A recruiter at a boutique firm posted a confession on Reddit that earned over seven thousand upvotes. Clients, they wrote, had "lost their damn minds" — demanding five-interview gauntlets, personality tests, and unpaid presentation projects even for junior roles. Candidates were ghosting, and the recruiter did not blame them. They were spending fifteen hours a week chasing people who had decided life was too short.
The firm took action. They dropped a client whose entry-level hiring process was taking two months and bleeding candidates by week three. Internal morale, the recruiter reported, "skyrocketed." Another recruiter in the thread described their own shift from gatekeeping to relationship-building, which cut candidate dropout rates by roughly seventy percent.
It is a small story. One firm. One client. But it is also the only story in this batch where someone inside the machine looked at the controls and chose to stop.