By Olga Fragis, Founder & CEO, Live Assets IT Staffing Solutions
I read something this week that I have not been able to put down. It was about why we keep leaving events emptier than when we arrived, and it made me think about hiring. Because the same thing is happening in recruitment, and almost nobody is naming it.
A piece by Andrea Sampson of Talk Boutique has been sitting with me all week. It is about connection, and about why so many of the events we attend leave us feeling more alone than before we walked in. Her argument is simple and a little uncomfortable. Most modern events are designed around programmes, not people. Sponsorship tiers decide who gets a stage. Headcount targets decide the venue. Back-to-back sessions eliminate the unstructured time where real conversation actually happens.
I read that and thought: she could be describing the way most companies hire.
Because somewhere along the way, hiring stopped being about people too. It became about programmes.
Why Most Hiring Processes Are Designed Around Programmes, Not People
Walk into almost any company’s recruitment process in 2026 and here is what you will find. An applicant tracking system that filters resumes before a human reads them. A job requisition packed with fifteen requirements, written by committee. A scorecard designed to make candidates comparable rather than understandable. A service level agreement that measures time-to-fill instead of quality-of-hire. A sequence of interviews structured to evaluate, not to connect.
Every piece of that machine is optimised for the process. Almost none of it is designed around the actual person you hope to hire, or the team they will join.
I have written before about how your job description is quietly costing you top talent, and the deeper issue underneath it is exactly this. The job description is written from the company’s point of view, listing what the company wants, not what the candidate would actually do or become. It is a programme artifact. It is not a human invitation.
And candidates can feel the difference immediately.
What Candidates Lose in a Programme-First Hiring Process
When hiring is designed around programmes, the person becomes a data point. They submit an application into a system and hear nothing back. They record a one-way video interview that an algorithm scores. They complete a technical assessment that gets graded automatically. By the time a human enters the picture, the candidate has already been processed by three layers of machinery that never once tried to understand who they actually are.
I wrote about this shift in detail when I covered how AI is now part of nearly every IT interview. The technology is not the enemy. Used well, it removes drudgery. But when a company leans on it to avoid the human parts of hiring rather than to support them, something essential gets lost. The candidate stops feeling like a person and starts feeling like a file.
Andrea quotes a 2026 finding that our brains do not register video and text communication as genuine human contact. The neurological effect is almost the same as no contact at all. It leaves us lonely and confused. I would argue the modern hiring funnel does exactly the same thing to candidates. They go through all the motions of being considered, and come out the other side feeling like they were never really seen.
Here is the part that should worry every hiring leader: the candidate is not the only one who feels it. The hiring manager feels it too. They screen forty resumes that all look the same. They sit through interviews that follow a rigid script. They make a decision based on a scorecard, and they are never quite sure they actually got to know the person they just hired. Both sides come away from the process emptier than when they started.
What People-First Hiring Actually Looks Like
So what is the alternative? It is not throwing away the tools. It is changing what the process is organised around.
Designing hiring around people starts with a different first question. Not “what are the requirements for this role,” but “who would genuinely thrive here, and what would they need to do their best work?” That single shift changes everything downstream.
It means writing job descriptions that describe what someone would actually build and become, not just a wish list of skills. It means making real human contact early in the process, not after three rounds of automated screening. It means interviews that are conversations, where the goal is mutual understanding rather than one-sided evaluation. It means treating the candidate’s time, energy, and dignity as if they already work for you, because the way you treat them now is the clearest signal of what working there will actually feel like.
This is the heart of what we have always believed at Live Assets. I have said it many times, and I will keep saying it: people thrive when they are treated as living assets, not commodities. That belief is not a marketing line. It is an operating philosophy, and it changes how every single search we run is structured.
The Salon Principle: Why Curation Beats Processing in Recruitment
Andrea’s piece is built around the idea of the salon. Centuries ago, thinkers and artists and rebels would gather in intentionally curated rooms, brought together not by industry or title but by curiosity, around a question worth wrestling with. The host’s job was not to lecture. It was to curate who belonged in the room, and then to get out of the way and let the chemistry happen.
I have come to believe that great hiring works the same way.
The best matches I have made in over twenty years did not come from algorithms or job boards. They came from understanding a candidate deeply, understanding a team deeply, and recognising that the two belonged in the same room. That is curation, not processing. It is the difference between a salon and a mass event. Between a conversation and a transaction.
There is real science behind this. Andrea references the sociologist Mark Granovetter, whose research showed that our most generative connections, the ones that change careers and open doors, rarely come from our inner circles. They come from the edges of our networks, from people we do not encounter every day. The same is true in hiring. The candidate who transforms your team is rarely the one actively applying to your job posting. They are the one a trusted recruiter knows, has a real relationship with, and thought of the moment they understood what you actually needed.
You cannot automate that. You can only build it, person by person, over years. Which is precisely why the relationship has to come before the requisition.
5 Questions to Audit Your Hiring Process
If you lead hiring at your organisation, here are the questions Andrea’s piece left me wanting to ask every leader I work with:
i) Is your hiring process designed around the candidate and the team, or around your applicant tracking system and your reporting metrics?
ii) At what point in your process does a real human first have a genuine conversation with a candidate? Is it early, or is it after three rounds of automated screening?
iii) If you went through your own hiring process as a candidate, how would you feel at the end of it? Seen, or processed?
iv) Are you measuring time-to-fill, or are you measuring whether the people you hire actually thrive and stay?
v) When was the last time someone on your team made a hire because they genuinely understood both the person and the role, rather than because a scorecard told them to?
None of these require a bigger budget or a new platform. They require a willingness to organise hiring around the humans in it.
Why People-First Hiring Is the Approach That Actually Works
Andrea ends her piece with a line that stayed with me: we do not need more events, we need more intentional gatherings. I think the same is true of hiring. We do not need more recruitment technology, more screening layers, more process. We need more intentional, human hiring. Hiring designed around people, paced to allow real understanding, built on the chemistry of the right person meeting the right team.
For more than twenty years, that is the only kind of hiring we have believed in at Live Assets. The tools have changed. The technology has changed. The principle has not. When you design hiring around people, both sides come away from it more whole, not more hollow. The candidate feels seen. The team gains someone who actually belongs. And the relationship that forms tends to last for years, not months.
That is not the slower way to hire. In my experience, it is the only way that actually works.
Rethinking how your business hires, and want a partner who designs around people, not programmes?
Whether you are building an IT team, rethinking your hiring process, or just want a more human approach to recruitment, we would love to have a real conversation. No pitch decks. No pressure. Just two people figuring out what is next.
Get in touch today, here.
With thanks to Andrea Sampson of Talk Boutique, whose essay “We Were Never Meant to Connect This Way” inspired this reflection.
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