Friday Fun: How to Break Hiring Without Noticing

Nobody sets out to build a broken hiring system.

If you recognise what follows, you are not observing the system from the outside.

You are part of it.

On the contrary, most companies are convinced they are doing an excellent job. They add structure, rigour, and validation. They call it professionalism. Sometimes even “best practice.”

The outcome remains stubbornly average: slow processes, safe hires, and a recurring complaint that “good people are hard to find.”

They are not.

They just do not queue for obstacle courses.

A Refined Local Craft

In France, this reaches a refined form.

Process as a virtue. Caution as a culture. Consensus as a shield.

And a quiet obsession with not being wrong, which often replaces the ambition to be right.

Decisions stretch. Responsibility diffuses. Titles multiply. Risk gets pushed into the future until it shows up as inertia.

The result looks serious, structured, and mature.

It behaves like a system designed to avoid embarrassment, not to win.

Phase 1 — De-risk Everything

Hiring feels irreversible. A bad hire costs time, money, and a few uncomfortable conversations. So organisations decide to eliminate risk.

They add interviews. Then a few more. Stakeholders appear. Panels emerge. Someone suggests a “final validation.”

Each step looks sensible. Each one sounds responsible.

Collectively, they achieve something else entirely.

The goal quietly shifts from finding the right person to avoiding the wrong one.

Congratulations. You are now optimising for mediocrity with excellent governance.

Phase 2 — Turn Process into Product

Once installed, the machinery needs to justify its existence. Five interviews become standard. Six if you really care about quality. Feedback loops multiply. Debriefs require their own debriefs.

What matters is no longer the signal. It is the ceremony.

Did everyone meet the candidate? Did everyone speak? Did everyone feel heard?

Perfect.

Nobody is any closer to a decision, but the process was followed. Which, in many places, counts as success.

Six interviews. No decision. A polite rejection two weeks later, or nothing at all.

Everyone involved feels they did their job.

Nothing moved.

Phase 3 — Reward Performance, Not Signal

Strong candidates tend to be direct. They ask questions. They challenge assumptions. They focus on substance.

Naturally, this does not play well in a fragmented process where every interviewer looks for something slightly different and none of them own the outcome.

So the system rewards something else.

Consistency. Polish. The ability to repeat the same story six times with minor variations and no visible frustration.

In other words, professional interview performers.

You are not selecting builders.

You are selecting people who can survive your process without rolling their eyes.

Phase 4 — Hide Behind Proxies

Assessing real capability is difficult. It requires context, disagreement, and occasionally admitting that you do not fully understand what good looks like.

So companies reach for safer tools.

Degrees. Brand names. Titles that sound impressive in meetings.

In France, add a preference for pedigree that borders on ritual.

Grandes écoles over demonstrated impact. Titles over outcomes. Tenure over trajectory.

These signals are easy to compare and easy to defend. They also correlate weakly with actual impact, but that detail rarely makes it into the hiring debrief.

Objectivity achieved. Problem solved.

At least on paper.

Phase 5 — Industrialise the Problem

Enter the recruitment agencies.

And here the system reaches peak efficiency in all the wrong ways.

Candidates get parked in pipelines and quietly forgotten. No feedback. No closure. Just silence, as if disappearing were part of the process.

At senior level, it gets more creative.

A candidate spends a weekend preparing a transformation plan. Presents it to a full panel. Gets positive signals. Then silence.

Weeks later, the same ideas quietly reappear internally, delivered by someone cheaper.

This is not an edge case.

It is a pattern.

Ask for a full use case. A strategy deck. A transformation plan. Something that takes hours, sometimes days.

Call it “assessment.”

Then take the material, reject the candidate, and move forward with someone cheaper who will execute the very ideas just presented.

Efficient. Questionable. Common.

In France, this often comes with a reassuring layer of formality: NDAs, structured briefs, carefully worded emails. It looks clean. It behaves the same.

Job descriptions follow the same logic.

Looking for an executive who is deeply hands-on. A leader who codes. A senior engineer who defines strategy. A manager who owns outcomes but has no authority.

Inconsistent expectations packaged as opportunity.

Everyone nods. Nobody clarifies.

On paper, they accelerate hiring. In practice, many industrialise the same flaws at scale.

Keyword matching dressed up as assessment. CV polishing presented as insight. Volume mistaken for quality.

The incentive is simple: close the role.

Not challenge the brief. Not improve the signal. Not tell you that your process repels the very people you claim to want.

So they feed the machine.

More candidates who look right on paper. More cycles. More noise.

Everyone stays busy. Nothing improves.

It is not a conspiracy.

It is a business model aligned with the very dysfunction it should correct.

Phase 6 — Remove Accountability

Hiring decisions become collective. On paper, this reduces bias. In practice, it distributes responsibility so thinly that it evaporates.

No one wants to take a risk. No one wants to sponsor a candidate who might be “a bit different.”

So the system converges, as systems do, toward the safest possible outcome.

The candidate nobody objects to.

Not the one who would actually change anything.

Phase 7 — Let Time Do the Damage

The process expands. Weeks pass. Sometimes months, because excellence cannot be rushed.

The best candidates, strangely enough, refuse to wait around for enlightenment.

They accept other offers. From companies that somehow manage to decide without a committee of twelve.

The ones who remain are, by definition, those willing to tolerate the process.

Which tells you a great deal about what they will tolerate later.

Phase 8 — Blame the Market

At this stage, the organisation develops a theory.

“The market is difficult.”

“There is a talent shortage.”

“We need to widen the funnel.”

In France, add: “candidates are not loyal anymore.”

All plausible. All convenient.

Because they avoid a more precise diagnosis.

The system is working exactly as designed.

It filters out speed, clarity, and challenge. It selects for conformity, patience, and a high tolerance for organisational theatre.

The Cost You Pretend Not to See

This does not stop at hiring. It compounds.

You build teams that wait for instructions, avoid friction, and optimise for approval. People who learned, during the hiring process, that fitting in matters more than thinking clearly.

Then you ask for ownership, initiative, and innovation.

And act surprised when none of it materialises.

It started earlier.

At the door.

What Good Systems Actually Do

They do not pretend hiring can be de-risked into submission.

They define what success looks like and align around it before meeting candidates. They reduce steps not to move faster, but to avoid destroying signal. They accept disagreement and force decisions instead of diffusing them.

They challenge the brief instead of outsourcing judgement to agencies.

Most importantly, someone owns the hire.

Which means someone owns the risk.

An uncomfortable concept in environments that prefer shared responsibility and collective indecision.

If this feels familiar, it is because it is not an exception.

It is the system you are running.

The Only Question That Matters

If your hiring system feels safe, predictable, and fully controlled, what exactly are you optimising for?

Because it is unlikely to be talent.

More likely, it is the reassuring illusion that nothing can go wrong.

Until, of course, nothing meaningful goes right either.

Friday fun. ⚠️ Bad hiring is not an accident. It is what happens when you optimise for safety over signal.

#Hiring #Leadership #SystemsThinking #Engineering