Happy Tuesday, everyone. I'm Frank Richardson, an organisational psychologist observing the workplace with curiosity and care. Each week, I share insights to help HR leaders better understand the people behind the processes and build cultures where both individuals and organisations can thrive.
This Week in Workplace Whiplash 🌀
Across work right now, there’s a growing gap between how things are supposed to work and how they actually play out in practice:
🦮 Unpaid Leave Can Still Count as “Reasonable”
A court ruled that a school district didn’t violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by giving a teacher unpaid leave, rather than paid sick leave, for guide dog training. The key issue was consistency. Because paid sick leave wasn’t offered in comparable situations, the court found unpaid leave was still a valid accommodation, even if it wasn’t the employee’s preference.
👉 HR Dive💰 HR Knows Pay… Just Not Their Own
HR professionals are expecting, on average, $42K more than what employers are offering. The gap is larger than the general workforce, which is slightly ironic given HR’s role in setting salary bands. The data points to something deeper than optimism, with expanding responsibilities, economic pressure, and structural pay issues all in play.
👉 SHRM🧠 “What Would Mentally Break You?”
A former LG researcher has filed a lawsuit alleging her manager asked what would “mentally break” her within days of starting, alongside ongoing comments about her appearance and behaviour. The case also raises familiar questions about what happens after reporting, with claims that HR responses fell short.
👉 HCA Mag
And when signals get harder to trust, people start looking for them somewhere else. Sometimes, that means outside the hiring process entirely.
🛒 Where would you most likely get “talent spotted”?
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by Metaview
Metaview surveyed 505 recruiting and hiring leaders, and the numbers are hard to ignore. 90% described their partnerships as "good." 58% admitted they actively wish they could work around their counterpart. That disconnect is showing up in real business damage, especially speed-to-hire and candidate loss.
🤐 The hiring tension is more serious than most leaders realize: 58% of recruiting and hiring leaders wish they could bypass their counterpart entirely
⚡ Misalignment is directly costing teams talent: Teams with excellent recruiter-manager partnerships are 60% less likely to lose candidates to faster-moving competitors
🤖 AI becomes valuable when it improves collaboration: Teams that say AI is core to hiring are 3.8x more likely to report excellent working relationships
📈 The strongest hiring teams treat AI as shared infrastructure: 85% of companies exceeding business goals are actively using AI in hiring workflows
A few months ago, my cousin was on a long-haul flight and ended up making polite conversation with the person next to her. Nothing particularly interesting, just one of those easy, in-between chats about her kids, her holiday plans, and oh… her work.
A few days later, she had a coffee chat lined up with the CEO of the organisation she had desperately been trying to break into for years. Turns out, the person she’d been sitting next to was a recruiter looking for her exact profile.
She got the job. At the time, it felt like a lucky, slightly surreal one-off. But when I read this HR Dive article, I realised maybe it’s not actually that unusual at all.
Turns out, recruiters are actively sourcing candidates in bars, gyms, airports, and grocery stores. According to the article, over half have already done it, and most say those encounters led to strong hires.
On one level, this makes sense. Hiring pipelines are flooded with AI-generated applications, perfectly optimised CVs, and cover letters that all sound suspiciously similar. But what’s interesting goes beyond where hiring is happening. It points to something recruiters don’t feel they’re getting from the process anymore.
This shift has very little to do with grocery stores, and a lot to do with trust.
🧠The behavioural acience lens
What looks like a quirky hiring trend is actually a pretty predictable response to how hiring has changed:
When signals become too easy to fake, we look for new ones: CVs and interview answers used to act as signals of capability. Now that those signals can be generated and refined at scale, they’ve lost credibility. So decision-makers shift toward things that feel harder to manufacture, like how someone comes across in an unstructured interaction. This is classic signalling theory, where the value of a signal depends on how difficult it is to produce.
We overcorrect when a system feels broken: Online hiring hasn’t just scaled, it’s overwhelmed. When people lose trust in a process, they don’t gently tweak it, they swing. Shifting from structured pipelines to chance encounters starts to look a lot like a behavioural overcorrection. Under uncertainty, people rely more on intuitive shortcuts (otherwise known as heuristics) instead of structured evaluation.
Thin-slice judgements feel more ‘real’ than they are: We form impressions of people incredibly quickly and tend to trust those impressions more than we should. A short, informal interaction can feel more revealing than a formal interview, even though it’s not necessarily more predictive.
Authenticity is becoming a proxy for competence: In environments where everything feels curated, anything slightly unfiltered stands out. Someone being easy to talk to can start to feel like evidence of capability, even when it’s not. Research shows we often conflate likability with competence, especially in ambiguous decisions.
🚀What this means for leaders
If hiring is starting to drift back toward chance encounters and gut feel, it’s worth pausing before following it there. The instinct behind this shift isn’t wrong, but replacing one imperfect system with another, less structured one, doesn’t necessarily lead to better decisions:
Build “realness” into the process on purpose: If informal interactions are revealing something valuable, design for that. Work samples, unscripted discussions, and realistic scenarios can surface how someone thinks without relying on luck. Just make sure they’re consistent enough to compare across candidates, otherwise you’re swapping one flawed signal for another.
Treat instinct as input, not evidence: That strong feeling you get about someone after a quick interaction is compelling, but it’s shaped by bias and context. It can inform a decision, but it shouldn’t make it.
Fix the signal problem, don’t abandon the system: If every candidate looks identical on paper, the issue is usually that your process is flattening differences. The solution isn’t to go offline, it’s to create better ways for meaningful differences to show up.
Be wary of overcorrecting: Swinging from overly structured hiring to completely unstructured encounters might feel refreshing, but it introduces a different set of risks, especially around bias and consistency.
💬 Final thoughts
There’s something slightly absurd about all of this.
We built hiring systems that are structured, scalable, and designed to remove bias. Then we optimised them to the point where we stopped trusting what they produced.
And now we’re back to hiring people based on who we happen to sit next to on a plane.
It’s easy to laugh at, but it points to something real. When the process stops feeling human, people start finding those signals in places they weren’t designed to be.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Frank
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