How to test your recruiting strategy

A simple experiment to test if your recruiters are doing their job: create fictional profiles with ideal resumes and see if they make it past the phone screen.

> be company
> "It's so hard to find talent."
> be SWE in 2024
> "The job market is cooked."
> logically, both can't be true at the same time
> but real life is not logical
> as engineer, must debug the system
> in software: unit test -> integration test -> system test
> higher complexity? need simulation - game testers, Selenium, etc.
> what if we applied the same to recruiting?
> run recruiting test with fake ideal candidate profiles
> see if your team spots the obvious "qualified" ones
> TFW most companies have never even tried this

Recruiting test (no one does)

Step 1: Create a fictional profile

with the ideal resume for the position you're trying to recruit.

Step 2: Let your own recruiter call back your resume.

If it doesn't get past the phone screen, your recruiters are not doing their job.

Proper scientific method

If you have to do it scientifically, create 10 or 2-10% of applications with those profile. Do not announce to your recruiters you have this much "qualified simulated accounts" so the test set is not included in training.

Check how much they missed as a benchmark, say 7/10 to measure you screening false negative rate.

It's going to waste 20 minutes of my life and a phone call!
You'll waste months of your life on a wrong hire.
If your CEO accidentally picks up the line, just tell them congrats -- they're actually doing their job.
But creating and maintaining fictional profiles is so hard!
Everyone's using AI to generate profiles these days.
Applicants are stuffing resumes with every framework they vaguely know, just to game the ATS keyword search.
Instead of spending millions on data science for better recruiting AI, why not use simple data science to test your recruiting team's hit rate?
Okay... It actually makes sense, but we still don't want to do it.

And that's exactly why we keep seeing tweets like this.

EDIT 2025 (author's note):

I'm blackpilled by the hiring process.

I'm convinced the modern corporate has been institutionally captured by HR cat ladies, resulting in an agency problem that harms founders and jobseekers.

You just can't tell recruiters what they should do to maximize their chances of getting a favourable outcome for their career, because the incentives doesn't reward them for getting a good hire.

Just DM the founder on Twitter and show them your work.

Resumes are artifacts post-chatGPT and post-ZIRP.