By Bennett Sewell | Sewell Consulting

At some point in the last decade, hiring stopped being about finding the right person and became about avoiding the wrong decision. Those sound like the same thing. They aren’t.

The difference shows up in how companies actually behave. Résumés screened by algorithms before a human eye ever sees them. Personality assessments administered to candidates for jobs that pay twelve dollars an hour. Four interviews — sometimes five — for a position at the bottom of the company hierarchy. And increasingly, candidates asked to produce detailed work product — a full marketing plan, a competitive analysis, a creative brief — as part of the application process. Unpaid. With no guarantee of consideration.

This is what a broken, dehumanizing process looks like from the outside. I’ve watched friends enter a job search with energy and optimism, only to have it ground down by the indifference baked into the system. The process doesn’t just fail to find good people — it discourages them.

From the inside, it has four causes.

The first is the abdication of judgment to technology. AI-powered résumé screening was supposed to make hiring more efficient. What it actually did was create an arms race. Candidates now optimize their résumés not for the hiring manager who will read them, but for the software that will filter them. Keywords, formatting, phrasing — all engineered to pass a machine. The result is that the people who are best at getting through the filter are the people who are best at gaming filters. That is not the same person as the best candidate for the job. When you outsource a human judgment call to an algorithm, you don’t eliminate bias or error — you just make it harder to see.

The second is bureaucracy. Process without purpose. Multiple interview rounds by different people repeating the same questions, each of whom has veto power and none of whom has final authority. Personality tests that measure trait profiles with clinical precision and tell you almost nothing about whether someone will show up on time, get along with your team, or actually do the work. The bureaucracy exists not because it produces better hires, but because it distributes responsibility. It also reflects something rarely admitted: many owners and executives are unwilling to engage at the front end of the process — to define what they actually need, to read résumés, to form an early opinion — and so the process expands to fill the vacuum. If six people interviewed the candidate, nobody is solely to blame when it doesn’t work out.

The third is dishonesty and greed. Two examples that have become industry standard and deserve to be named for what they are. The first: asking job candidates to produce substantive, usable work as part of the hiring process. A detailed marketing plan. A strategic proposal. A design mockup. Companies collect this work from a dozen candidates and pay none of them. The second: structuring the workforce around part-time positions — not because the work is part-time, but because two full-time employees come with healthcare obligations and labor protections that six part-timers do not. Both practices are legal. Neither is honest. And both signal something important about how a company values the people who work for it.

The fourth is indecision. Somewhere in the organization — usually near the top — there is an owner or executive who cannot bring themselves to commit. The process extends not because more information is needed, but because making a final call means accepting accountability for the outcome. Another round of interviews. Another assessment. Another week of deliberation. Meanwhile, good candidates accept other offers, and the position sits open at a cost no one is measuring.

Behind all of it is a single delusion: that the perfect candidate exists, and that enough process will find them. Perfection is the enemy of profitability. The longer a position sits open, the more it costs — in lost productivity, in team strain, in the institutional knowledge that walks out the door when good people get tired of waiting and take another offer. No algorithm, no personality test, and no fifth interview will find you a unicorn. They will only help you avoid making a decision.

Bennett Sewell is the founder of Sewell Consulting, based in Austin, TX. He works with small business owners on strategy, operations, and AI integration.