poor performers and pat high performers on the back, they wouldn't be adding much value to the business would they?

No, it's those edge-cases, where a recruiter could go either way, where you can demonstrate the most value to your team and to the business.

And in my view, distinctions like this aren't particularly helpful to a manager. Any "High Performer" can struggle for a huge range of reasons. It's on you to support every recruiter.

Over the years, I have noticed some common issues with recruiters who are struggling to achieve success. I'll be honest..I have personally struggled with every single one of these issues myself. Here are the common causes of low activity in recruiters, and the methods I have used to help them get on track.

1. Time Management

Even with recruiters who have the best of intentions, an inability to scope the time taken to complete tasks, to prioritise work, or to separate their work to allow for focus time means that the top of funnel stuff gets waylaid.

You can see candidate communication slipping in this situation also, as these tasks are postponed until the end of the week, then they run out of time.

Commonly found

New recruiters.

High performing recruiters who have recently been given more responsibility.

The Solution

Coaching. In your 121, go to their calendars to review how they manage their time. Show them your calendar as a comparison. It's a good learning tool but it also demonstrates transparency.

Once you have an idea of how they are currently managing their time, give them training on time management tools and methods like Deep work, Pomodoro & calendar blocking.

Set more specific activity targets for them to aim for. This helps them utilise the new training and keeps them accountable to what you agreed in your 121.

Follow up in your future 121s to see which tools and methods worked for them and double down on those methods. Give praise and encourage them to share this new knowledge with their peers (building confidence).

2. They don't like top of funnel work

There are some excellent recruiters who love working with stakeholders and candidates, give great candidate experience and are highly insightful......but hate hate hate the Sourcing>Outreach piece. Nothing wrong with that, we all have a least favourite bit of our jobs right? But these recruiters can often deprioritise the ToF work, do the bare minimum, or find ways to avoid it all together, such as relying entirely on applications.

Commonly found

Internal recruitment.

Ex 180 recruiters.

The Solution

Change the experience by running social sourcing sprints with the team.

Break the top of funnel tasks into bitesized daily goals. Encourage them to get their favourite album, make an amazing coffee and blast it for 45 min per day.

Maybe pair them up with a Sourcer. If this is a common problem, maybe a 180 model would work better for your team? Worth thinking about.

3. Afraid to ask for help

Some recruiters are happy to put the effort into sourcing, but find it too challenging, usually because of a lack of domain knowledge that helps them find relevant candidates. So the work is laborious and they don't see a payoff. But when faced with this problem, they are afraid to ask their manager or peers for help through fear of looking unskilled or unprofessional. These recruiters tend to have lower Outreach>Screen conversion rates as they are doing a lot of sourcing, but the sourcing lacks relevance.

Commonly found

Ex agency recruiters

New recruiters

The Solution

Team wide rituals of blame free post-mortems. ie, when something bad does happen, the team takes it as a valuable learning opportunity. Responsibility isn't even discussed, just the solution. This is something software development teams do to solve the exact same problem.

Open, transparent 121s. Make sure the 121 is a protected environment where your recruiters can speak up about anything. If every 121 starts with pipeline updates, it feels like an assault course to the recruiter who has to work their way through the update without getting caught. Instead, create an agenda that starts with their own inputs, "what do you want to improve?"

Team wide training. An individual's areas of improvement don't have to be dealt with 1 on 1. If someone is struggling with the relevance of their sourcing, ask the recruiter with the best conversion rate to do a lunch and learn training on the topic. This kills two birds with one stone as you give one recruiter a stretch target and the other recruiter support. Double bubble!

4. They are disengaged

This is the most difficult issue that causes low activity. Disengagement can come from anywhere and it is important to be sensitive and conscientious at all times. Recruiters could be going through personal issues that are affecting their ability to engage with work, or they could be realising that recruitment, just isn't for them.

Commonly Found

Any Recruiter at any time

A recruiter's first recruitment role.

Recruiters who are looking for a new role.

The Solution

Early and open discussion. The only things I really regret looking back are when I had a vibe or an inkling about a recruiter I've worked with, but didn't bring it up. As long as you have built a relationship where you can be open and the recruiter knows you have their best interests at heart, you should be able to say in your 121s, "is there anything frustrating you or on your mind just now?"

Care, not Management. Disengaged recruiters require care, not leadership. Your attitude to this problem has to put the recruiter ahead of the business. You need to put their best interests at heart (this has nothing to do with your job, this is something you strive to be as a person, irrespective of your job). The reason is simple. You don't know what is going on in their heads. They could just be about to resign anyway, or they could be in a deep depression. So care must come first.

Luke Update

Next week on Wednesday 25th ill be in London working with the awesome folk at Calyptus, advising their customers on AI approaches for their business. If you are in central London, give me a shout!

Well... that's issue sixty five! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Sourcing. It's the tippity top of the funnel for any significant piece of recruitment. If you broke it down to level of effort, it's the biggest thing we do, per hire.

But if you were anything like me when I started in recruitment, you struggle to source consistently, and affects your ability to make hires.

Consistent, high quality sourcing is so hard to get right.

Here's how I went from someone who couldn't source to getting 24 Recruiters in 6 locations to source 100-120 Software Engineers a week, each.

So, how does the average recruiter source consistently?

Structure your sourcing.

Make it the best part of your day

From now on, you spend at least one hour per day sourcing.

The aim is 15-20 good candidates per day. But heres the deal.... you make it the best hour of your day.

Put on an album, make a fantastic coffee and go for it for an hour.

Make it social

Try suggesting sourcing sprints with your team.

A sourcing sprint is an opportunity to shoot all your sourcing efforts in one direction, like a musket volley in a Napoleonic battle (I've reached the age where I learn about Napoleonic battles...).

This is a team get together on a video call. One recruiter is the 'leader'. They decide what the team is sourcing for and they get all the candidates at the end.

You hang out, shoot the breeze and get some focussed sourcing done.

It could be a difficult role, or sourcing for someone on holiday, a D&I piece, anything. The important thing is it's social, there's a team goal, and you are accountable to each other.

For example, your team has three sourcing sprints a week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Monday, you're the leader. You tell the team you are sourcing for a Data Engineer based in US (East coast). Segment by strings or sourcing tools, or different locations, or different companies. doesn't matter.

Wednesday, it's Laura's turn and she wants us all to hit remote BDRs

Friday is Gene. He's on holiday so we want him to have 100+ candidates to come back to so he doesn't have to start from scratch.

Awesome team dynamic right?

Hold Yourself Accountable

Track the volume of sourced candidates.

There doesn't need to be hard KPIs around sourcing if you understand the value of sourcing.

Frame your ask of 15-20 candidates per day as a guide rail, and the outreach & screen conversion to be another guide rail.

The goal is being over 15+ in volume without reducing your outreach and screen conversion.

Calibrate Regularly

To make sure you aren't generating junk volume, measure the conversion rates of outreach messages and screen calls.

If you see them drop, then sourcing quality is most likely the issue and you can bring it up in your 121 or learn some more about the role.

Learn About Time Management

Maybe you aren't sourcing as much as you like because you can't manage your as time well as you would like.

It's a very common issue and time management is like an arms race (like the one between Napoleon and the British led 2nd coalition....sorry.)

By this I mean, every time you get on top of your business, you get more responsibility and more is asked of you. Will you have more or less time when you're promoted?

So, time management isn't something you learn once and you're done. No, you are always optimising.

So, time management training is a really useful way to remedy the root cause.

Check out Deep work by Cal Newport and Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden. Both excellent resources on time management.

Luke Update

This week I had an awesome chat with Shally Steckerl from Shally's Alley. We got stuck into the topics of data driven recruitment, and Whisky.

in a couple of weeks ill be going live with the Promptmates crew where ill be showing off a few of my home made tools. really looking forward to that one!

Well... that's issue sixty four! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Okeydokey my supersonic crop of unsettlingly attractive people pirates....

Here's three low-tech fixes that immediately improve your ATS outputs, and none of them require new features, integrations, or contracts.

Let’s get....right into it.

Document Your Operating Model

Your ATS can only track what it’s told to track. If there’s no consistent process behind it, you’re just logging chaos. A year after you bought the shiny new ATS, you'll have nothing tyou can show leadership. which makes you look like a right royal berk. (That's "like a total bozo" to my American friends)

Define each interview stage and what qualifies a candidate to move forward. Set SLAs for things like feedback, scheduling, and review cycles. Make sure everyone’s using the same definitions: is “Interview 1” a screen? A panel? A skills test?

Luke Nugget : Create a 1-pager with your funnel definitions and share it in every kickoff. (ill show you mine if you want just email me)

Write Better Interview Instructions

Most interview stages in ATSs are just blank boxes. You’re asking your team to assess candidates without giving them any tools.

After every kickoff, write a short guide per interview stage: what to ask, what to look for, what good looks like. If your ATS allows it, embed these instructions in the interview stage itself. Don’t have that feature? Send it manually 24 hours before the interview. It takes 10 minutes.

Luke Nugget : Use a robot to create the first draft from your kickoff doc. Then just tweak and paste. I actually vibe coded an app that takes you from key responsibilities to full review guidelines in 5 min. its easy, but manually time consuming, so automate it.

Track Inputs, Not Just Outputs

Time-to-fill and offer-acceptance rate are great, but they are lagging indicators. Start tracking the controllable actions earlier in the funnel.

How many hours did we spend sourcing this week? What percentage of scorecards are submitted within SLA? How long is the average time in stage per interviewer?

Luke Nugget: Use a time budget (e.g. 1hr/day sourcing, 30 mins/day app review) and treat it like a performance guardrail (not for micromanagement)

So...

If your ATS isn’t delivering value, the solution probably isn’t another tool.

It’s governance, clarity, and consistent best practices. You need to squeeze every drop out of the one you already have.

And 90% of that is not about software, it is about process. .

That’s it for today. See you next week!

Well... that's issue sixty three! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

So, you went to the trouble of parsing through two years of recruitment data from fifteen of the ugliest spreadsheets in the western world, and an ATS thats been used like a garbage can with no index or structure.

Took you about two days. But it's all gonna be worth it, because you can show your findings to the hiring managers and they will all be impressed right?....Right?

"Ooooh look at that lovely data"..."59%....really? We should definitely change our habits then"

Then the day comes and you present your data in a lovely funnel, with some useful insights.....and they don't care.

They wander off bemused and you go home to drink gin and cry under a piano.

Here's what went wrong and a few ways to fix it.

Time & Money

Tattoo that to your forehead, backwards so you can read it in the mirror.

Your mistake was....You gave a non-recruiter recruitment data.

Recruitment is an operational necessity to your hiring manager. They care about the end result. The only other thing they care about is the resources they expend to achieve the end result.

Think of it this way, if you click on a button on a website. Do you care about what webserver is used, in what region? No, the only things that WOULD make you care is if it :

1. It stopped you clicking the button.

2. Took too much time to click the button.

3. Cost you money to click the button.

....THEN you'd care about webservers.

It's the same with your hiring managers.

So if you want to influence change, you need to translate recruitment data into hires, time or money :

❌ "We need to increase conversion at tech stage by 10%"❌

✅"If we increase conversion at tech stage 10% we can give you back 75 hours of engineering time"✅

That's a feature completed on time.
That affects your hiring manager's personal OKRs.
That affects your hiring mangers budget.
THAT will help you influence change.

So thats what you translate your data into. Time and Money.

Now Here's How to do it

1. Translate your funnel data into a level of effort

a. Start with your target hires (lets say 10)

b. Work out the offers needed based on your offer accept % (lets say 80%)

Offers Needed = 10/0.8

Offers Needed = 12.5

c. do this with every stage right up to screen.

You now have the predicted volume of each stage needed to make the target hires. Your level of effort.

2. Do it again with your future state.

a. pick a conversion you are going to improve, say technical interview by 10%

b. do the same calculation

3. Compare current to future state

a. Note the differences in each stage and think about who it would effect.

This is step by step how you turn basic recruitment data into time and money

Example

- You have figured out that your tech interview has a 55% passthrough rate.

- Firstly, they may not see this as bad. I've met hiring managers who see this as a badge of honour, like "wow this proves we hire only the best". Which is of course nonsense.

- You want to increase this by having recruiters shadow tech interviews, do 30 min live prep sessions with candidates and invite engineers to join sourcing sprints.

- You think this can increase the passthrough rate to 65% at least.

- Your hiring manager wont care about an extra 10% passthrough rate at the tech stage because they don't know what that means in terms of the end result, the time and the money.

- So calculate the hours of engineering time saved by increasing passthrough rate across the whole of the engineering hiring plan.

Here we see a 10% increase in conversion at the tech stage for a hiring plan of 150 translates to 66 hours of engineering interviews, 300 less code test reviews and 400 less screens. Saved.

Thats the stuff that moves the needle with your hiring managers.

So have a crack at it yourself and remember, your hiring manager needs recruitment put into context.

Luke Update

Next week on Tuesday March 3rd I'll be at Greenhouse Open Leaders event in London, speaking on stage with the irrepressible Joe Atkinson about the future of Talent Intelligence.

Come register and say Hi!

Well... that's issue sixty two! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Howdy recruiters! I'm sick and tired of talking about technology. At the end of the day, you became a recruiter the same way we all did, failed all our exams then became recruiters.....

we didn't need technology to do that, we needed that right combination of curiosity, energy and EQ that makes us good at recruitment, but not good at literally anything else.

So heres 3 top tips to be a better recruiter that harness your natural awesomeness

1. Block it Like its Hot.....

Ok I admit I chose this topic largely to make that pun, but never the less its still valuable information so lets move on..

Cal Newport popularised the idea of focused, distraction-free time in his awesome book, Deep Work.

Recruiters need this more than almost anyone.

Your job naturally splits into:

Deep work : sourcing strategy, writing outreach, stakeholder planning, market mapping

Shallow work: Emails, Slack, scheduling, quick approvals

If you don’t deliberately separate them, shallow work eats everything. And I bet when you are crazy busy with reqs you notice the deep work stuff slipping don't you....come on...don't you!

Block time for:

60–90 minutes of sourcing per day Structured hiring manager planning, documenting etc Pipeline review and analysis and getting into your pipeline data

Two awesome things happen:

You become dramatically more efficient (most people see a huge productivity lift just from protected focus time, up to 50%). With calendar blocking, you can actually see how you spent your week, and its way easier to then improve it next week.

2. Run 30-Minute Candidate Prep Calls

Before skills interviews and before final stages.

Yes, it feels like extra work.

I PROMISE YOU....It isn’t.

A 30-minute prep session:

Candidate feels supported Candidate goes in more confident Candidate has been prepped on stuff not related to performance, like when to log in or what white-boarding tool you will be using. Candidates is more likely to pass the interview. You have another touch point to validate the candidates expectations.

The overall result is a Higher conversion to next stage AND a higher offer conversion.

And that means days less sourcing and screening to replace avoidable drop-offs....DAYS

You trade a couple of half-hour calls per week for entire days of saved effort.....DAYS

Plus:

Candidates feel supported Candidate NPS improves You build real trust They walk into interviews feeling like rock stars

Its you doing more of the stuff you are brilliant at, using your high EQ to build relationships and support.

3. 15-Minute Friday Decision Sprints

Every Thursday, send a one-page doc:

Borderline candidates Soft yes / soft no cases Pending feedback Any unmade decisions

Give stakeholders time to pre-read.

Then on Friday:

15 minute sync. Live. Fast. Decision-y.

Bang through the list. No storytelling. No rehashing interviews. Just:

Yes No Next step

The outcome is every candidate gets clarity before the weekend. and time to hire drops.

Remember, all unanswered questions feel negative.

If your boss messages you on Friday saying, “Can we talk first thing Monday?”, you don’t spend the weekend thinking "awesome...I'm probably getting a raise!!"

Candidates don’t either. Remove uncertainty, increase conversion. Protect candidate experience.

None of This Is Fancy

It’s calendar discipline, better preparation. Faster decisions, clearer communication.

Low tech but high leverage stuff that makes you a happy, in control, high performing recrutier.

Luke Update

I'll be down in London for a couple of events in March.

March 3rd I'll be speaking at the Greenhouse Open event for TA Leaders

March 25th I'll be speaking at an event organised by Calyptus on real AI applications in TA & HR

Come say hi if you are about those days.

Well... that's issue sixty one! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Time. It's the most important resource in any process. If you think about it, almost every other measurement we make is sub-ordinate to time. Hires....per what? Sourced candidates...per what? What we do as recruiters is only valuable if it is done within a certain time.

Now here I'm at a crossroads :

Road one, I bang on about time to hire in some high level, flaffy way... (flaffy is a word I made up, but you know what it means).

Road two, low-level advice on how you, as a recruiter, can manage your time better.

If you read my mission statement above, you know we will be going down road number two....

So, since time is so central to our success, you need to ask yourself a question and give yourself a very honest answer :

"How good am I at managing my time?"

Here are five ways to structure your time effectively between sourcing, screening, interviews & stakeholder stuff. I know they work from years of experience. They will make you look more professional and reduce your stress

1. One hour a day of sourcing no matter what

Make this hour your happy place. Make an amazing coffee, put on your favourite music and blast it for one hour. target is 10-15 good candidates found in that hour.

2. Auto-schedule screens.

Use Calendly or other auto-scheduler to reduce admin time. Customise your calendar so you can do max 4 screens per day, 2 late morning, 2 early afternoon is a good shout. make this focus time on Slack so you aren't disturbed.

This means that screens never wreck the structure of your week and affect other priorities.

3. A thirty minute, in person prep session for late stage interviews.

This may seem counter intuitive as you are spending an additional 30 min per late stage candidate. But, it has a massive impact on the conversion at that stage and saves you days of sourcing & screening time in the long run. The candidate also thinks you are the bees knees.

4. Templates and info-packs.

Anything you have to say more than twice, make it a template if its an email or add it into some kind of info-pack resource for your candidates. It reduces admin time and makes you more responsive to the candidate which is much better candidate experience.

5. A 15-30 minute Friday decisioning session for hiring managers.

If you are bouncing backwards and forward on Slack for decisions and updates on candidates, you are wasting everyones time. Write a pre-read document with all the candidates in the interview stages and their status, any notes for edge case candidates, and any process problems that need addressing.

Share this on Thursday with the hiring team and then have a 30 minute call (max) on Friday. Go through the document until all the decisions and updates are complete.

It protects the hiring manager's time from ballooning Slack threads of doom, provides structure to how they make decisions and ensures all candidates are updated before COP Friday which increases offer accept rates.

These are tips I know work irrespective of the size of business you are supporting. The key is structuring and multiplying your time.

On that note. If you are looking for some resources to help you with time management in general, I highly recommend you read Deep Work by Cal Newport.

It helps you structure your time and tasks in a way that allows you to make the most of each task. I have found it immensely helpful in my epic journey to becoming a person who will probably not get fired.

Awesome Recruiter Spotlight

We need to talk about Shaun Hervey. While I love recruitment and the opportunities it has given me, I am often deflated and depressed by the sheer amount of corporate nonsense and bullshit we're exposed to on social media on a regular basis:

"The green banner makes you look desperate, your resume MUST be 2 pages and don't you dare interview in a hoodie!"

It's enough to drive you loopy. Well into this Katzenjammer of corporate crap walks a hero. Someone who seems to have a pathological need to bring those social media buffoons down a peg or two, and do so in a really entertaining way.

Please please please connect with Shaun Hervey on LinkedIn. He's a recruiter based in the states who is my go to source of humour about the weird world we work in.. If you have TikTok, definitely follow him here. He's currently doing dramatic readings of LinkedIn posts and it's my reason for going to work every day.

Luke Update

Last year I joined the amazing Ava Labs, the brain boxes behind Avalanche. I've beed a huge Avalanche fanboy for years and I genuinely believe it is the best place to start a business, and for entrepreneurs to make money not just in Web3, but online.

I'm determined to be as present and consistent a member of our community as I always am and will be posting weekly newsletters, and daily LinkedIn posts with the goal of empowering recruiters with data.

I'm still doing a lot of product advisory for cool TA tech products and a smattering of coaching

This year I'll be doing a bit of travelling similar to 2025, and i'll keep you posted closer to the dates if there are any interesting events you'd like to meet at.

Here's me and one of the best recruiters in the world hanging out in Miami.

Well... that's issue sixty! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Happy Wednesday my recruitment nerd Brothers, Sisters and Smizmaars....

So, I the past 8 years I've implemented 6 ATS into Pre-Seed > SeriesC tech companies.

I've learned a lot about the shared features of most ATS on the market and how recruiters can use them to make more hires with less effort.

While everyone is banging on about AI and skills based hiring, just remember there are some simple, free ways to use low tech features to make more hires.

Templates

In all ATS, you can save your Emails to templates.

Yes, you may have the odd nurture sequence templated up, but this is massively underusing the template function of your ATS.

Any email you need to send more than once should be a template!

Here is what you do :

First, write out the ideal workflow for a piece of recruitment from start to finish.

Second, write templates out for as many eventualities for each stage as possible.

For instance here are four common eventualities you want to template if a candidate replies to an outreach:

They agree to a screen call, in which case you should have a template to schedule a call.

They get back to you declining, in which case, a lovely stay in touch email

They ask about salary and comp, in which case a template about your comp philosophy and an invite to a screen to discuss in more detail.

They ask about remote work. So a template describing the working format and an invite to the screen.

These are about 90% of the replies to my outreach.

If you spend half an hour writing out really good templates for these common eventualities, you save yourself DAYS of value add time.

This isn't just for top of funnel by the way. Go all the way through your process and write up good templates for each eventuality, interview invites, interview prep calls, everything.

You don't have to have boiler plate info for every candidate, you can personalise each one, particularly at the bottom of the funnel with more specific details.

This turns writing an email into writing a sentence. Still a huge time saver.

Really Really Really focus in on your workflows and and use templates to turn admin time into value time. You will save DAYS of time which could be more hires, or it could be more time for you, the gym, your partner, whatever keeps you healthy. It's all connected.

Tags

I bet you either have an ATS with no tags or so many tags that it's a total mess.

Make a list of things you would LOVE to be able to search for in a candidate at the touch of a button. Use that list to structure your tagging system with a basic nomenclature so you can search via categories, like Sourcing, Outreach etc.

Eg. A/B testing a piece of outreach. They should tag candidates something like "Outreach - Paul's message A" and "Outreach - Pauls message B". Now you can search "Outreach" and these will come up. You would never in a million years think to search "Paul's Message A"

Write a document that is going to be your 'Tag Glossary' and keep all your new tags in there to future reference.

Reminders

This is one of the most criminally underused features in my opinion. I remember clearly about six months after I started faithfully using reminders to follow up with candidates, It felt like cheating. It was like having a personal assistant telling me who to speak to on that day.

I made so many extra hires just by keeping in touch at the right time. Good uses of reminders :

1. Candidates accepts another job + 3 months - scoop up candiadtes who were lied to about the amazing new job.

2. Super star candidate replies with a "not interested right now - keep in touch" + 6.months. keeps you on top if those superstars for no effort.

3. Candidate rejected at tech/domain for experience + 6 months - Keeps you on top of candidate who know your brand and are maybe just a couple months of a specific skill away from an offer.

Integrations & Marketplaces

Modern ATS have really easy methods to integrate other tools, you don't have to be a software developer.

You can use an API to integrate your ATS with google sheets which in turn could feed a bespoke dashboard, or maybe a CRM that has richer features for email sequencing. The sky is the limit!

Also check if your ATS has an internal marketplace. Third party tools can often be accessed and enabled from inside the ATS.

Feature Requests

One element of an ATS that is never properly utilised is the company behind the ATS.

there is an awesome bevvy of new TA Tech platforms that are currently super lean, enormously customer centric and have a development lifecycle of 2 weeks!?! That's some seriously superb software development going on and your specific needs and requests can become a reality in a matter of weeks.

So take full advantage of this. If there's a feature that would make your life easier, make a feature request to your ATS provider.

You'll be surprised how quickly your suggestions can be made into a reality (if it's a sensible request of course...don't write "make the background all pictures of Scarlett Johansson"....no matter how many times they ask...they wont do it....).

Luke Update

Next week I'll be partnering with the superb Calyptus to deliver a talk on how to implement AI in TA and HR. it will be focussed on more enterprise businesses so I'm hoping to learn a lot about the problems larger companies face when adopting AI.

If I learn anything funky, you my friends will be the very first to hear about it.

To improve your day somewhat, here's a picture of a baby otter in a Wellington boot.....

Well... that's issue fifty nine! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Hello Data-DrivenRecruiters! Have you lost weight? Crossfit? well good for you!

Today we’re talking ATS selection.

This is something I’ve written about a lot over the years because it is just such an ever present risk for changing recruitment functions.

The ATS market used to be one of the most underserved areas of business software.

That is absolutely no longer the case.

In the last five years it has completely exploded.

We now have:

Big legacy players with massive market share Newer platforms shipping features at an insane pace Smaller tools solving very specific problems extremely well

We have never been more software-enabled as a function.

Which sounds great.

But it also means choosing the wrong ATS is now easier than ever.

So here are five tips to help you not buy a shit one.

1) Process first.

If you haven’t written out your recruitment process properly, you are not ABLE to choose an ATS in any meaningful way. You are guessing.

Listing stages does not count.

I don’t mean:

Screen → HM → Panel → Offer

I mean the actual process.

A full flowchart for every step recruiters take.

Every step candidates experience.

Who does what.

Who waits for what.

Where delays happen.

How feedback is captured.

What format information is in.

Emails, calls, forms, documents, NDAs, info packs, references, onboarding handovers.

All of it.

They tell you exactly where your system is getting in the way and what would actually improve your outcomes.

Until you’ve mapped this visually using a white boarding tool, you do not know what you need from an ATS.

Once you do, the requirements become obvious.

And suddenly you can say:

“I need X and Y. I absolutely do not need A and B.”

That is when vendor conversations start being useful.

2) Scale is mostly not a consideration.

I hear this constantly:

“We’re getting bigger, so we need a more enterprise ATS.”

In most cases, that statement does not survive five minutes of scrutiny.

Almost every modern ATS can handle more roles, more candidates, and more users.

The system is not going to fall over because you hired more people.

What people are really describing is this:

“We want to increase hiring output without increasing recruiter headcount.”

That is an automation and workflow problem.

If your ATS does not support automation properly, it was never a good system to begin with. That would have been true at one hire or one thousand hires.

3) Proper Governance

This one hurts because I’ve seen it so many times.

TA teams do the work.

They shortlist vendors.

They run trials.

They gather feedback.

And then at the eleventh hour, the CPO goes "good news, Workday said they'd throw in the ATS for 8 grand!

Then you enter a pit of despair.

Especially the candidates filling out 17 page application webforms that were built circa 2004, just to get a part time janitor role.

Before you even speak to vendors, write down governance.

Who is accountable for the decision.

Who is responsible for running selection and implementation.

Who needs to be consulted.

Who just needs to be informed.

As a general rule:

TA leadership should be accountable TA Ops and implementation owners should be responsible HR, Finance, IT, Legal should be consulted The wider business should be informed

If this is not explicit, you can still end up with the wrong tool even if you did everything else right.

4) Interrogate the AI claims early and aggressively

Everything has AI now.

Fine.

Ask them to show you exactly what it does.

Live.

With your use case.

Ask what triggers it.

Ask what data it uses.

Ask how it fails.

Ask what control recruiters have over it.

Ask how much time it actually saves per week.

If a vendor cant clearly explain where the value appears in your process, there is no value.

A tool doing something badly at speed is just faster chaos....that you pay for.

If you cant clearly map the feature back to your process, stop the demo and go back to tip number one.

5) Do not overcomplicate implementation

You do not need every feature turned on from day one.

That is how you burn out recruiters and yourself

Figure out your MVP.

Implement that properly.

Get adoption.

Then layer in complexity over time.

Treat it like a product rollout, not a big-bang transformation.

This approach is better for outcomes, better for adoption, and significantly better for the old mental health.

Luke's Final Thought

If you want to avoid buying a shit ATS:

Understand your real process Ignore scare stories about scale Lock in governance early Push hard on AI claims Implement in small, deliberate steps

Well... that's issue fifty seven! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!

Hello my vibrant, shamelessly attractive recruitment warriors! Lets talk about something really boring, but doing it right is the difference between being a credible recruiter and hiding under a piano, drinking Gin and crying.

Let's talk governance.

So, recruitment pretty much lives or dies on decisions.

Who makes them. When they’re made. How they’re made. And what happens when people disagree.

That’s essentially governance.

And despite how important it is, most recruiters, including a lot of recruitment leaders, don’t really think about it, nevermind design it intentionally.

Which is massive problem.

Because when governance is missing, unclear, or implicit rather than explicit :

Hiring slows down Accountability gets fuzzy Recruiters become process babysitters And everyone feels like “recruitment is the blocker”

When governance is clear?

Recruitment suddenly gets easier.

Here are governance tools to help you out.

What is Governance

In business and project management, governance is essentially:

The framework that defines how decisions are made, who is involved, who owns what, and how accountability works.

It’s not bureaucracy, and it’s definitely not about control.

Good governance is there to:

Reduce confusion Prevent rework Speed up decision-making Protect people’s time And make outcomes more predictable

In recruitment terms, governance answers questions like:

Who actually owns the hiring decision? Who needs to be consulted vs informed? Where does recruiter autonomy end? When does escalation happen? What happens to the interviewer if they don't give feedback?

If those answers aren’t explicit, you have poor governance.

Why Us Recruiters Should Care

It helps you:

Fewer circular conversations Less stakeholder chasing Less “just one more interview” bollocks Clearer pushback when scope creep appears Better expectation-setting with hiring managers

Governance Frameworks

Below are tools and models I’ve used repeatedly.

I’ve kept this to four but i recommend you just use whatever is relevant to you and what you are trying to achieve.

1. RACI Charts

This one comes from project management, and it’s criminally underused in recruitment. In my view it should be a standard portion of any kickoff call.

A RACI clarifies:

Responsible – who does the work Accountable – who owns the outcome Consulted – who provides input Informed – who needs visibility

Where it works brilliantly in recruitment:

Hiring decisions Interview feedback ownership Process changes Offer approval flows

Pros

Removes ambiguity Creates defined accountability Exposes decision bottlenecks immediately

Cons

Feels “corporatey” if you over do it. Needs a bit of upkeep when roles change It only works if people respect it

If you’ve ever asked “why am I chasing this?” or felt hopeless when a really poor stakeholder just gets away with it, you needed a RACI.

2. Decision Rights Frameworks (RAPID-style thinking)

Another project-management classic, adapted for decision-heavy environments.

These frameworks focus less on tasks and more on decisions:

Who recommends? Who provides input? Who decides? Who executes? Who needs to know?

This is incredibly powerful for:

Interview debriefs Bar-raiser models Final hiring calls Conflicting stakeholder opinions

Pros

Speeds up decisions Reduces consensus theatre Makes escalation clean, not political

Cons

Requires senior buy-in Can feel uncomfortable in high-ego rooms

Recruitment is a decision factory. If decision rights aren’t clear, everything slows.

3. Stage-Gate Governance

This one is more operational.

You define:

What must be true to move a candidate forward Who validates that at each stage What evidence is required (not opinions)

This works especially well in:

Early funnel stages High-volume hiring Technical or skills-based screens

Pros

Predictable Scales well Reduces false positives early

Cons

Risk of false negatives if poorly designed Needs really strong calibration

4. SOPs (Standard Operating Principles)

This isn’t a framework so much as a layer that sits over everything else.

They should be explicit statements like:

“No one interviewer can veto a hire alone” “Culture add is discussed collaboratively, never in isolation” “Recruiters own process, hiring managers own decisions” “More interviews require new signal, not reassurance”

Pros

Easy to communicate Reinforces good behaviour Reduces edge-case debatathons

Cons

Needs reinforcement Useless if treated as just slogans

I love SOPs because they cost nothing, and quick to create and help with your broader management of a recruitment functions.

So...

Crappy governance :

Unclear ownership Implicit decision-making Undefined roles And governance that exists only in people’s heads

Awesome governance:

Makes recruitment faster Makes decisions fairer Makes recruiters more effective And quietly removes friction everywhere

Luke Update

Last year I wrote a book on change management for recruiters called "Welcome to the Desert of Shitty Change Management"

I wrote it mainly to get out of designing slides for a talk I did at last years RecCopsCon in Chicago. So two weeks work to escape 45 minutes work (I really suck at design stuff as you have probably already gathered).

Anyhoo, next week I'm going to try to get it up as an E-Book on my website. It has a bunch of time tested frameworks for change management and communicating change which is really helpful for stuff like rolling out a new tool. Heres me at RecOpsCon waving it about like a preacher.

Well... that's issue fifty seven! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.

I'll see you next week!