What makes a recruiting agency successful is their ability to build a network of the industry’s best candidates; everything else follows from there. Top-tier firms don’t choose a recruiter based on how many thousands of unqualified resumes they’ve filtered out; they contract with recruiters because they want top talent, which, by definition, is always scarce. What matters is the quality of who they attract and retain – and when the goal is to be on top, anything that raises that bar is worth the effort.

It’s no secret that most industry-standard recruiting playbooks are fundamentally flawed and treat the hiring party’s best interest as zero-sum against the candidate’s; there are good reasons that the phrase “modern recruiting” is almost always used as an insult. Across the board, hiring processes have largely become a technological arms race where both sides feel justified in wasting the other’s time because theirs was wasted first. From the perspective of a hiring manager, job boards are an increasing nightmare because it’s easier than ever for anyone to shotgun apply with AI, but from a candidate standpoint, the game theory makes sense – why spend time writing a cover letter if you think no one will read it?

Recruiters and hiring managers have largely responded to this by massively scaling up their usage of ATS and automated gatekeeping – and, if you purely go by the numbers, this works. These tools are very effective at cutting through high volumes of unqualified candidates (as I’m sure their sales reps are more than happy to point out), they save hiring managers a lot of time, and they spare companies the hard work of giving qualified candidates human attention until they’re 200% sure. If you’re on the hiring side, it’s effort-efficient and you’ll usually end up with someone who’s good enough. (Though while we’re assessing the pros and cons here, it’s worth mentioning that people selling magic alternatives to hard work are very often con men, and trusting mission-critical functions to con men is a great way to lose millions of records in a data breach because they set your AI bot’s password to 123456.)

Either way, this approach might be justifiable if ‘good enough’ is good enough for you, but not if you want the best – because when the best candidates feel sufficiently disrespected, they opt out. To paraphrase Gordon Ramsay after eating weeks-old microwaved lasagna that the chef assured him was ‘good enough’ for customers: “Most people don’t like to complain to your face, they just don’t come back.” The same applies here – the better the candidate, the more likely they are to value their own time and respond accordingly when their time is wasted. There is almost no scenario where it actually takes months to tell if a candidate for a technical role is qualified (or if an entry-level candidate is a culture fit), and no one is more acutely aware of this than someone on round 8 of interviews who fits the role perfectly. Burning applicants’ time unnecessarily in the name of risk management inflicts significant invisible damage to your talent pool – those who close the tab when it forwards them to a chatbot, or take a competing offer halfway through your interview process, or simply never apply because your reputation precedes you – and almost all that attrition occurs at the far end of the bell curve.

Most people who say hiring needs to “be more human” frame it as a social imperative, and it is, but that’s not the only reason to put in the work. It’s also good business.