How to Get the Best Choice of HR Talent
It's tempting to keep recruitment in-house. Technology has made it feel like everyone is just a search away: LinkedIn profiles, CVs floating around online, social platforms built for professional networking. Add in the horror stories about expensive agency fees and underwhelming delivery, and "let's just do it ourselves" starts to sound like the sensible choice.
But if you've hired directly, you'll know it's rarely that simple.
The hidden cost of hiring alone
Volume is only the first problem — and it's a bigger problem than most hiring leaders realize. A typical corporate role now attracts around 200–260+ applications, according to recent benchmarks, with the average corporate posting drawing roughly 250 applicants. For a specialist role like HR VP or HR Director, the picture shifts: fewer applications come in through the front door, and inbound response rates at Director/VP/Executive level typically sit at just 5–15%, partly because candidates at this level are not active job seekers, and are more often reached proactively by executive recruiters than found through open applications. Even when the volume looks manageable on paper, quality rarely matches quantity - we know from direct experience that one of our recent CHRO vacancies attracted 93% of applicants who did not match any of the advertised criteria.
That's before you even get to interview. Once the applications land, the real work begins: figuring out who's genuinely motivated to join your company versus who's just testing the market. Working out whether the skills on the page match the person in the room. Judging cultural fit from a CV. Assessing real performance capability before you've committed hours to interviews. Across the market as a whole, only about 2% of applicants are ever invited to interview - of every 250 applications, just 4 to 6 people get called, and only one gets the job. At senior level the funnel narrows even further, since a smaller, more targeted pool is doing the filtering.
The cost of silence
Here's what most companies underestimate: how they treat the applicants they don't hire matters almost as much as how they treat the one they do.
Roughly 75% of job applications now receive zero response from employers, making candidates three times less likely to hear back than they were in 2021. Only around 26% of North American job seekers say they've had a genuinely good candidate experience - meaning three in four leave the process with a negative impression of the organization, whether or not they ever hear from you directly.
It gets worse post-interview, where the investment of time is highest on both sides. 61% of job seekers report being ghosted after an interview, a rise of nine percentage points in a single year, and Indeed's research found 40% of candidates were ghosted even after making it to a second or third round. This isn't a minor irritation - it's reputational exposure. Ghosted candidates are 80% less likely to ever refer someone else to your company, 37% go on to leave negative reviews, and 72% tell other people about the experience. Poor communication signals to candidates that you don't value their time. Increasingly, they don't stay quiet about it, sharing their experiences on platforms like Glassdoor.
And silence cuts both ways. When companies fail to communicate with applicants, those applicants become more likely to ghost the company back - disappearing mid-process, not showing up to interviews, or accepting a competing offer without a word. 44% of candidates now admit to ghosting employers themselves, and when candidates ghost after accepting an offer, 22% simply don't show up on day one, forcing an expensive restart of the entire search.
The follow-up problem
At the other extreme sits a different symptom of the same broken process: candidates who won't let go. When applicants sense they're being screened by volume rather than judged on merit, some respond by escalating - repeat emails, LinkedIn messages, calls to switchboards, even reaching out to people at the company they don't know. It's an understandable reaction to silence rather than a character flaw: CareerPlug's research found that 75% of applicants expect to hear back within two weeks of applying, yet the actual median response time regularly exceeds what most candidates consider acceptable. That gap between expectation and reality is exactly where anxious follow-up behavior breeds. It rarely reflects well on the candidate, but it's a direct, predictable consequence of a process that isn't giving people a clear answer either way.
Even when you get it right, you're only seeing part of the picture
And this is the part that matters most: even a company that handles volume well, responds promptly, and runs a slick process is still only fishing in one pond - the people who are actively looking, the "low-hanging fruit." Randstad's research found that 57% of hires now come through informal channels (referrals, networking, and targeted approaches), rather than open applications, and referred candidates are hired at roughly four times the rate of candidates sourced any other way. Advertising and inbound applications, however well managed, structurally exclude the people who aren't looking at all - often the strongest HR leaders on the market.
What do you do when hiring directly is not working?
"We've had this role vacant for months, I just don't know why, and now I'm at risk of losing the headcount."
"We've advertised extensively, had lots of response, but they're just not the right quality."
"My recruitment team keep telling me we cannot afford what we need, or that candidates just aren't interested in moving right now."
"I'm looking for A-players, but they don't seem to exist - am I setting the bar too high?"
The numbers suggest these frustrations aren't unusual and are in fact close to the median experience. Average time-to-hire has stretched to roughly 41–44 days across the market, and for senior or specialized positions that timeline regularly runs past 90 days, driven by extra interview rounds, assessments and additional stakeholder sign-off. Candidates now commonly go through 5–8 interview rounds, up from the traditional 2–3 — and every added round adds days, sometimes weeks, before an offer goes out.
The cost of getting it wrong rises just as sharply with seniority. SHRM's 2025 benchmarking data puts average cost-per-hire at $5,475 for non-executive roles versus $35,879 for executive roles. Nearly seven times higher, and that's before factoring in what happens if the hire doesn't work out. Estimates for the full cost of a bad senior hire, once lost productivity, disruption and replacement are counted, run from roughly 50% up to 200%+ of the role's annual salary, and some analyses of failed executive hires put the all-in impact at several times base salary once the ripple effects through the team are included.
So before assuming you're chasing an unrealistic "purple squirrel," it's worth checking the numbers against what a wrong hire at this level would actually cost you. Firstly, we recommend you get additional expert opinions. Speak to peers in other parts of your company or in other organizations who may have had to make the same hire. Speak to specialist search firms. For junior roles, speak to specialist contingency recruitment firms. You may indeed be chasing the purple squirrel, or be way under market rates, or there may be a deeper issue with perceptions of company brand or work culture.
Three recruitment secrets you need to know
Most of the candidates you want aren't visible online at all. According to LinkedIn's Talent Trends research, roughly 70% of the global workforce qualifies as passive - employed, not browsing job boards, not submitting applications, and reachable only through direct, personalized outreach. That means any hiring process built around inbound applications and job board advertising is, by design, only ever competing for the 30% of the market who happen to be actively looking. It's also why more than 80% of talent acquisition professionals now say engaging passive candidates will be one of the most important recruiting skills over the next five years. Everyone knows where the talent actually is; the challenge is reaching it. This is especially true of high performers: one Global Total Rewards leader we've worked with reports fielding 60 unsolicited approaches from recruiters every month, so he's no longer "online" nor taking contact from strangers.
Recruiters juggling high volumes of live roles rarely give any one search full attention. Fewer still will tell a hiring leader that the brief itself, not the market, is the real obstacle. This shows up in the outcomes: with senior and specialist roles typically drawing narrower but more targeted funnels, and general market interview-to-hire conversion sitting around 2%, a search that isn't getting focused attention can quietly stall for weeks without anyone flagging why. Despite their best intent, this is true of many recruiters across all agencies, and within in-house teams too when they’re trying to manage tens of hiring mandates.
Candidates rarely tell you the real reason they've said no. Professionals are careful not to burn bridges, and that reticence compounds the silence problem on both sides of the table - which is part of why fewer than three in ten North American job seekers report a genuinely good candidate experience, whatever the eventual outcome.
What if you need support from a recruitment agency?
"The best recruiters really do have extensive networks"
This isn't just a nice turn of phrase - the data backs it up directly. Randstad's research found that 57% of hires now come through informal channels: referrals, networking and targeted introductions rather than open applications, and in France specifically, APEC estimates 37% of executive hires happen through employee referrals alone. Referred candidates are hired at roughly 30% versus 7% for candidates sourced any other way, and they pass probation at 98%, compared with a 78% average across all hires. Passive candidates sourced through direct outreach, rather than pulled from inbound applications, also convert differently once engaged. One recent survey found offer-acceptance rates around 83% among passively sourced candidates, well above what's typical for candidates found through open advertising.
The pattern across all of this is consistent: the strongest candidates for a role like HR VP or HR Director are disproportionately likely to be found through a network and a direct approach rather than a job posting. The consultant and their firm should already know contender candidates and/or should be able to easily secure trusted recommendations to other contenders, thus securing access to both active and, more importantly, those people who aren't actively on the job market, and who aren’t taking calls from anyone outside of their network.
"The best recruiters have either deep technical knowledge or know enough technically to weed out the candidates who cannot 'walk the talk'"
This one matters more than most hiring leaders assume, because the honesty problem in recruitment is bigger than it looks on paper. Depending on how the question is asked, published estimates of resume misrepresentation range from roughly 25% of candidates admitting to exaggerating on their CV, up to 78% admitting to some form of misrepresentation when the definition is broadened to include inflated skills, extended tenure or fabricated achievements. HireRight's global benchmarking found over 75% of employers worldwide catch at least one discrepancy during screening. Skills are the single most commonly inflated item: CareerBuilder's research found 62% of resume lies relate to skill sets specifically, ahead of exaggerated responsibilities, adjusted employment dates and inflated job titles.
The problem compounds under time pressure. Seven in ten employers spend less than five minutes reviewing a resume, according to that same CareerBuilder hiring manager survey; which is exactly the environment in which an exaggerated skill set is least likely to get caught before someone's shortlisted, interviewed, and eventually offered the role. A recruiter who genuinely understands the function they're hiring for - who can tell the difference between someone who's led a transformation and someone who's merely been in the room for one - closes that gap. LinkedIn's research backs the underlying principle: 93% of talent professionals say accurately assessing candidate skills is crucial to quality of hire, yet it's precisely the step that is usually the most under-resourced inside an already over-stretched in-house process.
"The best recruiters rarely need to start any search from scratch"
If they really are specialist experts and well connected, then they will have immediate access to potential candidates - unless, of course, you really are chasing a purple squirrel. In our own firm, we frequently deliver fully qualified shortlists with contingency speed, simply through the strength of our long standing relationships and currency of our networks.
"The best recruiters enjoy an advanced level of trust with their candidates"
Trust isn't a soft add-on in senior hiring - it's the mechanism that determines whether a passive, well-regarded HR leader engages with your opportunity at all. The AESC surveyed 2,500 executive-level candidates on their experience with search firms, and the findings were consistent: candidates rank open, honest communication, regular follow-up and straightforward feedback as the elements that most define a successful search process. They’re ranking this more than speed, and more than the number of options presented to them.
That trust gap runs both directions, and it isn't automatic. Separate research on the broader recruitment market found that 56% of candidates say they don't trust recruiters to add value to their job search at all, with a third believing an agency's main priority is pushing volume through the pipeline rather than genuine suitability. The distinction between a transactional recruiter and a trusted search partner isn't cosmetic - it's the difference between a passive candidate taking your call or letting it go to voicemail. For roles at HR VP or Director level, where the candidate you most want is rarely the one who's short of options, that difference decides who you get to talk to in the first place. The best recruiters can leverage their relationships as trusted advisors, to secure consideration of your company by candidates who might otherwise be wary of your branding, reputation, or market position.
"The best recruiters (for international companies) have a network that spans many sectors, and many countries"
Senior HR hiring increasingly crosses borders, and the mechanics of doing that well are different from a domestic search. PwC's research anticipated substantial growth in cross-border executive assignments as multinational organizations increasingly draw leadership talent from outside their home markets, and more recent mobility research shows a persistent gap between what relocating hires actually need (support finding their footing, a network, help easing family or partner transitions) and what most companies typically provide. That gap shows up in outcomes: international hires and relocating spouses consistently report meaningfully lower satisfaction with the relocation experience than fully company-sponsored expatriate assignees.
For an organization hiring HR leadership across markets, that's the practical argument for a partner with genuine international reach rather than a domestic firm making an occasional cross-border placement. Great international recruiters can leverage their global reach to tap into new candidate pools for you, to secure in advance of any local agency or local resourcing function, those candidates who are planning to transfer across markets, and ensure you're getting access to the best possible, genuinely international HR specialists for your organization.
Where Carter Morris fits in
Hiring the best leaders for all the expert roles within the HR profession is exactly what we do, day in, day out. We specialize in identifying and engaging HR talent that isn't sitting on the open market - the people who are settled, in demand, and simply not responding to generic outreach. Because we work only on hiring for HR functions, we understand what strong technical and cultural fit actually looks like for the roles you're hiring, and our networks mean most searches don't start from a blank page.
If you're finding that direct hiring is costing you more time and more missed opportunities than it should, it's worth a conversation. We'd be glad to share what a fully qualified shortlist could look like for your next HR hire.
About the Author
Tracey Thompson is well regarded within the industry for her ability to source and engage high performance HR talent. Over many years she has built a well deserved reputation for her uncanny ability to access proverbial “purple squirrel” HR specialists and as a result, is looked to as a global sourcing subject matter expert.