In 2025, one of the biggest hiring challenges facing businesses isn’t just finding talent — it’s cutting through the noise to identify real, qualified candidates.

A recent story shared by Maxwell Bond CEO, Steven Jagger, highlights a problem many leaders have already encountered:

“We spent 8 weeks hiring… only to realise the candidate was fake.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t a one-off. It’s a symptom of a deeper breakdown in the hiring process — and it’s costing businesses time, money, and momentum when they can least afford it.

 

What’s going wrong?

The market is flooded. And while more applications might sound like a good thing, here’s what most internal teams are actually dealing with:

  • 300+ applications per role, and in some extreme cases, up to 1,500
  • Overwhelmed talent teams managing 30+ roles per person, equating to thousands of applications
  • Recruitment admin taking up hours each day, with little return
  • Poor candidate experience, impacting employer brand
  • Hiring managers and execs frustrated by long timelines and repeated failures
  • The ultimate nightmare: candidates making it through the process, only to turn out to be fake

It’s not just inefficient — it’s demoralising. And for business-critical hires, it’s a risk few companies can afford to take.

 

Why is this happening?

Put simply: your process is broken.

Too many hiring systems are still built around volume and speed, rather than accuracy and quality. In a market where impersonation, AI-generated CVs, and ghost candidates are increasingly common, that model just doesn’t hold up.

And when your internal teams are under-resourced and stretched thin, even the best people can’t deliver the results the business expects.

 

So what’s the fix? 

Leading companies are now turning to refined, specialist-led recruitment processes — the kind that prioritise vetting, technical validation, and genuine relationship-building over outdated volume metrics.

At Maxwell Bond, our clients are seeing results in just 1 week that outperform what many teams achieve in 3–6 months.

Why? Because we cut through the noise. Our process is built around deep market knowledge, rigorous candidate checks, and strategic alignment with your hiring needs from day one.

 

If hiring is business-critical in 2025 — and for most companies, it is — then fixing your recruitment process is just as important as finding the right candidate. In fact, the two are inseparable. The good news? You don’t have to go it alone. Let us help you take the guesswork out of growth.