Your recruiters are asked to be strategic and scored on speed

At a session at the Gartner HR Symposium this week, as HR Dive reported it, Gartner's Jamie Kohn said, "We're asking recruiters to behave strategically." The systems around them reward the opposite. Her line on who wins: "If recruiters have to fight the system to be strategic, the system's probably going to win."

The pile got bigger. The scorecard did not change.

Application volume has more than doubled in two years, Kohn said, and data from other companies points to near tripling, partly from bots and AI agents. Gartner research says about 1 in 4 candidates may be represented by an AI agent by 2029. Same recruiters, same dashboard counting open reqs. Doubling the pile and keeping the scorecard is a fast way to read more of the wrong resumes.

What to measure instead

Kohn recommends measuring slate quality, time to productivity, and candidate confidence. Counting applications processed measures none of them. Those numbers move when recruiters know where the right people already are, before the req even opens.

Three checks for this week

  1. Which numbers is your recruiting team measured on, and is slate quality one of them?
  2. Can your team name five companies hiring the same profile you are, and say where those people gather?
  3. When speed and slate quality disagree, who owns the call?

Where Talent Map fits

Talent Map shows where the people you want already work, gather, and get certified, so your recruiters stop guessing.

Book a Talent Map session with Jackye Clayton

Source: HR Dive, "4 trends explaining why recruiters are struggling right now," Oct. 28, 2026.