For decades, hiring looked a little like this: companies and recruiters alike would write up a thoughtful job description, post it on the careers page and various hiring platforms, and just wait for the right person to apply. We like to call it “post and pray.” It used to be enough to surface good candidates, but times have changed.
We'll be blunt: we haven't placed a candidate who simply applied to a posting in years. The job posting as a way to attract your next great hire is, for all practical purposes, dead. What's replaced it is a completely different way of finding people, and the companies that are leaning into the change are landing exceptional talent.
WHY JOB POSTINGS ALONE STOPPED WORKING
Two things broke post and pray at roughly the same time. Spoiler alert! They’re both related to AI.
The first is on the applicant side. It's never been easier to fire off an application, so people do… at lightning speed and intense volume. In many cases, AI is writing their resume, and now AI is also submitting the application. The result is a flood of hundreds of applicants for a single role, the large majority of whom aren't remotely a fit, whether on experience, location, or relevance.
For a recruiter, wading through the influx of submissions is pure time lost. The signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed.
The second is on the company side. Job descriptions themselves are increasingly AI-generated, and they tend to describe a role in generic terms that don't capture what the job truly entails. So you have vague postings attracting unqualified applications, and everyone is stuck with a process that isn't producing anyone worth interviewing.
WHERE TOP CANDIDATES COME FROM NOW
If postings don't work, what does? For us, nearly every placement comes from either referrals or outbound sourcing.
Outbound means we go find the person, reaching out directly to someone who fits a role and giving them a genuine reason to consider it. Referrals mean leaning on a network deep enough that the right introduction is usually just a conversation away.
Nowadays, roughly 90% of the candidates we present, and 90% of the ones who ultimately accept, were never looking for a job when we found them. They were happily employed until the right opportunity came to them.
The best candidates for most roles simply aren't actively in the applicant pool, because they're not applying to anything. They're doing their jobs. Reaching them takes a network and a deliberate outbound effort.
WHY YOU SHOULD STILL POST THE JOB (BUT NOT RELY ON IT)
None of this means you should stop posting roles entirely. There are still good reasons to have a public listing. Many companies post for internal reasons, like enabling promotions or internal transfers.
Candidates still expect it, too. When we reach out to someone about a role, the first thing they do is look up the company to find the posting. A public-facing job description signals the role is real and gives an interested person a place to land.
You do have to keep creating the job postings. Just don't mistake them for a sourcing strategy. You're almost certainly not going to find your best hire because they stumbled onto your careers page. The listing supports the search but does not drive it.
There's a way to make that listing work harder, though. Most job descriptions are a wall of responsibilities and requirements, but the part that actually matters to the kind of candidate you want is usually missing.
They want to see the selling points up front. What's the growth path in this role? What's the culture like? Why do people stay? One company we're working with is proud that they've made "best places to work" lists year after year, and that several team members have followed the same leader from company to company because they just love working together. Those are exactly the things that belong at the top of a job description, because they're what make a strong, not-actively-looking candidate stop and consider.
THE COST OF WAITING FOR APPLICANTS
Passiveness has a price, and it's probably higher than you think.
We recently came in to help a fast-growing company after their head of marketing spent months trying to hire on his own, personally combing through every applicant and even running his own outbound on LinkedIn. It was some admirable hustle, but think about what it cost the company.
Every week he spent recruiting was a week of 10 to 20 hours not spent marketing the company he was hired to grow. After all that time, the roles were still open. He finally handed it off, because he needed someone with the network and the bandwidth to source the way today’s hiring requires.
If you wait for applicants now, you either burn your own team's time doing work that isn't their job, or you let roles sit open while the business growth waits. Neither is cheap. In a market where the best people are generally sitting comfortably in their current role, hiring is not a passive activity. You can't post a role and hope. You have to go get the person, and that takes intention, a real network, and a message compelling enough to make someone happy in their job want to hear more.