Strategic Deep Dive | The Recruiting Guy | GDCF News

🧭 #GDCFNews | Sunday, September 6, 2026

I want to start with a thank you.

ISG (Information Services Group)’s Matthew Brown, HRIP published a piece this week arguing your ATS probably is not broken, your hiring workflow is.

It landed right in the middle of my doctoral research.

Brown identified something real: intake, approvals, compliance, and dispositioning all interlock. Swapping tools without fixing the workflow just gives the same dysfunction a faster ride.

I want to add from years inside these companies.

Inside the 137+ Global Digital Consulting Firms (GDCFs) I track, the problem sits one layer above Brown’s workflow. Organizational ownership is split across HR AND talent acquisition (TA) with different budgets, leaders, and accountability.

In my experience, HR tends to run on well-funded platforms like SAP, Oracle, or Workday because it carries compliance risk.

Talent acquisition too often runs on a separate, older, under-invested stack, or no real system at all. Just tribal knowledge held by a “recruiting supervisor” whose job security depends on being the only person who actually knows the process.

I recently worked a large hiring project, hundreds of roles, for a client one of my own sales Rainmaker placements had just closed. Nobody was working from the same spreadsheet. Coordination happened over Teams and WhatsApp. The ATS sat untouched.

Hiring managers were visibly frustrated with how utterly disorganized the TA project was.

The people were not the problem. The process was. I know because I once spent nine months building a fix for exactly this. It was never adopted. I was told, and I am quoting exactly: “do not boil the ocean.”

That phrase is the whole industry in four words.

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Brown makes another important point: AI cannot create hiring maturity when role criteria, screeninging, interviewing, and decision evidence are weak.

That is why I argue process architecture has to come before AI-enabled selection, not emerge from the technology itself.

My research is the infusion of automation, AI, and business intelligence into a sound recruitment process.

Sound is the operative word.

Brown’s future and my future may be the same. Neither gets there until the process is fixed.

This is not a widget business. It is a people business. AI does not change that.

Executives walking into one of these 137+ firms study the finance spreadsheet on day one. Put the talent spreadsheet next to it. Ask which is costing more in growth, speed, and efficiency.

🧠 The Recruiting Guy Take

Fix the process before buying the next tool. Otherwise, AI just makes a broken hiring process move faster.

❓ Question of the Day

If you are paying for an ATS but still hiring through spreadsheets and email, who is accountable — and who is fixing it?

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Chris Wellington
The Recruiting Guy

Business Consulting + Digital Engineering | Talent Market Intelligence | Rainmaker Hiring