Uncertain economic times, high volumes of layoffs, and easy access to AI tools mean many employers are dealing with an unprecedented number of applications.
Recruiters are overwhelmed, candidates are getting ghosted, and trust in the recruiting process is suffering. But are TA teams doing all they can to relieve the pressure at the top of the funnel and give job seekers the clarity they need? Employers want candidates to be more intentional about applying for the right roles for them, but often post roles with unclear requirements and don’t approach hiring strategically.
So what should TA leaders be doing to fix the process and rebuild vital trust with job seekers?
My guest this week is Catherine Wylie, Senior Talent Acquisition Business Partner at Mavericks Recruiting On Demand. Catherine has recently joined the business after a six-month job hunt. She has some incredible, valuable insights and advice to share for both employers and other TA professionals in job search mode.
In the interview, we discuss:
Catherine’s recent job search experience
• Dealing with the extreme level of volume at the front of the recruiting funnel
• Lack of clarity, unclear requirements, and the importance of transparency
• Speed to delivery versus speed to quality
• Why the matching process is broken
• How employers can be intentional and hire holistically
• Which companies are actually doing this well
• Restoring trust in the hiring process
• Advice to TA job seekers
• What should the future look like
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Transcript:
Ep 751 Recruiting Future
Tue, Jan 06, 2026 8:52PM • 20:43
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Candidate experience, recruiting process, job applications, hiring delays, job requirements, talent acquisition, intentionality, recruiter speed, job offers, transparency, AI in recruiting, persona hiring, HR technology, candidate journey, resilience.
SPEAKERS
Matt Alder, Catherine Wiley
Matt Alder 00:00
For many employers, application volumes have been at an all time high this year. Inevitably, this has impacted the candidate experience and eroded trust in the hiring process. But do things have to be this way? What could employers be doing to make the recruiting experience better for everyone? Keep listening to find out.
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Hi there, and welcome to episode 751 of recruiting future with me. Matt Alder, uncertain economic times, high volumes of layoffs and easy access to AI tools mean many employers are dealing with an unprecedented number of applications. Recruiters are overwhelmed. Candidates are getting ghosted, and trust in the recruiting process is suffering. But are ta teams doing all they can to relieve the pressure at the top of the funnel and give job seekers the clarity they need employers want candidates to be more intentional about applying for the right roles, but often they post roles with unclear requirements and don’t approach hiring strategically. So what should ta leaders be doing to fix the process and rebuild vital trust with job seekers?
My guest this week is Catherine Wiley, senior talent acquisition business partner at Mavericks recruiting on demand, Catherine recently joined the business after a six month job hunt. She has some incredibly valuable insights and advice to share for both employers and other TA professionals in job search mode. Hi Catherine, and welcome to the podcast.
Catherine Wiley 02:40
Hi. How are you? I’m very well.
Matt Alder 02:42
Thank you, and it is a pleasure to have you on the show. Please. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Catherine Wiley 02:48
Yeah, sure. So I’ll keep it simple and sweet. I am a senior Talent Acquisition Professional. I’ve been in the industry for a little over 12 years, worked in leadership operations and pulled up my sleeves and done the recruiting myself. So yeah, that’s that’s a little bit about me. I’m currently working for a company called Mavericks recruiting on demand. They’re an RPO style recruiting consulting firm that is specifically dedicated to support early stage startups in the tech space. And right now, I’m working with a client called Ready on AI, helping them scale out their talent acquisition initiatives and get to hiring
Matt Alder 03:34
fantastic stuff. So you’ve just been through quite an intense period of job seeking. Tell us about the kind of experience that you had, and really what sort of surprised you the most about the state of talent acquisition and what the candidate experience is actually like today.
Catherine Wiley 03:51
Yeah, for sure, it was interesting. I was a candidate for about six months, and although I did recently land somewhere, I had a lot of takeaways. And I quite frankly, am really grateful for the experience of being on the other side, because I did learn a lot about, you know, what candidates are dealing with, right? And I think there. I mean, really a short, short answer. Here is one thing that I really noticed, and what I think is clearly, clearly going on are kind of two things. Number one, the state of the funnel on the front end, the volume is extreme, and so it’s really hard for recruiters to manage that, but, but also, I think there’s a lack of clarity on the front end. And by that, I mean, you know, there’s unclear job requirements before we go to post. I think there’s, you know, a mix of, are we hiring? Are we not hiring? And so I just think. Think the what I’ve noticed the most, and where I feel there’s the most lack of clarity is on the front end of the funnel, where you know those candidates are coming in at that initial sourcing stage.
Matt Alder 05:12
Paint a picture for us. What were your kind of numbers on this? How many jobs did you apply for? Did you hear back from everyone? What was the journey like? Yeah.
Catherine Wiley 05:20
So I actually kept track of everything I applied to a little over 100 jobs. But that also includes companies that, you know, I’ve networked with, have connections at and have really kind of embedded myself in their groups, but so around 100 applications led to 12 interviews. I got two job offers. I did decline those for just a lack of clarity around what the offer was. Also it was offered something that was well below my expectations that we had discussed on the front end. 52, of those applications were declined, and still, to this day, 50 applications are still pending. I haven’t received a response so so I mean, like the numbers don’t lie, nearly half of my job search activity remains open, right? And I think that reflects a mix of hiring delays, unclear job requirements and probably some team capacity issues, probably all at once. So for me, my thoughts are, I think recruiters are focused on speed to delivery versus speed to quality on the front end specifically. And then I also think, you know, the the high proportion of declinations and offer stands out for me. I know the landscape is very competitive right now, but I think the issue goes deeper. I think the matching process on both the candidate and company side is fundamentally flawed, and candidates are told to be strategic right now, but most jobs that are being posted or described aren’t very intentional, right? And so candidates are told you need to be aggressive and be intentional about where you’re applying. But I think meanwhile, we as recruiters need to do a better job of being intentional about what we want to hire for.
Matt Alder 07:13
Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point that’d be great to sort of dig into that, because we’re kind of living in a world where recruiters are getting hundreds, if not 1000s of applications, sometimes for jobs. There’s, you know, always a lot of criticism about, you know, candidates are using AI, all the applications look the same, inflicting advice out there about tailoring applications and all that sort of stuff. So it’s very, it’s very difficult situation for candidates. What is it that employers and recruiters could do to kind of really return the favor. They’re asking candidates to be very intentional about how they reply, how they apply. What are employers providing in return? Or what are they not providing in return? At the moment,
Catherine Wiley 07:49
yeah, I think I talk about the speed to value recruiters, at least. I think the best recruiters often act like solution consultants, while hiring managers play a role of clients, I think we’d all benefit, like I said, from slowing down at the start and investing more time up front to clarify what’s actually needed before any search or candidate engagement begins. I’ve been in scenarios, and I’m sure there’s other recruiting teams or talent acquisition teams out there that feel that, that sense of urgency to just get a job posted and start talking to people, which is fine. However, when you get on a phone with a recruiter, or you get on a, you know, a Google meets, you know, you want to spend time and understand what, what does this job mean? What am I actually going to be doing today, and what’s the future look like? And when we try to get through that initial kickoff and intake, there’s just a lack of clarity. Questions remain unanswered. Candidates move through the process and maybe are reluctant to ask certain things, because maybe they should know them. And I just think if we all took a step back when we’re going to hire and, you know, going to put something out there, we’d all benefit from taking a step back and thinking about of hiring more holistically, rather than just a functional or task oriented initiative. So just being more proactive of funnel management, but also really taking a step back and Solutioning what’s necessary in order to go to market to find the next hire.
Matt Alder 09:31
Absolutely and, you know, it sounds that sort of very often, employers are still behaving like that. We’re in a, you know, a very market that’s very short candidates, and they need to get everything out there as quickly as possible and getting as much response as they can. But you know, very, very often we’re operating in very different times, aren’t we?
Catherine Wiley 09:48
Yeah, absolutely, totally agree with that
Matt Alder 09:54
during the job search that you had, other than obviously, the company that you’re working for now. Were there any other companies that kind of really stood out in terms of doing this well or things, or in general, things that employers were doing that were really helping you and sort of indicating that they were putting that, that kind of thought and intention into what they were doing?
Catherine Wiley 10:13
Yeah, so a company called Ashby, I applied to two roles there and Ashby. I mean, we know who they are now. They are a, I guess, a talent intelligence platform, but they have a great ATS solution embedded in their tool. But I applied to their roles. I love their application process. It’s very it’s easy, but it’s intentional. So the way that they describe their jobs, they give you clarity on almost everything. Who are you going to be working with? What does a day in the life look like? You know, outlining. You’ll thrive in this role if you have this but this might not be the right opportunity if you’re looking for this. So a lot of details around matching personas, but also, you know, attracting those candidates that want to work at a company that you know describes itself like this. It’s, it’s a lot of information, and I appreciated that other people might, might not need all that, but for me, it felt very authentic to my persona, and I appreciated that, so I decided to intentionally apply. I felt like they were matching my intentionality, so I was more enthused to, you know, get my application in there. They also were very explicit about the time it takes on the front end of the funnel to go through everything. You know, I didn’t mind that. I’m okay if your team is stepping as taking a step back to really understand, okay, who’s applying? What are we looking for? How do these people align based on the needs of the business? And then they followed up. I didn’t get the job. I didn’t interview for anything with them, but they provided me with a very intentional, let’s call it declination. They clearly explained to me what they liked about me. However, you know why they were seeking other candidates, and it felt authentic. It could have been, you know, something distributed and sent to me via AI or an automated response, but it’s it was authentic. It felt authentic and it resonated with me absolutely.
Matt Alder 12:35
And it’s really interesting that you kind of picked that one out, and you know, that’s job that you didn’t get an interview for, but it just shows you it can be a much more positive experience than it is at the moment for many people. And I want to come back to the the employer ta side of things in a second. But obviously there are lots of people listening ta professionals who are in a similar position to the position that you were a few weeks ago, out in the market looking for jobs, that kind of stuff, finding it very difficult. Do you have any advice anyone sort of currently looking for a job in this market?
Catherine Wiley 13:08
Well, first of all, be kind to yourself. You’re stronger than you think, even in the toughest moments, right? You I think this could be looked at as a gift. And, you know, I, and I mean that intentionally, right? So if you’re, you know, you’re in this space where you were recently, you know, delivered, you know, the news of, hey, I’m being you’re getting laid off, right? I’m a planner in nature, so uncertainty usually sends me into overdrive. But this time, I didn’t, I didn’t feel defeated. And instead of spiraling, I focused on being present, reminding myself that the future isn’t something I can control. So, so why let that fear run the show? So, you know, I just made a conscious effort to kind of silence that inner critic and take a step back to truly understand what actually makes me happy. And, you know, design a job search strategy that’s based on an intentionality and all about me. So So those little rituals really kept me grounded. And truthfully, the shift started with a conversation I had with myself. You know, I wasn’t going to let shame define my journey. I saw this as a gross moment to train my brain to accept uncertainty. You know, the jobs, the money will go but the real constant is you. You take you wherever you go. So my biggest lesson is, don’t, don’t compromise your best qualities, even when you’re up against a wall or feeling misunderstood. That mindset really did carry me through the mountain of rejections. I guess you could say or, or, or no response at all and help me peel back. Yeah. Really helped me peel back the layers on what I truly want. So I think, you know, it helped me just really establish again, ground myself, and establish what was really true to me moving forward. And also built some resilience to say, No, right? I did decline two jobs, and that’s money on the table that that maybe I, you know, could have said, Oh, well, it’s better than nothing. But at the same time, I really, I don’t believe in compromising your best qualities. So if you you have an idea, and you’re intentional about the search, it’s going to be easier to manage and kind of be fun, and you’ll learn new things about yourself. You maybe never, never knew.
Matt Alder 15:45
It’s really clear that situation that we’re kind of in at the moment is sort of really destroying trust in the recruitment process, from from candidates, any trust that there was in the in the first place, because this is a kind of an age old situation, and trusted employers and recruiters and all that kind of thing from a talent position, leadership perspective, how do you think? How should employers be thinking about how they act, what they take to market, what they what they do, in order to really kind of restore that trust in the recruitment process?
Catherine Wiley 16:18
Yeah, so I think ta leaders and just, you know, recruiting in general, we all need to take a step back and think about what we’re going to market with and how we describe what we want our candidates to do. I feel like they invested a lot of time on the front end to understand, you know, what this position is doing, but also, how will they deliver? How will they interact with the business? It was really fleshed out with a lot of details, and we we want our candidates to provide that type of information in their applications and their resume. And so I think if we take a page out of that book, our own book, and what we ask our candidates to do, we should apply that system in action of how we put together our goals and our hiring strategies, so kind of, rather than just, again, thinking of recruiting as a function within a function, or task oriented unit, where we open a rec, we, you know, put together a job description, and then we go to market, and it’s Wash and repeat. Think things need to be more fluid and transparent on the front end. So not only do you engage the right type of candidates, but there’s just more clarity on the front end to build trust.
Matt Alder 17:56
Transparency, absolutely and I suppose, moving on from that. What’s your kind of vision for recruiting in the future? We’ve got, obviously, a lot of technology AI coming into the coming into the process. How do you hope the recruiting process? You know, things might look like in two or three years time.
Catherine Wiley 18:13
I think we’re going to have more conversations about experience in general. There’s a lot of emphasis on building HR technologies that hone in on what does experience feel like, what what’s, what does the journey look like for a candidate? So I think we’re going to see more conversations around orchestrating new journeys for candidates and how they connect to recruiters, and that’s going to drive more authenticity in the process and how we engage in the market. And, of course, AI and automation and learning models that help understand, okay, what makes this candidate tick versus another? I think recruiting is going to shift to be more focused on building better experiences that are more authentic to attract the right candidates and the right personas. There’s going to be more about persona hiring like do you fit in to where we’re at currently, and does this align to your current goals? So hopefully you know that it’ll be more strategic and more advisory and solution based focus, versus just being an embedded function that focuses on hiring, recruiting is going to have a bigger seat at the table, because we have more perspective on what’s going outside? Going on outside versus inside? Catherine, thank you very much for talking to me. Yeah. Thank you.
Matt Alder 19:49
My thanks to Catherine. You can follow this podcast on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at. Recruiting future.com on their site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, recruiting future feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me. You
