A presentation at Compass AI & Tech Summit in in Budapest, Hungary by Jonathon Colman
Transparent Recruiting — cover slide
Hi there. We’re going to start with an ice-cold open and jump directly into the data…
244 — that’s how many applications the average open role pulls in now. Three years ago it was 116, so it’s more than doubled.
And they arrive faster than any human could ever read them: 11,000 applications a minute on LinkedIn, up 45% in a single year.
Now look at what that does to the team of people buried under the wave. The average recruiter used to field about a hundred and fifty applications a year. Now it’s over seven hundred. It’s 5x the workload, but nobody hired 5x the recruiters. They’re drowning.
Here’s how you can tell: the average number of recruiters in companies surveyed by Greenhouse fell steeply from 10.4 in 2022 to 4.6 in 2025.
When I first gave this talk back in 2021, the problem was exactly the opposite. Companies were growing 30–40% a year and had massive recruiting teams. There were more open jobs than there were people to ll them. My whole talk was about how to hire a lot of people, fast and well, in the most competitive talent market of our lifetime.
And you can see how well that worked out for us. The market didn’t cool off… it died.
As Mindy would say, “That’s rude.”
So you might assume more applicants means it’s easier and faster for employers, but it’s the reverse. When everyone applies, resumes stop being a good source of signal. Recruiters can’t tell what’s real or AI. There are also problems on the candidate side: they’re getting ghosted and can’t tell if a human ever sees their applications, or if a bot bounced them in seconds. Trust is broken.
So in 2026, finding people is easy. You’re drowning in them. But finding the right person in all that noise, without burning months doing it while somehow also doing your real job? That’s the hard part.
Which means every hire counts more than it ever has before. On a small team running at full capacity, a wrong hire isn’t a rounding error. It’s a re you’ll be putting out for a year.
That’s what this talk is about. Transparent recruiting is a way of working with candidates by being radically open. Open about who you want, what “good” looks like, what the job really is, and even about how you use AI.
Being genuinely open is how you cut through a market flooded with AI noise. It’s how the right people nd you and trust you, and how you build real confidence in them, and them in you. It’s the difference between recruiting like a marketer and recruiting like a leader. That difference is the whole talk.
I’m Jonathon Colman, a senior design manager at HubSpot. I’ve built and hired for global teams for over a decade. I’ve interviewed and hired hundreds of people in multiple roles, countries, and continents, both in a boom economy and now in a bust. I’ll walk you through you the process I developed to make these hires quickly and well. I’ll hand you the strategy and tactics, real examples from companies doing this right out in the open, along with supporting research and new laws that say it works. Please steal all of it.
You can find me on LinkedIn at jcolman. Please reach out if you’ve got any questions or need more information.
You can nd this talk and all of the resources and examples I mention all in one place: bit.ly/transparent-recruiting. You can get the deck there along with links to all of the free examples I’ll show you.
No need to take notes! Just enjoy the show or, hey, I’m not your boss, so you can go back to playing Roblox or whatever.
Here’s our core theme — we’ll come back to this many times. So if you take away nothing else, try to keep this in mind: People will always perform their best when they know what’s expected of them.
I’m going to show you why setting clear expectations and coaching people to meet them can be a hiring superpower. It’s good for candidates because it reduces their stress and anxiety. And it’s good for hiring managers because it levels up your candidates’ performance.
It also levels the playing field so that all sorts of people can succeed, not just people who look like me.
Let’s talk about why recruiting is so hard for so many people. First of all, no one’s born a recruiter. If you’re like me (and I am), It’s something you had to learn on the job and invest a lot of time in. But it’s important that we develop in recruiting as a competence because it’s one of the most important competencies for people managers.
But here’s the thing: recruiting is a missing competency!
I cam e he & buil re to desig d, not n to hir e! or a job f s i h t t Isn’ iting? Recru how to e m t h g tau No one do this! Recruiting is a missing competency There’s no time to do all of th is! ch ail a bun m e t s Can’t I ju le? of pe op Almost none of us have a background in it. So we assume it’s someone else’s job. No one’s trained us on how to do it well. And we simply don’t have time for it. So we often end up optimizing for shortcuts…
Source Here’s what a bad shortcut looks like. This is a real email Microsoft their recruiters sent, promising interns “hella noms” and a night “getting lit.” It’s o -brand, it’s o voice, it’s just o . ff ff ff Scaling up noise like this didn’t work in 2016. And with 11,000 applications coming in every minute, it really doesn’t work now.
At the end of the day, it turns out that recruiting is still all about people. And so maybe we should be a little less eager to scale, especially when we don’t have anything of substance to say.
Listen: if you’re building out a high-performing team, recruiting should be your #1 job. That means it requires your prioritization, focus, and deep investment of time. Your recruiters don’t have your domain expertise, your knowledge of the industry, or your familiarity with the people you want to reach. And they know this, so they want you to work with them!
“ The single most impactful thing a hiring manager can do is protect their time for recruiting and hiring. Peter Merholz Source Peter Merholz talks about why this is the hiring manager’s job, not someone else’s. You’re probably on a leaner team than you were three years ago. You may have lost people. Or you might be someone who was laid o . The recruiter who used to carry this work for managers while also staying in touch with candidates? They’re drowning too. ff So hiring managers need to lean in and invest deeply in recruiting.
fi There aren’t enough designers, so… I don’t have time to nd designers, so… I have to do the work myself, so… Source Remember, recruiting teams have been cut by over 55%. So they’re not coming to save you. That makes this vicious cycle described by Merholz even worse. The only way out is to treat recruiting like a real job, not the thing you’ll get to later.
So you might be tempted to treat recruiting like marketing. If you scale up your outbound reach, surely some good people will apply.It’s all just a numbers game, right?
Sourcing Marketing Attract Recruit Interviewing Sales Engage Hire Onboard Delight Employees Customers Source That gives you a funnel model where you attract at the top, engage in the middle, convert at the bottom. In 2026, this model is broken. AI and layo s made the top of the funnel nearly in nite. Remember those 244 applications per open role I shared at the beginning? I got over 1,000 applications for a role I had open last year. I’m sure other folks with roles open have as well. That’s the funnel “working”. fi ff fi fl A bigger ood doesn’t help you nd the right person, it just buries them. So more top-of-funnel is now actively worse.
That’s why recruiting doesn’t equal marketing, and it never did. It doesn’t matter how many messages you blast out if you don’t know who you’re looking for or what matters to them. Volume was always a weak quality signal.
So what if recruiting is less like marketing, and more like managing?
People aren’t mind-readers. Or at least: I’m not. I have no idea what you’re thinking about and I’m always bad at guessing. So I don’t want anyone to have to guess what I care about, what I’m looking for, why it matters to me, or what “good” looks like.
“ The interview is a concerted effort between a candidate and a hiring team. It’s not a test for interviewees—it’s a fair, two-way evaluation process. Helena Seo Source Helena Seo, former VP and head of design at DoorDash, points out that design interviewing shouldn’t be set up as a test for candidates. As a people manager, you’d never, ever act like an adversary to someone who’s on your team… You’d just be open, straightforward, and direct about what you’re looking for from them. So why take an adversarial approach with someone who’s applying to be on your team?
The answer is that you shouldn’t! Because people perform their best when they know what’s expected of them. So we should all stop making candidates guess about what we’re looking for, and instead start setting them up to do their best work.
“ If you don’t think designing a great candidate experience is UX design, you are sadly mistaken. And you’re losing great candidates. Jared Spool Source | Good Job by Margo Stern Jared Spool reminds us that the hiring process is a designed experience. More to the point: it’s “designed” regardless of whether you intentionally design it or not. But your candidates can always tell where the gaps are and what’s broken. That’s why we lose them. {CLICK} This point has a whole book behind it now, Margo Stern’s Good Job, which Jared wrote the foreword for.
Source Let’s look at some examples of companies who are building amazing, candidate-centered hiring experiences. fi Here’s part of a job post for a designer role from Who Gives A Crap in the Philippines. They lay out a compelling story about the amazing work you would have done if you were in this role last month. It’s such a clear picture of the work a candidate could expect to nd themselves doing on the job. It shows people actual reality instead of a wishlist.
Source Here’s part of an engineering job post from Gain Compliance where they’re very open about the challenges they know their team are facing this year. ff This sets up candidates to better understand what they’re getting into so there aren’t any surprises. And by focusing on reality instead of fantasy, candidates can share their most relevant work examples that help address these issues. It may even draw in more talented people who specialize in these e orts.
Source By showing their Primer design system openly to the public, GitHub helps candidates understand what they care about, optimize for, and what it’s like to actually design and build product there. This is a great way to help candidates learn what working for you would be like.
Source MixPanel created a public Figma board for their open roles instead of a job post. They’re completely open about the role, the company, what their interviews are like, and more. You get to learn about real people on the team, the tools they use, get a sense of what a typical week looks like, and more. Candidates ask about these things all the time—so why not just tell them up front?
Source Many companies give candidates an overview of their hiring process, but few tell you about what it takes to succeed. ff When I was at Intercom (now Fin), we wrote about our hiring process and criteria publicly and in great detail. Candidates who absorbed this material performed much better—with less time and e ort—than those who didn’t. They also asked us better questions during the interview process, which gave us more insight into how they think and what they care about.
Source So how do you actually set those expectations? Intercom/Fin and other companies have made their career ladders public so that potential candidates can understand what “good” looks like and how they could advance in their roles. This helps candidates understand what they should focus on as they prep for interviews and portfolio reviews.
Source GitLab publishes almost everything about how they hire in a public handbook. How they work, their interview stages, even their job levels and expectations. Candidates can read exactly what good looks like before they ever apply. Better still, anyone can suggest edits to the content.
Source But there’s more to transparent recruiting than just publishing content. fi Facebook’s design team invited people to join them in an open design critique. This was an opportunity for people to learn from designers working at Facebook, but also an opportunity for Facebook to nd potential new designers to reach out to with job opportunities.
Source One of the most powerful things you can open up is pay. The EU’s Pay Transparency Directive says you must post a pay range up front and can’t ask what someone earned before.
Source Countries are adopting it at di erent speeds, but just stating “We o er a competitive salary” with no speci cs is living on borrowed time. fi ff ff So the question isn’t whether you’ll open up about pay. It’s whether you wait to be forced, or get ahead of it.
Source Some companies don’t wait to be told. Bu er publishes salaries for everyone on their team, and the formula behind it. ff They’ve had full salary transparency, both internally and externally, for well over a decade now and said that it’s led to better trust, hiring, and teamwork.
Source DuckDuckGo sets pay by level and region, full stop. So an engineer and a copywriter at the same level in the same market earn the same pay. fi Notice what this removes: the person who negotiates hardest no longer quietly out-earns the one who didn’t feel safe pushing. That’s the bias that this kind of openness is supposed to x.
Everything so far has been about being open and clear. Who you want, what “good” looks like, how you pay. There’s one more thing we need to consider: AI. It’s a big reason trust broke in the rst place. Candidates apply with it, you screen with it, and nobody admits it, and we all act like this is normal and ne. fi fi But it’s not. So the way out is simple: just say it out loud.
Source Going back to GitLab, they’re completely open about how they use AI in hiring. They say up front that AI never makes the hiring call, a human does. And they tell you you’re welcome to use AI on your application, as long as you disclose the tools and you can talk through how you used them. It’s honest on both sides.
Source And DuckDuckGo do the same thing. They earn trust right from the start by providing full disclosure and clarity for candidates, by showing there are real humans in the loop, and by inviting candidates to ask questions about their use of AI.
Source Similar to pay, companies won’t be able to hide their use of AI for long. The EU already requires you to tell people when they’re dealing with an AI system. Tougher hiringspeci c rules are coming in many places in and beyond the EU. For example, New York City already makes employers give candidates notice of their use of AI. fi So again, you have an opportunity to get ahead of this. Being open about your AI doesn’t have to be a compliance headache. Your transparency can rebuild the trust that AI broke.
Design Language Sandbox v2 But pay and use of AI are just the most obvious things to open up. You shouldn’t stop there, because people perform their best when they know what’s expected.
So we’ve talked about The Why, now let’s talk about The How. How do you set up transparent recruiting for your team and in your org?
Our transparent recruiting strategy We’ve looked at lots of examples you could copy, but how will you know what’s best for you and the people you want to hire? I’ll walk you through how we built our transparent recruiting strategy from he ground up.
“ The most dangerous phrase in the language is: we’ve always done it this way. Grace Hopper Source Admiral Grace Hopper nailed the key thing standing in your way that makes this work so hard. Before you change how you hire, you rst need to understand why it works the way it does right now. Who bene ts the most, and who’s left behind? fi fi That’s just to start with. Then you start asking the really hard questions…
Who are you looking for? What motivates them? What do they love doing most? What are their ambitions? At HubSpot, we started by asking 4 key questions of ourselves, our team, and even our newer hires and past candidates. fi First, who are you looking for? You need to understand the people you want to hire in a meaningful way. What are their speci c qualities and characteristics? Or their goals and ambitions? What compels them?
Who are you looking for? What causes them pain? What motivates them? What do they love What’s frustrating them or causing them doing most? What are their ambitions? fear, anxiety, doubt, or trauma? Then you need to understand what might be causing them pain. What are their frustrations and barriers to progress in their current role? How do they feel held back or limited? And what’s causing them anxiety or, in some cases, trauma?
What causes them pain? Source We can’t skip over organizational trauma, because so many candidates raise it with us. Workplaces that had harmed them, or still are harming them. This report puts it plainly: “The American workplace is a traumatized workplace.” And we all know it’s true well beyond America. Hostile environments, no psychological safety, always-on pressure, weaponized reviews, absent or hostile HR, and the structural racism and misogyny built into how many places run… it all leaves marks.
What causes them pain? Source Our bodies keep the score. So we can’t just ignore past trauma when people share it with us. We owe it to them to acknowledge their truth and to show them the greatest possible care. Out of everything we’ll discuss today, this is the most important reason why you should approach recruiting as a manager instead of as a marketer. You can stop the gaslighting and help people feel seen and validated as you work with them.
What causes them pain? Source The US-based National Fund’s guide to building a trauma-informed workforce helps us understand trauma, including how to identify it, recognize signs of its impact on people and groups, respond with empathy and humane practices, and to actively resist re-traumatizing people.
Who are you looking for? What causes them pain? What motivates them? What do they love What’s frustrating them or causing them doing most? What are their ambitions? fear, anxiety, doubt, or trauma? What makes you different? What differentiates you, your team, and your company from everyone else? How our organizations understand trauma and respond to it is an important di erentiating factor. It’s likely one of many things that makes you, your team, and your company di erent. fi ff ff Dig into what else sets you apart: beyond vague generalities like “world-class design,” “customer-centric,” or “build at scale,” what are your speci c value props? What about your culture supports people? How do you set them up for success?
Who are you looking for? What causes them pain? What motivates them? What do they love What’s frustrating them or causing them doing most? What are their ambitions? fear, anxiety, doubt, or trauma? What makes you different? How can you make it clear? What differentiates you, your team, and How do the right people nd you, choose your company from everyone else? you, and get through? fi fi fi And nally, how do the right people nd you, choose you, and get through all the noise?
How can you make it clear? Source Let me show you why this matters by highlighting a few things we don’t do. Monzo, a UK-based ntech, used to ask these sorts of questions in their application without sharing any context on them: what excites you about them, what’s the bestdesigned product you use? fi How’s an applicant supposed to know what a good answer looks like? Put simply, they can’t. You’d never judge someone on your team by criteria they can’t know. So why do it to candidates?
Source Then there’s candidate exercises. Whether they’re done live or take-home, they’re biased, have unclear success criteria, and — hot take! — they pressure candidates just to see how they handle it. Live exercises are biased against introverts, the neurodivergent, people raised in cultures where interrupting is impolite, and others. Take-home exercises punish anyone without time to spare, like parents and people working multiple jobs. And “just a couple hours” always turns into unpaid labor.
“ By the time you’re in this step of the hiring process, a good interviewer ought to know whether you have the hard skills. Jamal Nichols Source Jamal Nichols, former product design manager at Bolt, is 100% correct: many companies use these exercises as a sort of catch-all to evaluate candidates’ skills. But if you can’t determine that from their past work and conversations with them, then I’d argue that you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
How can you make it clear? Source | Source | Source | Source And that’s just the surface. There are moral, ethical, and practical reasons both formats fail candidates and companies alike. Meaghan Li puts it well: they deter, delay, and disrupt the exact people you most want to hire. So if your process runs on exercises like these, I encourage you to stop leaning on biased tests that don’t give you honest results.
How can you make it clear? Source If you can’t get a sense of someone’s design skills, process, collaboration, values, and leadership after talking with them for several hours? Then you should improve the quality of the conversations you’re already having with them instead of asking them to do more unpaid labor.
Show you understand Acknowledge their fears, anxieties, and pain. Always center the candidate. Okay, rant over! Those four questions gave us two strategic pillars. First: show people that you understand them. Center the candidates. Say “you,” not “we.” Speak to their pain points, and show how they’ll grow if they join you.
Show you understand Make it clear Acknowledge their fears, anxieties, and Just tell people what you’re looking for! pain. Always center the candidate. Never make them guess. Second: make it clear! Increase the signal by cutting the noise. Don’t hide what “good” looks like, lead with it. Take away the guessing game, and you set candidates up to succeed.
Four questions and two key strategic pillars. I could make transparent recruiting strategy sound wayyyyy more complicated than that, but it’s not.
Now I’ll walk you through our transparent recruiting tactics so you can see how we applied this strategy at HubSpot.
Source Let’s start with something simple we do in our job posts. Content design is an ambiguous role that’s de ned di erently with wildly variant tasks in di erent orgs. So rst, we say upfront what content design means to us — we point out directly that this role is focused on UX and product, not on content marketing or related elds. fi fi ff ff fi ff fi Then we highlight that our audience might use di erent titles than us and we reassure them that’s okay. These are small actions, but many candidates told us that seeing these statements gave them con dence that they were applying for the right role.
Show we understand Source; with thanks to Andrew Schmidt, Brandon Currie, Candi Williams, Darci Dutcher, Dmity Nekrasovski, Elizabeth Goodman, Hannah Collins, Paul McAleer, Sarah Culver, Thom Wong, and whomever the hell used to write Shopify’s job posts. And rather than including a vague, bland statement about how diversity is important to us, we engage in some Real Talk™ . Here we show that we know people struggle with impostor syndrome, especially if they don’t “check all the boxes,” or come from backgrounds that aren’t thought of as being “standard,” or have been marginalized or actively excluded in the past, or because they don’t look like this. {POINT TO YOUR FACE} But beyond showing people that we understand them, we try to go the extra mile by sharing that we feel these things, too. And it’s no act — it’s how I feel most of the time. It’s how I feel right now. So I want folks who feel that way to know that we still see them and welcome them.
Make it clear Source We also ask candidates to show us samples of their work. So we wrote this public blog post that details exactly what we look for in these work samples, why those things matter to us, and how to pass the review with ying colors. fi fl This creates far more equity for candidates because it levels the playing eld, helping everyone start from the same point. It reduces bias toward people who already think and communicate like we do, increasing the opportunity for those who don’t to share their knowledge and expertise.
Make it clear Source Our goal was to remove barriers to people applying by making it as easy as possible to create a clear portfolio. You might think this is a sort of “cheat sheet,” but it’s not. It just provides information equity so that they don’t have to read our minds.
Make it clear Source. With thanks to: Adina Cretu | Clem Auyeng | Heather McBride | Leo Raymundo | Riri Nagao | Ryan Jales | Sarah Sabner | Shilpi Dewan A key way we did that was to highlight several portfolios that we thought were good. Beyond setting expectations for our candidates, this also helped us highlight a number of great folks working in the eld. fi I found people who were doing high-quality work, came from diverse backgrounds, were located all around the world, and who weren’t already well-known. These folks all gave us permission to showcase their work and were thrilled to be included.
Make it clear Source In the post, we show candidates the speci c questions we ask whenever we look at design work. fi This was intended to help them think through the kind of stories they should tell about their designs, how they made decisions, why their choices were good, and so on.
When candidates are in our interview process, we set them up for success by actively coaching them and sharing prep guides like the one you see here. And as you can see, we really do ask those questions! With our coaching and by reviewing this prep guide prior to their interview, candidates can prepare more easily with far less stress. In short: we set them up to do their best.
Make it clear Source But again, this transparency doesn’t just stop with me or with the things we publish. Our team hosted a live “Ask Us Anything” event with a global content design community. It was free to join and folks could submit questions in advance and during the event. It was an awesome opportunity for people to learn about what our content designers actually do and how they do it.
Make it clear Source Here’s one of the many questions people asked, and it’s on a challenging subject: mental health and impostor syndrome. And rather than give a vague, general answer, Catherine Carr from our team led o by showing how this is something that she struggles with herself. ff This is real, not manufactured. And it shows people that we get them. And by being open about our own struggles, we validate other people, help them feel seen, and earn their trust.
This really is a better way to engage in recruiting. Not as an adversary, but as a coach. Not as a marketer, but as a manager. By showing people that you understand them. And then making things clear.
Because people perform their best when they know what’s expected of them.
We’ve covered strategy, tactics, and examples from companies all over the world. If you’re like me (and I am), you’re probably asking yourself if all this really works or not.
✨ 16 ✨ New content designers hired in 5 months Five years ago during the hiring boom, our transparent recruiting strategy and tactics led to hiring of 16 new content designers in just 5 months. It also gave us a pipeline of ongoing relationships with 200+ candidates we could turn to in the future. ff But, of course, now things are very di erent. You’re probably not hiring people in giant batches like this any more. I’m certainly not. So we need to include other proof points.
Source For fty years, researchers have studied what happens when you tell candidates the real, unvarnished truth about a job. The ndings detailed in this study are consistent: people self-select better, they perform better, and they’re less likely to quit. fi fi ff fi It’s not a silver bullet and the e ects are sometimes modest, but being clear de nitely beats being closed.
Source When researchers ranked what actually predicts a good hire, the resume, the degree, and years of experience landed near the bottom. What came out on top? A structured, consistent conversation. The lead author called it the most important paper of his career. This is what AI screening struggles to see, and what transparent recruiting excels at. The signal often isn’t in the CV, the portfolio, or the take-home exercise — it’s in the conversation.
Source Here are the numbers. A structured interview scores about .42 for predicting performance. Even raw intelligence testing comes in lower at .31. ff For years we thought it was the other way around, but the old math was o .
Source Here’s even more data showing how extraversion, agreeableness, and previous job experience are even weaker signals. The strongest signal you can get isn’t in the pile of resumes. It’s in a real, structured conversation with clear expectations for the candidate. Exactly the sort of thing that AI screening fails at, but transparent recruiting excels at.
This strategy is simple, repeatable, and just like it set our candidates up for success, it can do the same for yours. We’re not exceptional in any way! And that’s because you don’t need to be exceptional for this to work — you just need to be open. fi fi And when you try transparent recruiting, you’ll likely nd what I found: it just feels right. It feels good when you remove arti cial barriers from people’s paths, when you give them clarity instead of making them guess, and when you set them up to succeed instead of to fail.
Don’t be an adversary fi fi Let’s recap: rst, stop taking a biased, adversarial approach to candidates. You’ve likely been a candidate yourself, many times, so you know rst-hand what a bad experience this can be. It doesn’t set you up to do your best.
Be a manager not a marketer No more spray-and-pray, stop scaling at any cost. Instead, invest in candidates as if they’re already on your team. Support and guide them, coach them with feedback. Approach them as a manager instead of as a marketer.
Show people you understand Then do the work: ask yourself and your company the hard questions to understand the people you want to bring onto your team. Deeply empathize with their goals, their struggles, and the pain or trauma they might feel. Everyone wants to be seen and recognized. And we do this all the time with people on our teams, but so rarely with our candidates.
Make it clear And then make it clear by defaulting to open. Remove arti cial barriers like biased tests, homework assignments, and highly pressurized scenarios just to see how people deal with them. fi fi This greatly reduces the impact of your biases. It helps more people who don’t already think and work like you to enter your company. And it gives them con dence that you’re not excluding them for things that are beyond their control.
Don’t be an adversary Be a manager, not a marketer Show people you understand Make it clear These practices make up our approach to transparent recruiting. These simple ideas will transform the way you work with people to set them up for success even before they join your team. And over the long-term, they’ll have greater impact, add more to your culture, stay with you longer, and grow higher, further, and faster in their careers.
Why? Because people will always perform their best when they know what’s expected of them.
G N I IT T N E R A P S N A R T U R C E R And that’s transparent recruiting: a new approach to being radically open with candidates to support their success — and yours!
G N I IT T N E R A P S N A R T U R C E R Again, I’m Jonathon Colman from HubSpot. Jonathon Colman Senior Design Manager, HubSpot
G N I IT T N E R A P S N A R T U R C E R linkedin.com/in/jcolman And I can’t wait to hear about how you apply these ideas to your own recruiting practices. So please share them with me so that we can all continue learning and growing together. I’m at jcolman on LinkedIn.
G N I IT T N E R A P S N A R T U R C E R bit.ly/transparent-recruiting And again, you can get these slides and all related resources at bit dot L Y, slash transparent hyphen recruiting
Play us out, Mindy! And thank you all so, so much.
After years of frenzied growth, tech is now defined by mass layoffs, cautious headcount, hiring freezes, and hundreds of applicants for every role. Hiring cycles have grown longer: more interviews, more barriers, lower confidence.
The problem isn’t the market, it’s that most hiring managers treat recruiting as marketing. Transparent recruiting fixes both sides of the equation — it gives candidates the clarity and equity they need to perform their best and gives hiring managers a faster, more effective hiring process.
With 20 global examples from companies big and small, you’ll learn how to implement a transparent recruiting strategy by focusing on a simple idea: people perform their best when they know what’s expected of them.
A simple strategy and set of tactics you that transforms your recruiting practices, especially in a slow market where every hire counts
Compelling ways to set expectations for candidates before they even talk with you, reducing noise in your pipeline and building a strong employer brand
How to rewrite your job posts to speak directly to your target audience — their goals, motivations, and frustrations — so your roles stand out in a sea of sameness
How to help your best candidates succeed faster with enablement materials and radically transparent recruiting tools
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
The Hire Standard benchmark report provides a new look at how recruiters perform in this new hiring environment.
Artificial intelligence is transforming the recruitment process. Job seekers are increasingly turning to AI to apply to as many openings as possible, while recruiting teams deploy it to manage the resulting floods of resumes and screening interviews.
Indeed, Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States: 2021–2026. Updated: September 23, 2026.
Many of you will have seen the now infamous email that a Microsoft recruiter sent out to interns in San Francisco, trying to be all ‘down with the kids’ and using the language of the trendy young things of today.
Every design manager knows there’s an intense war for talent. It’s been going on for the past 15 years, and has definitely ratcheted up in the past 12-18 months.
The interview is a concerted effort between a candidate and a hiring team. It’s NOT a test for interviewees. It’s a fair two-way evaluation process, and both parties need to mutually put forth the best effort to make the experience truly awesome.
If we intend to design a great hiring experience, we need to start where you always start with intentional design: understanding the goal: Hire someone who will do a fantastic job. To fulfill that goal, we need to know what it means to do a job fantastically.
Tell a friend that you’re interviewing (either someone who is hiring or looking to get hired), you’ll likely be met with a sympathetic look. It’s hard out there. Beyond the time sunk in research, preparing, screening and searching, there’s the emotional rollercoaster that people on both sides are experiencing. Do they like me? Is this a good fit? Are they talking to other people? Was that interview super awkward? Why am I like this? Why is this so awful?
It doesn’t have to be.
We are looking for a creative and collaborative Digital Designer to join our Digital Product team! In this role, your goal is simple: help us design the digital experiences that turn curious consumers into loyal subscribers.
We are looking for a US based product-minded experienced software engineer. We’ve built a successful product and are in this pretty sweet spot to explore a handful of new things.
The GitHub Design Infrastructure and Design Engineering teams build and maintain Primer — this includes our CSS framework, style guide documentation, Octicons, numerous tools and libraries that support design and front-end, and component libraries.
What is this job, generally? Help design and manage the design system. From design to documentation. Shape and build platform-wide initiatives and explore structural concepts. TL;DR: Be a core member of the Platform team at Mixpanel.
Applying and interviewing for a job can be a daunting experience, so we’re demystifying the process by explaining exactly how we go about hiring designers, from the initial application to the interview process.
Our designers are expected to be proficient in product leadership, craftsmanship, business literacy, and domain expertise, with deep knowledge in at least one of these areas. Becoming an expert in these areas will set you up for success.
Through exceptional partnership and experiences, we attract and hire results-driven talent to build high-performing distributed teams that accelerate GitLab’s growth.
One of the most reliable ways to strengthen our work as designers is by sharing it with others.
New EU pay transparency rules are now taking effect across the EU. They will increase pay transparency, strengthen enforcement of the principle of equal pay between women and men, and improve access to justice for victims of pay discrimination.
Putting transparent salary ranges on job adverts is such a powerful way to turn inequality around.
Transparency is one of our core values. We’ve found that it builds trust, holds us accountable, and can push our industry forward. Since 2013, we’ve shared our formula-based approach to compensation, including the complete list of our salaries.
We’ve found that salary transparency can help others, which is central to our mission: to help small businesses get off the ground and grow.
The changes we made in evolving from a salary formula to a salary system, plus, why be transparent with salaries at all?
Our company culture is built around our values — build trust, question assumptions, and validate direction. They’re central to everything we do.
At GitLab, we embrace AI to help our teams work better and faster while following our CREDIT values and AI Ethics Principles. Similar to how we integrate AI into our products to support customers throughout the software development lifecycle, we also encourage our teams, and candidates, to use AI thoughtfully to boost productivity and drive better outcomes.
Growing our team is crucial to advancing our vision of raising the standard of trust online.
Up-to-date developments and analyses of the EU AI Act
As the US Navy rear admiral and renowned computer programmer, Grace Hopper, once famously said, “The most dangerous phrase in the language is: We’ve always done it this way.”
The American workplace is a traumatized workplace.
The Body Keeps the Score is the inspiring story of how a group of therapists and scientists— together with their courageous and memorable patients—has struggled to integrate recent advances in brain science, attachment research, and body awareness into treatments that can free trauma survivors from the tyranny of the past.
Stress affects individuals and families not only at home, but also at work. It zaps employees’ energy and concentration, reduces the capacity to engage with colleagues and work effectively, drains productivity, and diminishes creativity and optimism.
This blog post was accurate when we published it – head to monzo.com or your Monzo app for the most up to date information.
The whiteboard challenge is a popular interviewing technique. This board will give you a framework and give a tried-and-true structure for how to tackle the challenge. In addition to the template, there are seven practice problems for you try to build your confidence!
I’m still seeing companies asking for take home exercises. Even reputable ones like Linear. I no longer think you should engage at all with companies asking for design exercises. Here’s why.
There’s a good chance that you’re reading this because you landed an interview with your dream company. Now you want to be prepared to wow your interviewers.
As the title suggests, this was my first design assignment for a UI Design internship and I wrote this particular article to show how I solved the problem statement provided to me. Also, this might be of some use to anyone who has been given a design assignment for the first time.
Why is whiteboard design challenge so important? And what is the interviewer looking for? Nothing else comes close in demonstrating how a UX designer think and behave than a whiteboard challenge.
Recruiters, hiring managers and design leaders: we all know that it’s hard to hire great designers. One surefire way to scare off great designers is to give them take-home exercises!
how might we as a design industry get rid of “design challenges” that you should “only spend 4 hours on” during the interview process?
Search results for “content designer” at HubSpot
Applying for content design roles and trying to craft the perfect portfolio? We’re here for you (with a reminder that perfection isn’t the answer).
Career insights from HubSpot’s content design panel, covering entry into the field, portfolio development, interview tactics, and handling imposter syndrome. The experts underscore the significance of user problem comprehension, impact demonstration, and lifelong learning. The discussion is based on a Q&A session with a global audience.
Through a quantitative meta-analysis of 40 studies of realistic job previews (RJPs), 26 of which were published, the effects of RJPs on attrition from the job recruitment process, the level and accuracy of initial job expectations, affective reactions, job performance, and turnover were assessed.
Meta-analyses have overestimated both the primacy of cognitive ability and the validity of a wide range of predictors within the personnel selection arena, according to groundbreaking research conducted by Paul R. Sackett and Charlene Zhang,
Sackett, et al. (2022) identified previously unnoticed flaws in the way range restriction corrections have been applied in prior meta-analyses of personnel selection tools. They offered revised estimates of operational validity, which are often quite different from the prior estimates.
