My desk in 2016.
Long time, no talk! I haven't posted here since 2016. Life, work, a pandemic and what felt like the complete unraveling and re-stitching of the entire tech industry got in the way. I felt like it was time for a refresh, so I went back and read everything I'd written, and my reaction was genuinely mixed - some of it I'm proud of, some of it made me cringe. I think it's worth being honest about both.
What aged well: the stuff about salary
In 2016, I wrote about salary transparency when asking candidates what they currently made was still standard practice here in the US. I called the Massachusetts salary history ban a good first step. California followed, then most of the country. Asking what someone currently makes isn't just bad practice now - in many places, it's illegal.
I'll take the small win. But more importantly, the underlying argument - that the conversation should be about where someone is going, not what they're currently making - feels more true now than it did then, especially in a market where compensation has swung so wildly that current salary tells you almost nothing about someone's worth.
What I got wrong: how durable "delight" really is
I wrote a whole post about creating delightful candidate experiences. I believed it deeply, and I still believe in the principles, but I was naive about how quickly companies abandon those principles when things get hard.
The years post-pandemic have been a reckoning in tech. We’ve seen more mass layoffs than I can count, hiring freezes, AI-generated applications, AI-resume review. Ghost jobs sat open for months and candidates heard nothing. The "two-way street" I wrote about in 2015 started to feel a lot more like a one-way road.
One piece that compounds all of this is that in most layoffs, recruiting is the first team to go. As soon as the ripple effects of the layoffs started to reach the remaining teams, or companies realized they had cut too deep, who was there to help uphold candidate experience? The collapse wasn't entirely a story of people choosing not to care - it was a story of the people who cared being removed from the equation.
I have real sympathy for that. Recruiting is almost always the first budget line cut and the last to get credit. The recruiters didn't (always) fail candidates. The organizations that deprioritized the function did. Those aren't the same thing.
My desk in 2026.
Same setup. Different decade.
New laptop, AirPods instead of headphones, new mug and desk in a new house - the gear got quieter and the aesthetic got warmer. The tools inside the laptop have changed drastically (a post for another day) but the core remains the same. I’m also 10 years wiser with 4 more startups under my belt (and 2 more exits). I've learned a few things I couldn't have written in 2016 - mainly that the tools keep changing and the fundamentals never do. People make decisions about jobs based on how they feel. Respected or processed. Seen or sorted. That's not a technology problem, and it won't be solved by one.
I'm coming back to writing here because I think this moment in recruiting is actually worth paying attention to. The companies that come out ahead will be the ones that remember what this work is really about: one person trying to find the right place, and another trying to find the right fit.
More soon.