How Has Your Industry’s Recruiting Evolved? 25 Outdated Strategies to Avoid

Pursue Fits, Not Job Board Volume

Recruiting in supply chain has always been complicated, but it’s become even more complicated now because of AI.

For example, a supply chain manager can mean completely different things depending on the company. In one organization, you might need someone who wears a lot of hats, someone with experience in procurement, logistics, operations, warehouse management, demand planning, maybe even customer service. But in another company, a supply chain manager might be someone who’s really focused on procurement. So you can’t just look at the title and assume you know what the person does.

Now you also have AI in the conversation. Some companies are starting to look for people who have AI experience or at least know how to work with AI. So I think it’s becoming even more important to understand the industry and the actual role.

And I think that’s one thing that used to work but doesn’t work as well anymore, which is relying heavily on job boards and applications. You can post a role and get hundreds or even thousands of applications, but a lot of them are not actually a fit. They might have the right keywords because AI has made it easier to optimize resumes and get through an ATS, but that doesn’t mean they can actually do the job.

So now I think you have to be much more proactive. Instead of just waiting for candidates to apply, you have to go out and find them, especially for specialized and senior roles.

And again, it comes back to understanding the role and the industry. If you don’t understand what the company actually needs, it’s very easy to match someone based on a title or keywords and end up with the wrong person.

Move Proof to Live Task Walkthroughs

“I would say the clearest change is how much less a resume tells us. Two years ago a well-written application/resume was a reasonable first filter. Now nearly every candidate uses AI to write and tailor their applications. I don’t think that’s wrong; it’s a tool that’s available to them. But the applications we see for one role read far more alike than they used to, and the most polished ones don’t reliably come from the strongest people. So the strategy that stopped working for us is screening on the resume and using the interview to confirm what it said. We put that weight on a first screening interview instead: our recruiters ask candidates to walk through a specific piece of their own work, why they made the decisions they made, what they would change now. You can’t prepare a generated answer for a follow-up question you didn’t see coming, and that live conversation is where you find out whether the judgment belongs to the person. It has also made the AI question easier to answer when clients raise it.”

—Maria Jose Lorenzo, Director of Talent Acquisition, Hire With Near (https://www.hirewithnear.com)

Bio: Maria Jose Lorenzo is Director of Talent Acquisition at Hire With Near, where she leads a recruiting team of more than 40 people placing Latin American professionals into remote roles with US companies.

Display Standards and Select for Discipline

In remodeling, recruiting has shifted from “find a good carpenter” to “find someone who can think like a builder, communicate like a project manager, and respect a lived-in home.” On high-end kitchens, baths, aging-in-place work, and full-home renovations, the technical skill matters, but so does cleanliness, client communication, sequencing, and problem-solving.

One thing that used to work was hiring mostly through word-of-mouth and assuming a skilled tradesperson could just “figure it out” on site. That breaks down fast when you’re doing complex remodels where the homeowner is living there, selections are coming through a showroom/design process, and small mistakes ripple into schedule and budget issues.

Now I look harder for attitude, reliability, and the ability to work inside a system. For example, on bathroom remodels with aging-in-place features, I’d rather train a detail-oriented person on our way of doing things than hire someone who has talent but won’t follow layout, waterproofing, or communication standards.

My best recruiting strategy now is to show candidates the actual standard before hiring them. Walk them through a real project, explain how we protect the home, handle change orders, coordinate design selections, and see if they respect the process or just want to swing a hammer.

Assess Adaptability Over Past Trophies

The biggest change I’ve seen is that the C-suite used to be judged primarily on what they’d accomplished. Now we’re looking much harder at how they accomplished it—and whether that approach will still work five years from now.

AI is obviously a big part of that. The technology itself matters, but I’m less interested in whether an executive can talk intelligently about AI than whether they can lead through a period of enormous change. Can they rethink a business model? Can they make good decisions when the old assumptions no longer hold? Can they get a team to actually adopt new ways of working?

One strategy that used to work extremely well but doesn’t anymore is selling the executive’s track record as the whole story. That easily becomes a liability in a fast-paced world, especially if someone is too attached to the playbook that created it.

The executives who stand out now are the ones who have demonstrated adaptability without becoming reactionary. They know what to hold onto, what to throw out, and when they need to learn something completely new.

That’s where I think the AI conversation gets interesting. The executives most likely to thrive aren’t necessarily the ones who know the most about AI. They’re the ones who are comfortable saying, I’ll figure it out.

Swap Essays for Timed Micro Tasks

In cross-border corporate services, the first thing that died was the take-home writing sample. An essay prompt now measures which AI a candidate uses, not how they think, so any funnel built on written answers is filtering noise.

Volume moved just as fast. Greenhouse’s March 2026 hiring-benchmark report (greenhouse.com/recruiting-benchmarks), drawn from more than 640 million applications, found applications per job up 111% and applications per recruiter up 412% between 2022 and 2025. Recruiting is now a verification problem.

We hit both walls. I’m chief executive of TKEG Expat, a corporate-services firm helping companies enter foreign markets; our remote contributor pool spans many countries, and essays were our natural screen. Between 2021 and November 2025 the funnel took in 11,838 applications, 11,381 of them for remote internships. We trained a classifier to grade the essays; it tested at 77.9% precision against our 94% bar, so we demoted it to advisory and moved the real screen to short timed assessments, mostly three-to-seven-minute tasks that are hard to outsource in real time. Roughly 49% of applicants washed out on their own — timeouts, incomplete work — before any human looked, and 119 were approved, about one percent.

For anyone hiring in Europe, the EU AI Act treats recruitment AI as high-risk; deployer duties kick in December 2, 2027 under the Digital Omnibus amendment: human oversight, six months of logs, telling workers you’re using it. That deadline is half the reason the model stayed advisory.

Keith Yunxi Zhu, Chief Executive, TKEG Holdings / TKEG Expat.

Show the Role on Video

The thing that stopped working is the generic job post. For a while I could throw up a listing on the usual hiring sites, say “help wanted, weekend setup crew,” and get a stack of applicants by Friday. That was enough to keep my trucks staffed.

Those posts get ignored now. Everybody is posting the same thing, so my listing just sits in a pile with a hundred others that all sound identical. I’d get clicks and no real people, and my trucks would leave short-handed on a Saturday.

What works now is showing the actual job on video. I film my crew wrestling a 30-foot bounce house into place at the Plano Balloon Festival, or tearing down after a Cowboys event at midnight. I post those clips, and people apply because they already saw what they’re signing up for.

That honesty changed everything. Fewer folks quit after one hot afternoon, because nobody was fooled into thinking this is easy money. My good applicants started coming from people who watched a clip, tagged a friend, and said “we could do that.”

The strange part is my best hires now find me before I even post. They’ve already seen my crew online and they want in. A boring listing used to be my whole plan, and now it’s the one thing I know will get me nowhere.

Favor Range and Clear Translation

The biggest shift for us has been what we look for in the first ten hires on a regulated consumer-health team. Two or three years ago I’d have hired a QA or formulation background first, weighted toward GMP fluency and regulatory instinct. That worked when we were manufacturing-forward. It stopped working once the brand side had to carry growth—we ended up with specialists who couldn’t translate a probiotic strain claim into something a real customer reading a label on her phone would trust, or a CX rep could repeat back.

What we hire for now is range plus translation ability—someone who understands structure-function claim limits AND can write to a customer, brief a designer, or sit in a supplier call. In a small DTC team, one role touches marketing, ops, and compliance in the same week.

The cost of the old approach was real: rewrites, slower launches, and me still stuck as the translation layer between lab language and the landing page. We interview for that skill directly now—a short exercise turning a clinical sentence into consumer copy tells us more than a resume does.

Source From Passionate Customer Communities

When I started the business, hiring meant posting on a big job board and picking from a decent stack of local applicants. That is the strategy that no longer works. The last time I tried it we received over 200 applications, most from people who had plainly never read the advert, a growing share written by AI, and almost none from anyone with an interest in electric vehicles. Sifting them cost more time than it saved.

What changed in our corner of retail is that the work itself moved. Warehouse and admin roles now carry a digital layer, stock systems, listings, support software, so we need people comfortable with data and tools, not just reliable hands. And because we sell to EV drivers, product curiosity matters. A colleague who follows the charging world spots problems and opportunities that a disengaged one never will.

So we recruit where the interested people already are: EV owner groups, our own customer base, local part-timers who want to grow into a role. Our best hire in recent years came from a customer email pointing out an error in one of our buying guides. He cared enough to write in, and he now helps run our content. Small companies win on fit, not reach.

Probe System Design Under Real Failures

Over my ten years in AI, from scaling platforms at Leboncoin to building our autonomous agent OS at AGO, the engineering profile we hire for has completely flipped. A few years ago, we spent most of our recruiting cycles hunting for pure data scientists who could train custom models from scratch. Today, the foundation models are largely there. What our space actually needs are systems engineers who understand how to orchestrate those models, ground them in real company knowledge bases, and make them execute actions securely without hallucinating.

Because the day-to-day work changed, our old technical screening methods stopped being useful. We used to give candidates a clean, structured dataset and ask them to train a simple model over a weekend to hit a specific accuracy threshold. That strategy just doesn’t reflect the reality of building AI products today. Now, I care much less about someone’s ability to tune a model in a vacuum, and much more about how they design guardrails for when an autonomous support agent encounters an unpredictable user. Instead of a standard data science test, we typically drop candidates into a simulated, broken agent deployment and ask them to look at the system telemetry to figure out exactly why it failed.

Recruit Fewer, Train Longer, State Pay

The biggest change is that candidates now research us harder than we research them. Before anyone takes a first call they’ve read our reviews, checked Glassdoor, and searched the founder. Whatever your culture actually is, it’s already public.

What stopped working was volume hiring. Financial services sales floors ran for years on one model: bring in a large class, hand everyone a phone and a commission plan, and let attrition sort it out. That assumed a steady supply of people willing to absorb the risk. That supply is gone, and the model always cost more than the spreadsheet showed, because every washout burned a manager’s time and a piece of the team’s morale.

Now we hire fewer people, spend longer training them, and are specific about compensation in the posting itself. New York’s pay transparency rules pushed everyone in that direction, but it was the better approach before it was required. Being vague about comp only ever filtered for candidates who weren’t paying close attention.

Lead With Blind Skills Screens

Cover letters. We’d read those first before anything in the file. We used to feel good that those got sorted on top.

We knew this for a long time: someone who has been willing to spend forty minutes writing up a unique paragraph about us is inherently filtered out of the 99% of those just blast faxing resume.

Work, in this case, was a proxy for intent. Now that proxy has melted to nonexistence; an email that names product and position and references our blog from last Tuesday now takes the same ninety seconds to write up whether you actually want the job, or if it is just filler when there’s nobody else around. These letters have also gotten good, and that has been part of the problem; when your average application makes pretty much any sense at all, reading cover letters only lets you know who had the word document up. Underlying this is a shift in volume: applications which used to bring several hundred (some few thousand applicants in my time) are sometimes bringing in low double digits, in fact none that effectively filter themselves out of the running early on.

Instead, what we now do is shift skills screening to the start, removing names from all those pages up front to ensure those are done. Only later are cover letters ever read, only at the tail end when the top two to three people can do the job but I need to discover the way they think.

Run Short Paid Trials to Verify

Over the past few years, AI has changed both what we’re hiring for and how we evaluate candidates. Technical execution still matters, but I’m increasingly looking for judgment, problem-solving, communication and the ability to use AI effectively without becoming dependent on its output. Someone who can recognize when an AI-generated solution is wrong or mediocre is becoming more valuable than someone who is simply fast at producing work.

At the same time, the traditional resume, portfolio and take-home assignment have become much less useful as screening tools. It’s now extremely easy to present polished work without being able to tell how much of it actually reflects the candidate’s ability.

Because of that, a short paid, on-the-job trial has become almost a necessity for us. We give someone real work in a controlled setting and evaluate how they communicate, ask questions, use available tools, respond to feedback and ultimately deliver. You learn more from watching someone work for a few days than you can from several rounds of interviews.

The recruiting strategy I’d say no longer works is hiring primarily based on someone’s ability to interview well and present an impressive portfolio. AI has made the gap between appearing capable and actually being capable much harder to identify without seeing someone operate in a real environment.

Build Relationships and Respond Fast

Recruiting for skilled trades has shifted a lot over the past few years. When I started building Emergency Plumbing Squad, finding qualified plumbers was mostly about word of mouth and local reputation. Now there is real competition for skilled trade talent, partly because fewer younger workers are entering the trades at the same rate, and partly because plumbers have more flexibility to work independently or bounce between platforms rather than commit to one company or dispatch network.

That has forced us to think about recruiting less like hiring and more like building a relationship people actually want to stay in, with clear pay structures, faster job matching, and respect for their time, since plumbers now have real alternatives if they feel undervalued.

One strategy that used to work but no longer does is posting a generic job listing and expecting a steady stream of qualified applicants. That approach relied on trades having limited options and being willing to wait through a slow hiring process. Today, a good plumber gets multiple opportunities quickly, so a slow or impersonal hiring process just loses them to someone faster. We had to speed up our own process significantly and treat candidates the way we would treat a customer in an emergency, with urgency and clear communication.

Highlight Growth Paths and Boost Referrals

Salary isn’t the only consideration anymore. Several years ago, if a company offered an additional $1-2 to a candidate’s hourly wage, they would have received stacks of applications for that position by the end of the week. This is not the case today. In the spring of last year, I posted for a job with a pay rate of $1.50 per mile. But, two applicants failed to report for their first scheduled shift after being hired. The reason why candidates fail to report is now less likely to be because of money. But it is now much more likely to be because candidates are interested in advancement opportunities within a company.

Last fall, I lost an excellent candidate because of my inability to provide him with details about his career advancement opportunities with our company. I have now developed a clear career path for potential employees, which includes a progression from crew member to lead to driver. I explain this career path during the interview process so that they can be more motivated to do well for a path they may take for future advancements.

In 2017, it was satisfactory to simply post job ads and then take whatever applications came in, but that is no longer the case. A member of my crew suggested I pay bonuses to my crew for referring good workers into the company. Initially, I thought that would be a waste of money. But I was mistaken. Almost 2 years ago, I put into place a $200 referral bonus to be paid after 60 days. As of now, referrals account for almost 66% of my total hires, and they have a much higher retention rate compared to non-referrals because their friends have told them what the job is really like before they start. How physically demanding it is, how fast the pace is, and how the customer will be watching them closely in case they scratch any furniture.

Elevate Clear Explanations Over Trail Lore

Guests Now Expect Naturalists Who Explain, Not Just Spot

A few years ago, hiring a good naturalist mostly meant finding someone with sharp tracking skills, someone who could reliably spot a tiger or read pug marks well. That alone used to be enough to satisfy most guests.

That’s shifted. Guests today, especially international travelers, want naturalists who can also explain what’s happening, why a tiger is behaving a certain way, what a specific bird call means, the ecology behind what they’re seeing. Spotting skills alone don’t create the kind of experience guests talk about afterward.

The strategy that used to work but doesn’t anymore is hiring purely on tracking reputation within local guide circles. Now I look just as closely at how someone communicates and engages with guests during a drive, not just whether they can find wildlife. A naturalist who’s technically skilled but quiet or hard to understand doesn’t create the same experience anymore, even if the sighting itself was excellent.

That’s changed how I evaluate people before bringing them onto our safaris. Technical skill gets someone in the conversation, but how they connect with guests is what actually decides if they’re the right fit long term.

Target Employed Closers in Adjacent Fields

We used to post out a commission-only role on the job boards like Indeed or ZipRecruiter and within a week we would have a pipe full of candidates. That strategy isn’t working for us right now. People immediately click away from postings for commission-only OTE roles without a guaranteed base salary.

At CloserOnDemand, our method for hiring for commission-only sales positions has drastically changed over the last 5 years. We no longer post to sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter for commission-only sales positions and allow them to fill in a week (if they ever fill at all). Our main approach to filling these types of sales positions now is to proactively hunt down the best closers who are already employed in industries that are adjacent to the role we are hiring for. Typically, we look for highly performing salespeople that are in industries like insurance, real estate or B2B SaaS who are underpaid poorly for their production. Last quarter, 80% of our placements were sourced through proactive outreach to closers that were already employed.

Hiring great salespeople is a sale. Using the skills that you would use to make a sale of your product to find a candidate of high value to your company (as opposed to simply passively posting a job on a job board to find the same old batch of unexcited under-performing candidates) is far better than that. It’s a sale against their current situation, and against not hiring them at all.

Add a Second Unscripted Interview

A single interview used to be enough to know whether someone was a fit for a role on our team. Today, that isn’t the case.

Let me explain.

Today’s candidates walk into an interview with well-prepared, polished answers, many of which have been rehearsed using the help of AI tools. Yes, the responses may appear thoughtful, organized and self-assured at first, but they tell little about how a person really thinks when a real problem suddenly comes up.

To address these changes, Siddhi Yoga has changed its interview process from using one longer interview to two shorter conversations spaced one week apart. The first conversation focuses on the candidate’s past experiences, while the second conversation is based around an unexpected problem or hypothetical situation that the candidate has no time to prepare for in advance. The second conversation is very important because it gives the interviewer insight into the candidate’s true thought processes when confronted with something they were not expecting.

Match Household Fit Beyond Credentials

Recruiting in private households has become much more focused on compatibility, not just credentials. Families still care about experience and references, of course, but they are increasingly looking at communication style, personality, flexibility, boundaries, and whether someone will genuinely fit into the way their household operates.

One approach that no longer works well is hiring mainly from a strong CV. A candidate can look perfect on paper and still be completely wrong for a particular family. We now spend much more time understanding both sides before making an introduction. The better you understand how a family actually lives and what a candidate needs to thrive, the more likely you are to create a placement that lasts.

Optimize Language for ATS Parsers

The biggest change is that the first read of your resume is almost never a person. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) parse, rank, and filter before a recruiter ever opens a file, and the volume of applications per role has climbed to the point where that filtering is not optional for employers.

The strategy that has stopped working is the single, master resume people send everywhere. It used to be fine because a human skimmed it and could infer that your experience fit. Now, if the posting asks for “stakeholder management,” and your resume says “worked with clients,” a keyword filter may score the resume out before anyone reads the nuance.

The winning move today is tailoring the same true experience to mirror each posting’s language and keeping the format clean enough that the parser reads it correctly in the first place. It is less about gaming the system and more about making sure the machine can actually see what someone already offers.

Prioritize Learners Over Direct Experience

The skills required to run a nursery now, are much broader than they were several years ago. We still need people with horticultural knowledge, but we also need skills in inventory control, shipping and customer service. But today we also need people who are e-commerce savvy and fluent in digital marketing, automation, data and learning new technology.

One hiring practice that used to make a lot of sense was to put a lot of weight on whether someone had done that job before. I want to know if they can learn and problem-solve. I have hired people who are great but get stuck when they have to change. Other people who have unusual backgrounds are also very valuable because they are curious and they want to learn.

I think that’s how employers need to communicate opportunities. A job spec is not going to sell any more to the right talent. People are eager to find out about the culture, the expectations, the development on offer and the purpose of what they are doing, before they decide that this is a place they want to invest in.

Time Outreach Well and Humanize Contact

Recruiting has moved from being primarily a sourcing problem to being a prioritization problem. Recruiters have access to more candidates, data and automation than ever, but the real challenge is knowing where to spend their attention.

One strategy that has lost effectiveness is high-volume, generic outreach. AI makes it easier to produce and send more messages, which also means candidates are receiving more noise. The advantage now comes from using technology to identify the right people and the right moment, then making the interaction more relevant and human. Automation should help recruiters focus their attention, not simply increase activity.

Value Judgment and Earned Credibility

The biggest recruiting change has been the premium on judgment under uncertainty. In categories touching sleep, recovery, and health adjacent claims, teams now need people who can separate what research suggests from what marketing wants to say. That has pushed hiring toward candidates who are comfortable reading nuance, understanding materials reliability, and translating complexity into plain language that consumers trust. Functional expertise still matters, but interpretive discipline matters more.

A strategy that has clearly weakened is chasing candidates who built growth during cheaper acquisition years and assuming the same playbook transfers. I look harder for people who can create trust efficiently, because attention can be bought, but credibility usually has to be earned.

Offer Autonomy, Not Office Perks

Right now, I am looking for motivated and independent experts to be part of my team that can do their best work independently. Most modern sales reps are all about being as independent as possible with regards to how they choose to use technology; building their own professional image using social media; and doing things on their own schedule.

In the past, selling a beautiful physical space where a rep could sit at an assigned desk was always effective. However, today most top reps would rather have the option to do whatever they want whenever they want than have access to the fanciest offices.

Streamline Steps and Preview Reality

The landscape of recruiting has drastically transformed from the focus on simply filling positions to ensuring that candidates possess the qualities required to operate in a rapidly evolving, technology-driven workplace. Today, frontline employees expect a seamless mobile application experience, explicit scheduling details, and a realistic preview of the job before they will accept. Employers, as well as the candidates, need to pay attention to more than the applications received by measuring things like time from application to 1st shift, completion of onboarding, and 90-day retention of employees.

An unproductive approach to recruitment that is no longer effective is putting out a generic job advertisement and waiting for responses. Job seekers are looking for promptly responsive communication and minimization of steps involved in the hiring process.

Require PMP Upfront to Compete

Recruitment in project management has changed more in the past five years than it did in the previous two decades. Before, big companies used to hire candidates based on their potential and grant them sufficient time to acquire the much-needed PMP certification within a period of one or two years. Today, it is a different scenario. I have been interacting with the hiring managers of companies like General Dynamics and L3Harris, and it is clear that the recruitment trend has turned upside down. Companies today function with tighter budgets, smaller teams and have little room to get people trained. So, they want candidates to have the PMP certification already in place before their first interview. It is not just a desirable extra anymore. In a lot of cases, it is a first preliminary selection criterion for resumes.

Relying on experience is not enough nowadays. I have been attesting that candidates with experience spanning ten years lose job offers to candidates with only three years of experience yet having this certification already. The trend is stronger than I expected it to be. Since we have been training over 80,000 students in project management since 2003, I know that the people currently getting a job fastest on the market are not necessarily those with the greatest experience. The leaders in receiving job offers are the ones who got the certification earlier than they started searching for a job.