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The careers page was almost finished.
It had been through research, writing, design and several rounds of internal review. The team had tried to make it more specific. They had included language employees actually used. They had made some choices about what the company stood for, and equally important, what it did not.
Then the document came back with seventeen tracked changes.
“Demanding” became “fast-paced.”
“Direct feedback” became “supportive environment.”
A paragraph about the difficulty of the work disappeared because someone worried it might discourage applicants.
A specific story about how decisions were made was replaced by a sentence about collaboration.
One phrase was removed because Legal thought it might be interpreted too literally. Another disappeared because Marketing said it did not sound sufficiently “on brand.”
By the end of the review, almost every sentence was easier to approve.
It was also much harder to distinguish from the careers page of the company down the street.
Nobody in the meeting was trying to make the work worse.
Nobody woke up that morning thinking, “Let’s make ourselves sound exactly like our competitors.”
Everyone was doing their job.
That is the problem.
Nobody is the villain
It is tempting to explain bad recruiting by finding the person who got in the way.
HR is too conservative.
Legal kills everything interesting.
Marketing wants to control the language.
Finance will not approve the budget.
Hiring managers are impossible.
The CHRO does not understand employer brand.
Recruiters do not push hard enough.
The agency missed the point.
Sometimes one of those things is true.
Usually, though, it is not the useful explanation.
The enemy is not HR, Legal, Marketing, Finance, the CHRO, the hiring manager or the vendor.
The enemy is a system.
More specifically, it is an inherited way of hiring that has accumulated over decades until its assumptions feel so normal that nobody notices them anymore.
I call it The Usual Way.
The Usual Way is not a written policy. You will not find it in the employee handbook. Nobody formally voted for it.
It is simply the collection of things serious companies are expected to do when they need people.
Open the requisition.
Write the job description.
Post it.
Buy some media.
Ask recruiters to source harder.
Buy an award that says you are a great place to work.
Refresh the EVP every few years.
Put some employee photographs on the careers site.
Use the approved language.
Make sure the message works for everybody.
Add another piece of technology to the workflow.
Now add AI.
Measure applications, impressions, clicks, time to fill and cost per hire.
Then wait for the right people to appear.
None of this sounds absurd.
That is precisely why The Usual Way is so durable.
Reasonable things can produce unreasonable results
If The Usual Way required companies to do obviously foolish things, it would have disappeared long ago.
Instead, almost every individual decision sounds prudent.
Legal wants to reduce risk.
Marketing wants consistency.
Finance wants measurable returns.
Hiring managers want qualified candidates quickly.
Recruiters want enough applicants to work with.
Executives want the process to scale.
Technology teams want systems that integrate.
Every request makes sense when viewed by itself.
Put them together and something strange happens.
Anything distinctive becomes difficult to approve.
Anything broadly acceptable becomes easy.
A strong claim needs evidence. A weak claim rarely does.
A sentence that says exactly what a workplace is like may make someone uncomfortable. A sentence saying “we value collaboration” will sail through review.
A job advertisement that tells the truth about the difficulty of the role may repel some candidates. A generic one will offend nobody.
The system therefore rewards language that is safe, familiar and difficult to disagree with.
Unfortunately, candidates also find it difficult to care about.
This is how sameness becomes confused with professionalism.
It happens gradually enough that nobody sees themselves choosing sameness. People simply remove one risk at a time.
Eventually, almost nothing remains.
Standing out feels reckless
There is an asymmetry hiding inside most large organizations.
Suppose a recruiter writes a conventional job advertisement, runs the usual media, receives a mediocre applicant pool and struggles to fill the role.
It is disappointing, but nobody is terribly surprised.
These things happen.
The market is difficult.
The talent is scarce.
Compensation may be low.
Perhaps the company needs a stronger sourcing strategy.
Now suppose the recruiter tries something unusual.
The job advertisement is candid about the difficult parts of the role. It deliberately speaks to a narrow group of people instead of everyone. It uses language no competitor is using. It openly says who will probably dislike the job.
If that fails, someone may ask a different question.
Who approved this?!
That difference matters.
Failure inside convention is often attributed to conditions.
Failure outside convention is attributed to the person who departed from convention.
The incentive is obvious.
It is politically safer to fail conventionally than to risk succeeding differently.
This is not a recruiting problem. It is an organizational behavior problem.
People respond rationally to the risks the organization gives them.
If saying the same thing as everyone else is unlikely to damage your career, while saying something distinctive requires six approvals and exposes you personally if it goes wrong, the organization should not be surprised when everybody chooses sameness.
The Usual Way does not need anyone to enforce it.
People learn to enforce it themselves.
Familiar hiring is not necessarily good hiring
This is where companies confuse consistency with effectiveness.
A process can be mature, standardized, thoroughly governed and completely unsuited to the problem it is supposed to solve.
Think about the basic recruiting model.
A company needs someone.
It writes down its requirements.
It advertises the vacancy.
It sends recruiters into the market.
It tries to generate enough candidates.
It filters those candidates.
It interviews a few.
It makes an offer.
This works extremely well if suitable candidates are abundant, employers are differentiated primarily by access to jobs and most people looking at the role already want to move.
That is not the market many companies are operating in.
The people they most want often have alternatives.
Many are already employed.
Some are not actively looking at all.
They can ignore a recruiter without consequence.
They can compare five employers that appear remarkably similar.
They can stay where they are.
Yet much of the recruiting system is still built as if the main problem were distribution:
How do we get more people to see the vacancy?
How do we source more names?
How do we automate more outreach?
How do we increase applications?
The Usual Way keeps making the pipe wider without asking why somebody good would want to enter it.
When the system fails, recruiting gets blamed
This is perhaps the cleverest feature of The Usual Way.
It is almost impossible for the system itself to fail.
When applicant quality is poor, recruiting needs to source better.
When response rates fall, recruiters need stronger outreach.
When the career site fails to persuade people, employer brand needs refreshing.
When offers are declined, recruiting should have closed harder.
When hiring managers are unhappy, TA needs better stakeholder management.
When time to fill rises, recruiting needs more automation.
When agency spend increases, internal recruiting needs to become more productive.
The answer is almost always another improvement to the recruiting function.
Rarely does someone ask whether recruiting was given anything distinctive to take to market in the first place.
Consider what recruiters are frequently asked to do.
They must persuade someone with a good job to consider another job using a job description largely written from the employer’s perspective, a careers page full of broad claims, compensation that may or may not lead the market and a collection of approved phrases that competitors are also using.
Then we measure recruiter performance.
There is something slightly unreasonable about this arrangement.
A salesperson would object if you asked them to beat the competition with an indistinguishable product, an indistinguishable pitch and no meaningful proof.
Recruiters are expected to do it every day.
We have already tried "more." A lot.
One way to see the limits of The Usual Way is to look at how much has already been added to it.
Recruiting has more technology than it did twenty years ago.
Companies have more places to advertise jobs.
Recruiters can search more databases.
They can send more messages.
Career sites are more sophisticated.
Applicant tracking systems are more capable.
Programmatic media can optimize spend automatically.
Candidate relationship platforms can nurture talent for years.
AI can write job descriptions, personalize outreach, summarize interviews, rank candidates and automate pieces of the process that once required hours of human work.
If the central problem were simply insufficient activity, insufficient reach or insufficient efficiency, recruiting should be largely solved by now.
It is not.
This should tell us something.
More budget can amplify what you already have.
More media can distribute it.
More automation can distribute it faster.
More AI can produce more versions of it.
None of those things can rescue an employer that has not worked out why the people it most needs should prefer it.
Technology is very good at scaling an answer.
It is less useful when the answer is missing.
The Usual Way responds to weak results by increasing the volume of the system.
More applicants.
More messages.
More impressions.
More automation.
Sometimes this helps.
Sometimes it simply allows a company to sound like everyone else at industrial scale.
The safest sentence in recruiting
You can see The Usual Way most clearly in language.
Take almost any careers page:
“You’ll do meaningful work.”
“We believe in collaboration.”
“Our people make the difference.”
“We are committed to innovation.”
“You’ll have opportunities to grow.”
“We celebrate diverse perspectives.”
“We are passionate about making an impact.”
None of these statements is necessarily false.
That is not the problem.
The problem is that truth is not enough.
A useful employer message has to do more than survive fact-checking. It has to help someone make a choice.
“Opportunities to grow” tells me very little if every company offers opportunities to grow.
“Collaborative culture” tells me nothing unless I know what collaboration looks like here and how it differs from somewhere else.
“Meaningful work” is not a reason to choose if every employer has already claimed meaning.
The safest sentence in recruiting is the one nobody could possibly object to.
It is also usually the sentence no candidate could possibly remember.
Try the Red Pen Test
There is a simple way to see how much of The Usual Way has found its way into your own recruiting.
Take one job advertisement for a role that matters.
Print it.
Now imagine your closest talent competitor has copied it and put their logo at the top.
Read it sentence by sentence.
Every time you find a sentence your competitor could say with equal credibility, cross it out with a red pen.
“We offer a competitive salary.”
Gone.
“You will collaborate with cross-functional teams.”
Gone.
“We are looking for a motivated self-starter.”
Gone.
“Join a fast-paced environment.”
Gone.
“Make an impact.”
Gone.
Keep going until only the things that are meaningfully, demonstrably yours remain.
What is left?
For many companies, surprisingly little.
That is not an indictment of the recruiter who wrote the post. In many cases, the recruiter was working with exactly what the system gave them: approved language, a requisition, a template and a deadline.
The exercise is useful because it makes an invisible problem visible.
The red ink shows you how much of your employer brand belongs to the category rather than the company.
If almost everything disappears, you have discovered why increasing the media budget may not fix the problem.
You do not need more people to see the same thing.
You need something worth seeing.
The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do
This is why I do not think most recruiting problems begin with incompetence.
In fact, the opposite is often true.
Very capable people are doing exactly what the organization has taught them to do.
They are following the process.
Managing the stakeholders.
Reducing risk.
Using the templates.
Respecting the approvals.
Buying the accepted tools.
Tracking the accepted metrics.
They are succeeding at The Usual Way.
The trouble is that The Usual Way was designed to produce something familiar, defensible and scalable.
It was not designed to make a company choosable.
Those are different objectives.
One asks, “Did we follow the process?”
The other asks, “Did the people we most need see a reason to choose us?”
The first is easy to govern.
The second requires judgment.
The first makes sameness feel responsible.
The second occasionally requires somebody to say something that competitors cannot say, even if doing so makes the room slightly uncomfortable.
That is where better hiring begins.
Not with another accusation that TA needs to work harder.
Not with another piece of software.
Not with another campaign telling the world that your people are your greatest asset.
It begins by recognizing the system for what it is.
The Usual Way protects you very effectively from looking foolish.
It does not protect you from failing.
