You can’t learn how to recruit and why HR departments fail

There are many professions one can learn, and some where you might only learn 50%, with the rest being empathy and years of experience.

Here are a few examples of professions you can learn by rote and succeed in through diligence:

• Doctor or Surgeon
• Lawyer
• Auto Mechanic
• Cleaner
• Police Officer
• Firefighter
• Tax Officer
• Baker
• Butcher

And here are some examples of professions where diligence alone isn’t enough, even if one would like to mold these jobs into a form that leads to desired success:

• Artist
• Musician
• HR Manager
• Recruiter
• Headhunter
• Psychologist
• Crisis Manager
• Sculptor
• Designer
• Architect

As you can see, these are professions that require a lot of talent and empathy to truly succeed. Furthermore, you continuously improve over the years.

The problem with HR today is that, on one hand, it’s 90% dominated by diligent and emotional women who often prefer to work part-time. On the other hand, management doesn’t give the department much attention. The main thing is that they do their job in HR and the numbers add up. But HR should actually work much more closely with management instead of just being a service provider. HR needs to understand and contribute to the company’s vision and 5-year strategy to be able to recruit the right employees afterward. HR must be taken seriously and respected, because HR knows the market and knows what’s possible and what’s not. CXOs should also listen to this during strategy planning.

However, the management board often bombards HR with tasks to achieve its goals and collect bonuses, and HR has to figure out how to handle this mammoth task. Sometimes they are not qualified enough for the job or only do it part-time.

A core problem in selecting applicants is that empathy and an eye for people cannot be learned; you either have it or you develop it over years. I consider putting people into criteria and judging them accordingly problematic, as people cannot be categorized and cataloged, even if we’d like them to be.

This might still work in the blue-collar sector. The danger is that companies hire overly young HR managers who are cheap and willing but lack empathy, yet have their heads full of rules from their studies and believe that applying these rules will lead to success. The result is a compliant employee pool of generic order-takers without mojo, which might sometimes even be desired, though here again, I’m thinking of the blue-collar sector. We can operate like that there, as individuality isn’t important on the assembly line.

Good HR managers are typically 50+, because they have life experience that you can’t acquire fresh out of university.

Even funny HR questions like: “What kind of turtle would you like to be?” or games including dancing out names, might be fun and something completely new in HR, but they don’t lead to the goal or are too superficially thought out to truly recruit top employees. Nowadays, companies apply to candidates, not the other way around. This has changed since 2015 at the latest, but not all companies have grasped it yet.

HR has a lot to do with empathy, being able to read people, and listening to them. You should never just cling to keywords in a CV or be impressed by top companies on a resume where the applicant brewed coffee and ordered pens, even if it was Goldman, Blackrock, or Nestlé. You have to get to know the new employee, and that takes time.

It’s like dating. If a company doesn’t take the time to truly get to know me through 3–4 conversations and also discusses internal challenges (so you don’t quit after 2 weeks!), why should you work there for years? (go to bed with them)

When you get married, you don’t buy a pig in a poke! (well, in some cultures maybe :-p, lol) Unfortunately, many companies do that nowadays because positions simply have to be filled, no matter how.

“We need 60 new employees by the end of the year! That has just been decided.”

Most of the time, time and workload are problems in HR departments. Which HR Business Partner still takes the time or can take the time to talk to as many candidates as possible and invest 50 hours or more in the project?

We headhunters talk to an average of 50–100 candidates personally, create a shortlist of 3–5 candidates from that, with whom we conduct two more 30-minute interviews each. Then comes the 1st and 2nd interview with the client (45 minutes each), and then perhaps an assessment center (3 hours). In total, you spend about 6–10 hours talking to a shortlisted candidate before an agreement is reached.

HR departments often don’t have this time, as they also have to handle other agendas 50% of the time: internal HR, payroll, marketing, etc. So, hiring is done superficially, and they hope to meet the target of 60 or more hirings per year. What could possibly go wrong?

Healthy companies adhere to the headhunter workflow mentioned above themselves, for example, Google and some Unicorns that can afford it. Other companies, however, that don’t care about employees due to a hire & fire culture or because they are smaller SMEs that cannot afford the time of a perfect hiring workflow, fail miserably or just muddle through.

Also, articles like this one are far too audacious to be taken seriously by companies and HR departments, as headhunters are somehow strange competition, even though they are actually the guardians of the holy grail of recruitment. For us, recruiting is the main task, and not just a sub-area in a large HR agenda consisting of performance management, employer branding, payroll, benefits, fruit baskets, Christmas party organization, and people & culture games.

What can we change now? 4 points:

1. Don’t overload HR with too many tasks if it’s just a small team. HR is not also an event agency, facility manager, and marketing department!
2. It’s better to have 5 people with only 1 area of responsibility in HR than the “everyone-does-everything” concept, which leads to chaos (dynamic team).
3. Track the time spent on tasks to know what capacities are needed to do things well and when you would actually need to hire 3 more people for the workload.
4. Give recruiting more time and space, because new employees are, after all, the future of the company — whether positive or negative.

At least 50–80 working hours should be estimated per position to truly find the best candidate for an area, instead of just taking the first best from the 10 applications received. Hiring good employees also means surveying the market: Who is even out there, etc.?

Here, the manager must follow up and put HR to the test: Who have you approached, how many candidates are in the pool? Have we really spoken to at least 35–50 candidates from competitors? This is the only way to get the best solution/employee from the current market.

Perhaps this article will encourage management/board members to rearrange some things in the HR department to better counteract the shortage of skilled workers. If they have a well-positioned HR department, they will also save on headhunting costs, as well as the chaos that arises from wrongly hired employees.

Anyone who wants to build a good foundation and a sustainable company should not be indifferent to employees and the ways to find them, apart from appreciating the HR department, which is often completely overloaded and therefore performs so poorly. HR departments have this in common with recruiters at recruitment consultancies:

High workload, low salary, and high expectations placed on them. Yet, they are the ones who build the company’s future in terms of personnel.

Thomas Zahlten, Vienna, May 22, 2025

www.breadhunter.group