We’re hiring and being hired by a generation that grew up watching the gap between filtered images and real life — and they’ve gotten very good at spotting the difference. Here’s a quick look at what’s authentic.

Every week brings another version of the same headline: Company X cuts Y thousand jobs, citing AI.

It feels like a wave. It feels inevitable. It feels like the entire labor market is being rewritten by automation in real time. Here’s what’s true.

For most of the last decade, recruiting drifted into a transaction. But, time-to-fill is up. Quality of hire is down. Everyone’s frustrated. A better ATS isn’t the fix. Remembering that recruiting has always been a relationship business is.

Whether it’s a 5,000-person reduction in force, a department restructure that eliminates two positions, or a single performance termination, saying goodbye to an employee is one of the hardest things any organization does. And one of the things organizations are most consistently bad at.

Friction between recruiters and hiring managers is real and expensive. Recruiters are measured on speed and funnel efficiency, while hiring managers are often paralyzed by the fear of making a bad hire. Different games, different scoreboards. After watching this dance for two decades, here’s what actually fixes the friction.

There’s a tension in recruiting right now between two realities. Some roles demand volume. Other roles require a high-touch approach. Here’s what I see too often: organizations pick one approach and apply it to everything.

Think about a sophomore in high school. They’re figuring out who their friends are, whether they like chemistry, how to parallel park. And we’re asking them to narrow down a career direction? What if we gave them space to explore instead?

We talk a lot about pipelines in recruiting. But a pipeline assumes there are people in it. If students don’t know a career exists, they can’t pursue the education or training to get there. It’s that simple.

Spring cleaning isn’t just about throwing things out — it’s also about deciding what’s still earning its place. Your hiring process deserves the same honest look.

Four years ago, on April 15, I officially launched Sunflower Talent Strategies. Looking back, the work has taken shapes I didn’t fully anticipate, but the thread that ties it all together is a belief that the status quo isn’t good enough.

Job descriptions fail when they’re written for legal compliance or to make the company sound impressive. They work when they’re honest about the actual work and why someone talented would want to do it. Read on for tips.

We all know speed matters in hiring. But I don’t think we talk honestly enough about what slow hiring actually costs — not just in lost candidates, but in the damage it does to the team you already have.

“They’re not a culture fit,” has become the polite way to reject candidates we don’t click with. But the uncomfortable truth: our obsession with culture fit often leads us to hire people who think, look, and act exactly like we do — and that’s not doing anyone any favors.

We like to talk about how much recruiting has evolved, but you know what really happened? We moved ads from newspapers to the internet. That’s it. So what’s the actual disruption that would make it all work differently?

We love to blame the skills gap for our hiring struggles, but, after spending years in this business, I’ve learned it’s often not a skills gap at all. A lot of times, the problem is a motivation gap, and we’re the ones creating it.

Most candidate ghosting isn’t personal. It’s predictable. And that means it’s something you can fix. Here’s where to focus.

Everyone’s talking about skills-based hiring like it’s revolutionary. But here’s the dirty secret: most organizations that claim to do skills-based hiring have just swapped one lazy proxy for another.

Recruitment systems fail silently. Here’s what to look for — and what to do about it.

Your AI keeps optimizing the time-to-hire. Meanwhile, your 90-day retention just dropped 15%. Here’s the disconnect: AI optimizes for whatever you tell it to. It can’t question whether those metrics matter. Try this instead.

Short answer: Probably. Here’s what to fix today.