What my son's job search has taught me about hiring

What my son's job search has taught me about hiring

One of my children is graduating this summer.

They are smart, curious, hardworking and genuinely excited about what they want to do with their life.

They have also made it to the fifth round of interviews for a graduate role.

Without meeting a single human being.

Not one.

I want to talk to leaders and recruitment professionals about what that is doing to our graduates, to your talent pipelines and to the kind of world we are building together, one automated rejection email at a time.

I left university without a second’s doubt that I would find a job. The market was different, yes. But more than that, the process was human. Someone looked me in the eye and gave me a chance to be more than a CV or a recorded video response into the void.

My child is leaving university thinking they might never get a job. That is not an exaggeration. It is the conversation in student flats, on campuses and in family kitchens up and down the country.

And it is a mental health crisis that we are not talking about loudly enough.

Here is what I have been sitting with. And here is what I think leaders and hiring teams need to hear.

1. The process has become so efficient it has become inhumane

Automated screening, AI-scored assessments and pre-recorded video interviews where a candidate talks to a blank screen and wonders whether anyone will ever watch it.

We have optimised for speed and scale. And in doing so, we have quietly removed the one thing that every human being needs to stay resilient through a hard process.

A sense that someone, somewhere, sees them.

Five rounds in, my child does not know where they are. They have received no feedback, no warmth, no signal that they are anything other than a data point.

2. Loneliness is not just a social issue. It is a recruitment issue.

We talk a lot about the loneliness epidemic. We nod along to the data. And then we design hiring processes that are among the loneliest experiences a young person will ever go through. Round after round of tasks, tests and recorded responses. No conversation. No connection. No sense of whether there is a real place, with real people, waiting on the other side.

The mental health impact is not subtle. Anxiety. Self-doubt. A creeping belief that something must be wrong with them. That belief, once planted, is very hard to remove. You are not just filling a role. You are shaping how a person feels about themselves at the start of their career.

3. You are losing people you will never know you lost

Here is the question I want every hiring manager and HR leader to sit with.

How many brilliant people have quietly withdrawn from your process? Not because they were not good enough. But because the process wore them down, made them feel invisible and convinced them the role was not worth their dignity. How many great people have you missed?

A Partner at a law firm told me last week that he was called in to take part in a series of interviews. This was round 5 and the first face-to-face meeting. He couldn’t actually believe that some people had made it that far. He questioned the process and who they had missed.

Perhaps somewhere, your competitor, who took five minutes to have a human conversation with them, is about to benefit from everything you missed.

4. What students are thinking about has changed. Have you?

My generation left university thinking about what we wanted to do.

This generation leaves university thinking about whether they will get to do anything at all.

The confidence gap is real. The anxiety is real. The impact on who puts themselves forward, who keeps going and who gives up is real. If your process does not account for that, you are not just missing talent but you are actively selecting against resilience, because resilience has a limit and your five-round, zero-human process is testing it.

5. One human moment changes everything

I am not asking for the end of technology in recruitment. I am asking for one human moment somewhere in the process. Perhaps a brief call. A name. A piece of feedback that tells a candidate they were genuinely considered. Something that says: we saw you, not just your outputs.

It does not have to be expensive. It does not have to be long.

But it matters more than you know to the person on the other side of that screen, sitting alone, wondering whether anyone is actually there.

A message to the leaders and recruiters reading this

You are not the villain in this story. You are dealing with volume, cost pressure, time constraints and the very real need for consistency. I understand that.

But I am asking you to look at your process through the eyes of a 21-year-old who, after years of studying, has given five rounds of their time, their energy and a piece of their confidence to a company they cannot yet picture themselves inside.

Ask yourself: would I feel valued by this process? Would someone I love feel valued by it?

If the answer is no, you have the power to change it. And the talent pipeline you save might just be the best thing your organisation ever did.

I would love to hear from leaders and recruitment professionals who are doing this differently. What have you put back into your process? What has it changed?

And if you are a student or graduate who recognises this experience, please know: it is not you. The process is broken. You are not.

Zoe Sinclair