Notes on hiring tech, HR strategy, and the future of work.
Weekly. From practitioners. No SEO listicles, no AI-generated filler, no quoted "thought leaders" you have to Google.
Source Unlimited is now SourceHire
When we started Source Unlimited, the name described the ambition: limit nothing about who gets seen. Two years in, the team uses that ambition to mean something narrower and sharper — sourcing, but done in a way that respects the human on the other side.
- ResumeJob SearchATSCareer
How recruiters actually read your resume (and why most never get past line three)
Most resumes never get read. Not because the candidate isn't qualified — because the first seven seconds of a recruiter's scan, and the first thirty seconds of an ATS parser's pass, decide whether a human ever opens the document. This piece explains exactly what those passes look for, where most resumes lose them, and gives you a free in-browser scorer that grades yours against the same six dimensions.
Jun 22, 202611 min - Hiring MetricsHR StrategyCost of Hire
The real cost of a bad hire (with a calculator that shows yours)
Ask a CFO what a bad hire cost the company and you'll get the recruiting line item — agency fees, job-board spend, maybe an internal allocation. That number is usually 5-15% of the real total. The Society for Human Resource Management has put the true all-in cost between 50% and 200% of the bad hire's annual salary for over a decade. Here's where the other 85-95% hides, and a calculator that surfaces it for your specific situation.
Jun 20, 202612 min - HR StrategyHiring MaturityOperations
The 2026 hiring maturity model — and a self-assessment that tells you where you sit
Ask any hiring leader where their team sits on the maturity curve and they'll say "data-driven, working toward world-class." Run the actual diagnostic and most are ad-hoc, dressed up with metric dashboards no one acts on. The 2026 hiring environment punishes that mismatch harder than any year prior. This piece introduces a four-tier maturity model with a self-assessment that places you on it honestly — and three concrete next moves tuned to wherever you actually are.
Jun 18, 202613 min - PrivacyHR TechArchitecture
The hidden privacy debt in modern hiring tools
Pick any applicant tracking system that grew up between 2010 and 2020 and you will find the same set of architectural decisions: protected-class fields collected by default, third-party data syncs that nobody disclosed, audit logs that record everything except the events that matter. None of it was malicious. Most of it was the standard playbook. The bill is starting to come due.
May 16, 20269 min - PrivacyComplianceHR Tech
GDPR, CPRA, and the new compliance floor for HR tech
For most of the last decade, "privacy compliance" for hiring tools meant a paragraph in the master services agreement and an annual SOC 2 audit. In 2026, the floor is much higher. Here is a non-lawyer walkthrough of the regimes that now apply, what each one actually requires, and the questions that should be in every vendor RFP this year.
May 9, 202611 min - PrivacyEngineeringArchitecture
What a candidate-first privacy architecture actually looks like
Every ATS in 2026 claims to be "privacy-first." Most of them are not. The difference between the claim and the reality lives in places marketing copy does not reach — the schema, the database constraints, the middleware, the cron jobs that purge expired records. Here is what a real candidate-first architecture looks like.
May 2, 202610 min - AIEthics
AI in hiring: the 2026 line between helpful and creepy
There is a version of AI-assisted hiring that helps both sides — speeds up the boring parts, surfaces qualified people who would have gone unseen, and gives candidates faster, fairer answers. There is also a version that scrapes social media for vibes and rejects you because of a sentence in your cover letter. Same technology, different choices.
Apr 18, 20269 min - ReskillingResourcesCandidates
Free career-reskilling resources, 2026 edition
Every week recruiters tell us the gap between the candidates they meet and the work they need done is widening. Every week candidates tell us they'd learn the missing thing if they knew which thing to learn. So here is the working list, refreshed for 2026, of the free programs we trust.
Apr 15, 202611 min - HRLeadership
Why HR is the most strategic function of 2026
For thirty years, HR was treated as a back-office function — payroll, compliance, the people you call when something's gone wrong. In 2026, that arrangement is breaking. Here's why, and what the smartest companies are doing about it.
Apr 8, 20268 min - ATSProduct
The post-resume ATS
A candidate sent us a perfectly-tailored resume in October — every bullet point keyword-matched to the JD, the formatting was clean, the experience read coherently. They had used an AI rewriter. So had the next 200 candidates.
Apr 1, 20267 min - CompensationCompliance
Pay transparency: the cost of not posting the range
There is a recruiting team somewhere right now arguing about whether to post the salary range. The argument is over. The data has been clear for two years.
Mar 25, 20266 min - InterviewsProcess
Asynchronous interviewing, done right
Async interviewing was sold as the alternative to brutal scheduling cycles. In practice it often makes the experience worse — candidates record into the void, get no feedback, hear nothing for weeks. The good version is harder than the bad version. It is also better.
Mar 18, 20268 min - ProcessEquity
Skills-based hiring (finally, actually) works
The skills-based-hiring movement spent three years as a deck and a slogan. Then a few large employers actually did it. The retention numbers are in.
Mar 11, 20267 min - RetentionProcess
Internal mobility: the cheapest senior hire you already have
External senior hires fail at the highest rate of any kind of hiring — somewhere between 40 and 60 percent depending on whose data you trust. Internal moves succeed at twice the rate. The math is uncomfortable for retained-search firms but unambiguous for everyone else.
Mar 4, 20266 min - CandidatesBrand
Candidate experience is not a nice-to-have
A candidate who has a bad experience tells eleven people, on average. A candidate who is rejected gracefully often tells more. Brand is built mostly by the people you don't hire.
Feb 25, 20265 min
