How a broken recruitment process drains both jobseekers and employers

The hiring market is already a pressure cooker for anyone trying to land their first job. When the broader economic climate limits new openings and employers expect more experience than most fresh graduates can realistically have, even highly motivated candidates find themselves in a cycle of constant applications and rare call-backs. Yet there’s a particular systemic flaw in how many recruitment agencies now operate that makes the entire process slower, less transparent, and ultimately more damaging to both sides of the hiring table. It’s not just that the market is tough—there’s a structural inefficiency baked into the process that works against speed, trust, and quality.

Take the example of a recent graduate who shared her experience on a public forum. She has a diploma in Early Childhood Education, has sent out over a hundred applications in a matter of weeks, and landed only three interviews. None led to job offers, with employers citing a lack of experience. That in itself is a common entry-level hurdle. But the more pointed frustration she raised was about the recruitment agencies handling these roles. Many no longer reveal the name of the hiring company at the outset. Sometimes candidates only find out the employer’s identity during the second round of interviews, after already investing time and emotional energy in the process. For her, it felt “ungodly and unnecessarily tedious.” And she’s not wrong—when you strip this down to its operational logic, the approach creates needless friction and burns valuable hiring cycles.

From an agency’s point of view, the stated reasoning often revolves around protecting their commercial position. If the company name is disclosed too early, the fear is that candidates might bypass the agency and apply directly to the employer. On paper, this sounds like a defensive measure to safeguard revenue. But in practice, this opacity undermines the very thing the agency is meant to deliver: efficient, high-quality matches between employers and candidates. Every layer of secrecy slows the process, prevents meaningful preparation, and increases the chance of misalignment.

The core break in the system starts with how this secrecy affects candidate behaviour. A jobseeker who doesn’t know which company they’re interviewing for cannot tailor their preparation to the employer’s industry, culture, or history. Instead of walking into a conversation ready to show contextual fit, they’re forced into generic answers and surface-level engagement. Even the most talented candidates appear less compelling in these circumstances, not because they lack ability, but because the process has stripped away their ability to differentiate themselves. That, in turn, reduces the quality of interviews, which then reinforces the employer’s perception that the candidate pool is weak. It’s a feedback loop that drains momentum from the start.

There’s also the matter of self-selection, a crucial but often overlooked part of recruitment efficiency. When candidates know the employer early, they can decide for themselves whether the role is worth pursuing. If the company’s values, location, or industry are a poor fit, they can opt out before wasting anyone’s time. By hiding the employer’s name, agencies force unsuitable candidates to continue through early stages, leading to wasted interview slots, longer shortlisting cycles, and ultimately a lower conversion rate from interview to offer. What agencies see as “protecting the client” is, in effect, diluting the quality of the client’s hiring process.

For employers, the damage is subtle but significant. On the surface, the recruitment funnel might look active, with a steady flow of candidate submissions. But this volume can be deceptive. Many of these candidates are half-committed or poorly informed, making it to first interviews without the context needed to perform well. From a systems point of view, the metric of “profiles submitted” is a false positive. It signals activity, not progress. The true measure of a healthy funnel is the ratio of offers accepted to interview hours invested. When that number is low, it’s a sign that something upstream in the process is leaking value.

The irony is that employers often don’t see this clearly because their internal dashboards aren’t designed to reveal it. They track how many interviews happen, how many CVs are received, how many offers are extended. But they don’t calculate the cost of redundant interviews, nor do they measure the drop-off rate after employer names are revealed. Without that lens, the inefficiency remains invisible, and the flawed process gets repeated.

For jobseekers, the personal toll is heavy. Every interview comes with a preparation cost—not just in time but in cognitive and emotional investment. Repeating this process multiple times for roles that turn out to be mismatched is demoralising. In a tight job market, that demoralisation can erode confidence, which then affects performance in the interviews that actually matter. In other words, the broken process doesn’t just waste time; it degrades the very quality of the candidate pool over time.

This is where the founder’s perspective becomes useful. If you think about hiring as a system, every unnecessary step that adds delay or opacity increases the cost of acquisition—just as in a customer acquisition funnel. The longer the cycle time between a candidate entering the process and receiving an offer, the greater the chance they’ll drop out, accept another job, or disengage entirely. In sales, you wouldn’t hide the name of your product until the second meeting and expect the buyer to stay excited. Yet in recruitment, agencies are doing the equivalent, and employers are allowing it.

The fix starts with aligning incentives between employer and agency. If you’re a founder or hiring manager outsourcing recruitment, your agency agreement should stipulate that all candidate submissions include the hiring company’s name, either immediately or after a very short initial screening. This isn’t about giving away your hand—it’s about enabling candidates to prepare well and self-select early. By doing so, you ensure that every subsequent interview is with someone who actually wants to work for you, knows who you are, and has taken the time to engage meaningfully with your business.

Agencies, for their part, need to rethink what they’re selling. Secrecy is not a defensible advantage; speed and fit are. An agency’s competitive edge should come from its ability to identify candidates who not only meet the technical requirements but also align with the company’s culture and growth trajectory. This requires upfront transparency, better candidate briefing, and a commitment to shortening the decision cycle. Protecting client names like trade secrets might feel safe in the short term, but in the long run, it undermines trust and diminishes perceived value.

For founders running in-house recruitment, the lesson is broader. Audit your hiring funnel as rigorously as you would a sales funnel. Where are you introducing friction? Where are you withholding information that could help a candidate make a faster, more informed decision? In many cases, job descriptions are vague to the point of opacity, leaving candidates unclear on role expectations until deep into the process. That kind of withholding may seem harmless, but it carries the same cost as agency secrecy—it slows momentum, increases churn, and lowers the overall yield of your hiring investment.

The measurable outcome you should be watching is not how many people you interview, but how efficiently you convert the right candidates into accepted offers. This means tracking not just the conversion rate from interview to offer, but also the time-to-fill for each role and the retention rate of hires made through the process. If those metrics aren’t improving over time, it’s a signal that your process is accumulating debt—process debt that will make every subsequent hire harder and more expensive.

This structural issue also speaks to a larger truth about execution in business. Systems that prioritise self-protection over value delivery inevitably slow down and decay. Whether it’s a product funnel, a customer service workflow, or a hiring process, the same principle applies: opacity and over-control erode trust, and without trust, velocity collapses. In the context of recruitment, that means fewer top-tier candidates making it to the finish line, more wasted interview hours, and a weaker overall team.

The final takeaway for operators is simple but non-negotiable. Replace volume-based metrics with value-based ones. Instead of tracking how many CVs you receive or how many interviews you conduct, measure how many accepted offers you generate per interview hour invested. That single metric forces clarity, rewards transparency, and exposes any structural delays that are costing you talent. When you see that number improve, you’ll know your process is working. When it stagnates or declines, you’ll have a clear signal that it’s time to re-engineer the system.

In the end, the job market’s current challenges are not within the control of individual founders or hiring managers. But the efficiency, transparency, and fairness of your own hiring process absolutely are. If you strip away the unnecessary secrecy, align incentives with your recruitment partners, and measure success by real value created rather than activity logged, you can build a hiring system that works in any market. And that’s the kind of operational discipline that doesn’t just fill roles—it builds teams that can actually execute.