Recruiters and hiring managers are often misaligned and it silently kills hiring. Learn why broken context is the real problem, and how trust can fix it.
Recruiting doesn’t break because of a lack of candidates. It breaks because recruiters and hiring managers are rarely aligned and the fallout kills trust, speed, and ultimately, hires.
The friction nobody admits
Every recruiter knows this feeling: you’ve sourced a shortlist, booked the interviews, and… the hiring manager shrugs. “Not what I’m looking for.”
The role spec changes mid-search. Feedback takes weeks. Or the bar is set unrealistically high because the manager is chasing a unicorn.
This friction is so normalized we barely question it anymore. But it’s the silent killer of recruiting. Not just because it wastes time - but because it erodes trust on all sides: candidates lose faith in the company, recruiters lose credibility, and hiring managers lose confidence in the process.
Why this problem is structural
It’s not about bad hiring managers or lazy recruiters. It’s about the system.
Recruiters are forced to operate on outdated proxies - CVs, keywords, incomplete LinkedIn profiles - while hiring managers are judging candidates based on unstated team culture, stack nuances, or gut feel.
The recruiter can’t bridge the gap because they don’t have the context. The manager can’t trust the recruiter because the signal isn’t there. And so the cycle continues: more screens, more rejections, more wasted cycles.
This is why tech recruiting feels so broken. Not because recruiters aren’t trying, but because they’re playing without shared truth.
Where I think it’s going
The future of recruiting isn’t about more automation or bigger databases. It’s about giving both recruiters and hiring managers a richer, real-time picture of the candidate, not just what’s on a CV, but what they’re learning, building, and aspiring to.
Imagine starting a hiring process where both sides can see not only a candidate’s past, but their present engagement and future trajectory. Suddenly the recruiter and hiring manager aren’t arguing about guesswork - they’re aligned on signal.
That’s where the leverage is. Not in blasting more InMails, but in removing the friction at the source: broken context and mismatched expectations.
Why daily.dev cares
At daily.dev, this is the thesis we’re building toward. Developers already show us what they care about by how they engage with content, community, and growth. That’s the signal missing from the traditional recruiting stack.
If we can give recruiters and hiring managers that 360° view (past, present, and future) alignment stops being a fight. It becomes the default.
Recruiting doesn’t have to be this constant tug-of-war. But to fix it, we need to stop pretending more cold outreach will solve the problem. The real unlock is trust and context shared across everyone in the process.
