The challenge: Connecting talent with opportunity
Editor’s note: Randy Adis is Insights Career Network’s director of research on research, and SVP at RTi Research. Kahren Kersten is Insights Career Network’s VP of research on research, and founder of Experience Insights. Brian Fowler is Insights Career Network’s senior executive director. This is the second part of a series on hiring in the insights industry. You can access Part 1 here.
Two times a month, more than 100 experienced and mid-career professionals across research specialties and industries wake up and sign into an Insights Career Network (ICN) meetup to connect with “seekers” and “allies.”
As a fee-free, volunteer-powered career support community, the ICN has created a safe place to be heard and not judged as we work on personal skills and wrestle with mental health and career transformation. The ICN tells researchers that it is OK to bring your whole self to the discussion, and that there’s a community of people with relevant experience who have your back.
The most common refrain heard from those with more than 10 years of experience: "Things are so different now."
In this second article of our series on how recruiting and hiring in the insights world has been completely turned on its head in recent years, we're diving into a tale of two eras – the old way and the new way of finding talent and being found in our field.
The old job market: Human-centric but flawed
Until recently, businesses and relationships were built on handshakes, whispered endorsements and personal networks worth their weight in gold. The old way was deeply human-centric, relying heavily on established networks and personal referrals.
Cast your mind back to a time when landing your next role or finding that perfect addition to your team kicked off with a conversation that often began with, “Who do you know at X or who works at Y?” Maybe it was a tip from a colleague you bumped into at a conference, a casual chat that led to a lead or perhaps a call from one of those trusted executive recruiters who knew your work, understood your quirks and had a genuine feel for the company culture they were hiring for.
Sure, job postings were around, but nothing like the relentless firehose of opportunities and applications we're all dealing with these days. You'd usually spot them tucked away on those specialized industry boards, or maybe even buried deep within a company's own site somewhere. The whole process moved at the speed of a deliberate walk, and that afforded us the luxury of time to truly tailor an application with those rich, in-depth conversations and inspirational prose that went beyond bullet points to engaging that crucial, nuanced sense of fit that goes deeper than keywords on a resume.
An efficiency by today's standards? Probably not. A model for diversity of thought or open access? Not so much. But the “old way” had a decidedly human touch on both sides of the hiring situation. It felt personal. Admittedly, this approach sometimes meant prioritizing familiarity over true role compatibility, carrying the inherent risk of overreliance on subjective judgment.
The new job market: Tech-heavy and transactional
So, how did we get from that human-centric world to the wild west of online job boards we're dealing with today? We've been scratching our heads about this for years. Was it those ever-loving applicant tracking systems and AI screening tools that made companies think, “Great! Now we can post everywhere and let the robots sort it out!” Or was it the tsunami of resumes crashing into HR inboxes – especially when the economy hiccups and layoffs happen – that forced everyone to say, “We need machines just to stay afloat?!”
It's a vexing question, and honestly, the answer is probably a bit of both. Suddenly, platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed felt like they were everywhere you looked, and the quickest, easiest option was simply to blast every open role out across them. This cast a wider net, for sure, but it also opened the floodgates. Suddenly, hiring managers and internal recruiters were faced with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applications for a single role. Enter the algorithms.
The "new way" is characterized by this reliance on technology to be the first line of defense (or offense, depending on your perspective) in the hiring process. Job descriptions are crafted with SEO in mind, designed to be scraped by job boards and sorted by algorithms. Resumes are scanned for keywords and specific qualifications, a process that can be efficient but also unforgiving and potentially biased. Recruiters and companies may do their best to review every application, but the human review often comes much later in the process, if at all, for many applicants. Tick the wrong box, use the wrong term or format your resume incorrectly and “Yer out!” before the 800 applications get winnowed to the initial 40 (or eight!) that are passed on to the decision maker.
The challenge for insights job seekers and hiring managers
While technology offers real speed and the ability to process high volumes, something has been lost in the transition, according to the 70 interviews we conducted with insights sector recruiters, hiring managers and job seekers in 2024. The gut feeling about a candidate's potential contribution to a team, their cultural fit or their intangible skills – the things that don't always leap off a resume – can be easily missed by automated systems. This can lead to the "qualification paradox" we've observed: an abundance of candidates, yet a persistent struggle to find the right fit.
This shift has created a more transactional and often impersonal experience for job seekers. The lack of communication, automated rejections and the dreaded "ghosting" that many experience are the natural byproducts of a system designed for volume over human connection. It can have disastrous effect on job seekers, especially those who continuously apply for between two and 20 jobs a day in the hopes that they’ll break through.
Meanwhile, hiring managers are left sifting through algorithm-approved candidates who may lack the very qualities needed to excel in a dynamic insights role.
We've replaced what made talent recruitment human – imperfect but genuine connections – with systems designed purely for efficiency. In our obsession with efficiency, are we slowly chipping away at what makes our industry special? The brilliant, curious minds that can look at data and see the stories and know their relevance. The people. Not keywords or qualification checklists.
While the hiring process has always had its complexities and imperfections, the advent of AI and recent economic shifts have exacerbated these challenges, pushing us to question what we truly prioritize in talent acquisition.
The insights hiring managers in our study revealed their response to the flood of applicants and how incredibly frustrating the whole process of filtering candidates is. As one higher volume hiring manager put it, “Often, I don’t care what’s on the resume. Can you find me someone who can vouch for their work or them as a person? They’re in. And I’m out there – come find me.”
Hiring managers face major daily headaches from battling AI screening systems that miss great candidates, to the impossible task of writing job descriptions that actually work – to the frustration of being told, ”Sorry, you can only look for candidates who tick these exact boxes.”
Despite all this technology supposedly making things easier, it often feels harder than ever to connect great talent with open roles.