The Diamond in the Rough Problem
Your ATS was built to manage recruiters. It was never designed to help you hire.
I’ve hired about a thousand people over my career.
The best hires I’ve ever made, the ones who changed the trajectory of teams, who made everyone around them better, almost none of them would have survived a strict keyword filter.
They were diamonds in the rough. People with trajectory, hunger, some hard-to-name quality that told me they’d figure it out even without the “right” background.
And I found them despite my hiring tools and job boards, not because of them.
That’s the problem I can’t stop thinking about: hiring is the most important thing any business does, and the tools we use for it are fundamentally broken.
You Need Signal, Not Storage
The entire applicant tracking system category is built on a flawed premise.
The premise is that the hard part of hiring is managing the process. That if you just had better workflows, better pipeline stages, better ways to track where candidates are in your funnel, hiring would get easier.
It doesn’t. ATSs were built for recruiters, not for hiring managers. They’re workflow tools designed to make sure nobody falls through the cracks, that every candidate gets a status, that the process moves along in an orderly fashion.
None of that helps you figure out who’s actually worth talking to.
A few years ago I was hiring for a critical role. Within a week I had 2,000 applicants. Two thousand people, for one job. And somewhere in that pile was the person who would have been perfect.
My ATS was useless. It stored all 2,000 applications beautifully. It let me keyword search and set up filters. And I still had no idea which ten people deserved an interview.
An ATS is just a CRM for candidates. And just like salespeople hate their CRM, because it creates busywork without helping them actually sell, hiring managers are stuck with tools that manage process without improving outcomes.
I don’t need better storage. I need better signal.
Really See Candidates
Here’s what makes hiring actually hard:
You’re not trying to find the person with the right keywords. You’re trying to answer a much deeper question: what’s actually going on with this person?
Will they figure things out when the situation is ambiguous? Do they take ownership or make excuses? Will they make the people around them better or drain the energy from the room?
None of that shows up in a resume. Resumes are carefully polished marketing documents. Half the cover letters I see now were written by ChatGPT. The entire application process has become performance art that tells you almost nothing about the actual human.
Traditional hiring tech makes this worse, not better. It reduces people to keyword matches. It filters based on job titles and company names. It optimizes for the things that are easy to measure instead of the things that actually matter.
I don’t want to screen candidates. I want to see them. I want to understand how they think, how they communicate under pressure, what questions they ask when given the chance.
That requires actually hearing from them. Watching them respond to real questions. Getting signal that no resume could ever provide.
Trajectory > Pedigree
The best hires I’ve made were people with trajectory.
Not the most impressive resumes. Not the fanciest company names. People who were clearly going somewhere; hungry, resourceful, the kind of person you’d bet on even if their background wasn’t perfect.
Skills can be taught. I’ve seen it over and over. You can train someone on your systems, your processes, your industry. What you can’t teach is whether someone gives a damn. Whether they’ll push through when things get hard. Whether they’re the kind of person who figures it out.
That’s what I’m looking for. And nothing in the standard hiring process surfaces it.
Keyword filters actively work against finding these people. They screen out the diamond in the rough in favor of the polished resume that hits all the right terms. They optimize for pedigree when they should optimize for potential.
I don’t care if someone has the “right” background. I care if they’re going to be great.
AI That Helps, Not Decides
Here’s what I think AI actually changes about hiring:
For the first time, technology can help you see candidates and not just store them. AI can process a hundred video responses and surface, with surprising nuance, the ten people who actually demonstrated the qualities you’re looking for. It can find patterns you’d miss skimming resumes. It can help you find signal in a sea of noise.
That’s fundamentally different from what ATSs do. An ATS is a system of record. AI enables a system of intelligence.
But here’s what AI should never do: make hiring decisions.
Hiring is too important. The judgment call—is this person right for this team, this role, this moment—that has to stay with humans. What AI should do is give you better data to support that judgment. Surface the right candidates. Help you see things you’d miss on your own.
Hiring Deserves All Your Attention
Hiring is the highest-leverage activity in any business.
One great hire compounds. They make everyone around them better. They attract other great people. They raise the bar for what’s possible.
One bad hire compounds in the wrong direction. They drag down the team. They create problems that take months to unwind. They make future hiring harder.
And yet most companies treat hiring like an administrative function. Something to be processed and managed. Something to throw workflow software at and hope for the best.
That’s backwards.
Hiring deserves better than a glorified spreadsheet with pipeline stages. It deserves tools that actually help you find the people who will change your trajectory—the diamonds in the rough buried somewhere in your applicant pool right now.
They’re in there. I promise you.
The only question is whether your process and tools help you find them or buries them deeper.
This post was inspired by a conversation on the Breakfast Leadership Network podcast. You can listen to the full episode here.