Process Optimization Articles

Last Tuesday afternoon, I watched Helen—the quiet, dependable recruiter on our team—lean her forehead against a frosted glass partition. She held a stack of candidate profiles printed on misaligned office paper, each crammed with scribbled notes. The hum of our refurbished warehouse-turned-office café played in the background, beans grinding and espresso hissing. Helen had that look: the weary expression of someone who’s spent too many hours wading through applicant pools that felt more like tangled fishing nets than tidy talent streams.

Early one morning, I watched a CFO pinning sticky notes on a glass wall, each one representing an HR function. Some were big-ticket items—external hiring costs, specialized trainings—while others were small but numerous, like subscriptions to unused tools or poorly structured benefits plans. The CFO’s face showed a mix of curiosity and caution. The goal? Save money without eroding the quality that the entire organization relied upon.

It was close to midnight, and I was in that strange half-awake zone where the mind wanders off-road. The office was quiet except for the hum of a distant HVAC unit. I remember sifting through a digital stack of resumes—pages upon pages of repetitive details, job histories that began blending into one another—and feeling the weight of recruiting cycles that seemed endless.

The modern job market is broken, and the culprit might surprise you: the “Easy Apply” button. What started as a well-intentioned feature to streamline job applications has evolved into a system that’s hurting both employers and job seekers alike.