Is Your Hiring Process Telling the Wrong Story?

Originally published in my LinkedIn newsletter, Incurably Curious: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-hiring-process-telling-wrong-story-kate-mayeski-m3d3c

I keep getting stuck on the same contradiction: business owners and hiring teams say they cannot find good people, while capable professionals are sitting on the other side of the market wondering why they cannot get a real response.

Over the past 90 days, I have fielded more than 700 job seeker support inquiries, from resume rebuilds and LinkedIn rewrites to career coaching and interview strategy. They come from new graduates, single parents reentering the workforce, executives trying to transition away from corporate roles, professionals navigating layoffs a few years before retirement, career changers, and military or government workers trying to translate their experience into the private sector.

Different stages. Different stakes. Different stories. But the pattern is hard to ignore. Many are doing what they were told to do. They apply through the portal, follow up, prepare for interviews, update LinkedIn, optimize for applicant tracking systems, ask for feedback, and keep going.

And still, too many end up in silence.

The silence is part of the story

One executive told me their search had started strong. They were getting calls and moving through interviews. In a few cases, they made it "all the way to the last level." In one process, an "offer letter was supposed to come." Then it "went completely dark."

That is not a candidate needing a prettier resume. That is a business standards problem. It is also a storytelling problem.

I talk a lot about storytelling because most people think storytelling is only what you write on your website, say in a pitch, or post online. It is not. Your business is telling a story all the time, whether you mean to or not.

Your job description tells candidates something. Your interview process tells them something. Your follow-up tells them something. Your silence tells them something too.

When a company ghosts a candidate, the story does not end because the company stopped communicating. The candidate tells the next version. They tell their spouse, friends, former coworkers, and people in their industry. Sometimes they write the Glassdoor review. Sometimes they post about it online. Sometimes they say nothing publicly, but they remember.

A company may think it simply failed to send an update. The candidate may walk away believing the company is disorganized, disrespectful, unclear, overloaded, or not what it claims to be. That story may or may not be fair. But once a business creates the gap, people fill it in.

Businesses have a translation problem too

The obvious translation issue sits on the job seeker side. Candidates are trying to make their experience readable to the market. I hear this constantly. One person told me their LinkedIn and resume were "not really telling who I am." They were not saying they lacked experience. They were saying the market could not read their leadership, judgment, technical ability, or value clearly.

But businesses have the same problem.

A candidate may be asking, "How do I make my experience easier to understand?" A business should be asking, "How readable are we?"

Can a candidate understand what the role is supposed to solve? Can they understand the process, timeline, expectations, standards, and culture? Or are they forced to guess?

When people have to guess, they write their own story.

The external research backs up what I am seeing. iHire's 2025 State of Online Recruiting report found that 59% of candidates said ghosting, applying or interviewing and not hearing back from employers, was a top job search challenge. Stepstone reported that 64% of job seekers said they had been ghosted by companies during the application process.

This is not a few sensitive applicants needing thicker skin. Patterns become culture.

But when you peel back the layers, it is a stack of smaller disconnects. The role is unclear. The job description is bloated. The recruiter is overloaded. The hiring manager has not been trained. The system is automated, but the judgment is missing. Candidates are applying too broadly. Companies are screening too narrowly. Job seekers are struggling to explain their value, and businesses are struggling to explain the opportunity.

That is the gap. And that gap is filled with stories.

Standards are not optional

Business owners need to stop outsourcing the problem to "the job market." The job market is not some weather system passing over us. It is made up of company decisions, leadership decisions, technology decisions, training decisions, communication decisions, and follow-up decisions.

We cannot control everything that got us here. We cannot undo what the pandemic did to communication and workplace norms. We cannot pretend technology has not changed hiring. We cannot stop AI from becoming part of the process.

But business owners can control the standards inside their own companies.

They can decide that every interviewed candidate gets a response. They can decide that final-round candidates are not left guessing. They can decide that hiring managers are trained before they represent the company to the outside world. They can decide that communication, professionalism, and follow-through are operating standards.

This matters even more as the people stepping into management and hiring roles are changing. Glassdoor reported that Gen Z is expected to make up about 1 in 10 managers in 2025, while millennials are now a larger share of the managerial workforce than Gen X for the first time.

That is not an indictment of younger managers. "Young people are bad at work" is not a serious argument. It is lazy, and it lets business owners off the hook. The better question is: who taught them?

Who taught new managers how to run a hiring process, give a clear rejection, communicate delays, and understand that silence is not neutral?

For a lot of people, the answer is no one.

Gallup's 2025 workplace research says less than half of managers globally, 44%, report receiving management training. So many companies are asking undertrained managers to hire well, communicate clearly, protect culture, use technology wisely, manage people, do their own work, and somehow not drop the human thread along the way.

Of course the system is breaking. But that does not mean business owners get to shrug.

Candidate experience is not separate from employer brand. It is employer brand. It is often the first real proof of how your company treats people when it does not yet owe them anything.

Candidates notice when the job description says one thing and the interview says another. They notice when the company talks about people-first culture and then cannot send a two-sentence update.

This is not about being nice. Nice is not enough. This is about discipline.

If your company cannot communicate clearly during hiring, why should a candidate believe your internal communication is any better? If your managers cannot close the loop with someone who spent hours interviewing, why should anyone believe they are being coached well internally?

At some point, efficiency without judgment becomes negligence with better software.

Tools do not set culture

I keep hearing people say workers are "losing their jobs to AI." I understand the shorthand, but I do not like it because it lets decision-makers hide behind the tool. AI is not walking into the building and firing people. Companies are making choices.

Companies decide whether AI supports human work or replaces it. They decide whether automation improves a process or becomes a shield for poor communication. They decide whether technology helps people make better decisions or simply helps them avoid uncomfortable ones faster.

The same is true in hiring. AI did not invent ghosting, vague job descriptions, undertrained managers, or the uncomfortable silence after a difficult decision. It just made bad habits easier to scale.

So if you are a business owner, the question is not "How do we find better people?"

Not yet.

The first question is: what story is our hiring process already telling?

The talent problem is not always a talent shortage. Sometimes it is a communication problem. Sometimes it is a training problem. Sometimes it is a standards problem. Sometimes it is a storytelling problem. Sometimes it is a company asking the market for "good people" while creating a process that tells good people to stay away.

That part is fixable. Not with more software, more filters, or another vague "we're always looking for rock stars" post. It starts with clearer roles, better manager training, real communication standards, more honest timelines, and more human judgment.

If you are a business owner struggling to recruit, hire, and retain good people, and you think this is only a market problem or a job seeker problem, I challenge you to look again.

Look at your hiring process. Look at your communication standards. Look at how your managers are trained. Look at whether your job descriptions actually reflect the work. Look at how candidates experience your company before they ever become employees.

This is the kind of work I help businesses think through: the messy space between people, communication, leadership, hiring, retention, and the story your company is telling without realizing it.

If your team is struggling to find the right people, keep the right people, or communicate clearly enough to attract them in the first place, let's talk. Book a Clarity Call: https://www.maverickmaysolutions.com/booking-calendar/clarity-call

Because the talent problem may not be outside your business. It may be inside the story your process is already telling.