Your Hiring System Isn’t Broken. Your Decisions Are
A few months ago, I was on a call with an HR Head of a mid-sized tech company.
They had everything most companies aspire to:
On paper, it looked like a “mature hiring setup.”
But they were struggling.
Roles were taking longer to close.
Hiring managers weren’t satisfied.
And some of their recent hires were already underperforming.
At one point, I asked them:
“Where do you think the problem is?”
They didn’t say tools.
They didn’t say candidates.
They said:
“We’re not confident about our hiring decisions.”
That sentence has come up, in different forms, in almost every conversation I’ve had over the last few quarters.
We’ve now spoken to 10–15 HR and TA heads across IT services, staffing, and high-tech engineering companies.
Different sizes. Different hiring volumes.
But the underlying pattern is the same.
Everyone has a hiring system. No one has a decision system.
It was how consistent they were.
You’d expect a 10,000-employee staffing firm and a 400-person product company to struggle with very different things.
They don’t.
They struggle with the same core issues.
“Resumes look perfect. The candidate is not.”
Across every company we spoke to, resume inflation and skill misrepresentation came up immediately .
And then there’s a newer layer to this:
One leader told me:
“We’re not even sure the person we interviewed is the one who joined.”
That’s not a pipeline issue.
If you ask any TA leader where hiring slows down, the answer is almost always the same:
It showed up in almost every conversation.
Senior engineers are pulled into early-stage screening.
Interview slots are hard to coordinate across time zones.
Good candidates drop because scheduling takes too long.
In one company, hiring got delayed by a week simply because two people needed to be available at the same time.
When your system depends on a few busy people, it doesn’t scale.
This one is always surprising to outsiders.
From the outside, hiring looks “digitized.”
From the inside, it looks like:
In one case, an ATS had been implemented… and never really used.
Not because people didn’t want to use it.
Because it didn’t actually help them make better decisions.
This is the part most people don’t talk about openly.
Get Raj Baskar’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Two interviewers can meet the same candidate and come to completely different conclusions.
Not because one is right and the other is wrong.
Because:
One TA leader told me:
“Half my job is aligning interviewers, not evaluating candidates.”
This is the uncomfortable part.
Even with:
Decisions still get made.
Offers are rolled out.
Teams are built.
Targets depend on those hires.
Which means:
We are making high-impact decisions on top of low-quality inputs.
What I’ve come to believe after these conversations is this:
We’ve spent the last decade improving hiring workflows.
But almost no one has focused on improving hiring decisions.
Every tool in the stack is optimized for movement:
But very few systems ask:
“Are we making a better decision because of this?”
The shift is subtle, but important.
You stop asking:
And start asking:
When you look at it this way, a lot of current practices start to feel… misaligned.
For example:
These are not process inefficiencies.
In a few early implementations, when companies begin to fix this layer:
But those are side effects.
The real change is this:
Decisions start to feel less like judgment calls and more like informed choices.
And that changes how hiring is experienced:
Most companies think they need:
What they actually need is simpler:
A system that improves how decisions are made.
Because until that improves:
If you’re leading hiring today:
Where does your decision break?
That’s where your real problem is.
I’m sharing these observations as we build TuriyaSkills.
Not as a finished mission.
But as a pattern that’s becoming hard to ignore.
If you’re seeing similar issues in your organization, I’d be curious:
Where does it break for you?
Originally published at https://open.substack.com.
