Are You Really Hiring, or Just Collecting Applications?

You’ve seen it before: a job posting on LinkedIn with over a thousand applicants. A few weeks later, the job is reposted. And then again. It raises a simple question: If a company receives that many applications and still can’t find the right person, is it an issue of applicant quality, or is there a deeper problem?

Hiring managers love to say they’re looking for the best candidate. But in practice, many spend more time looking for reasons not to hire someone. The resume has a gap. The experience isn’t an exact match. The degree is from the wrong school. And so, thousands of applications later, the “perfect” candidate never materializes, and the search drags on.

Here’s the thing: most people can be trained. Skill sets can be taught. What you can’t train nearly as easily are work ethic, adaptability, and the willingness to learn. Yet, hiring processes often filter out good candidates before they even get a chance.

When I hired, I looked for reasons to hire someone, not reasons to reject them. I wanted to see potential—someone with the right mindset, even if they didn’t check every box. The best employees aren’t always the ones with the perfect resume from day one. They’re the ones who grew into the role, adapted, and added value in ways that a checklist would have never predicted.

If a company struggles to fill a position after sorting through hundreds or thousands of applications, the problem isn’t the applicants but the hiring process itself.