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http://www.elvis-eckardt.com/, https://linktr.ee/ElvisEckardtRecruitment

Elvis Eckardt Recruitment, Drebach (2026)

07/10/2026

We are really looking forward to another great matchday at Bolton Wanderers Official on 10 October, as we sponsor part of the day for Bolton vs Stoke City.

This one will be extra special for us, as our good friend Jens Haustein, Director of Sports and Board Member at FC Erzgebirge Aue, will join us in the box, another club we’re incredibly proud to sponsor back home in Germany.

When we started supporting clubs in England and Germany, we never really thought about the connections we might create between them. But perhaps that’s one of the nicest parts of it.

Two traditional football clubs, two brilliant communities and, through our little company, a small bridge between Bolton and the Erzgebirge.

Looking forward to welcoming everyone to Bolton! ⚽️💜🤍

29/09/2026

Nothing ages faster in recruitment than the words: “We need someone urgently.”

You know the call. The position needed filling yesterday. The team is stretched, projects are being delayed, the manager is desperate, and apparently the entire future of the business now depends on finding this person.

So naturally, everything else gets dropped. You search until stupid o’clock. You speak to candidates that evening. You move meetings around. You convince someone who wasn’t even looking for a job to have a conversation because, genuinely, this one sounds like a good opportunity.

Two days later you send three people. Good people as well.

Not “here are seven CVs and hopefully one sticks” people. Three people you’d happily put your name against.

And then... Nothing. Monday comes. “Just chasing.” Wednesday comes. “Any thoughts?” Friday comes, and you’ve reached that slightly embarrassing stage where you’re considering liking the hiring manager’s LinkedIn post just to remind them you still exist.

Eventually you get the answer. “Sorry, it’s been a really busy week. We haven’t had a chance to look yet.”

Excellent. I thought Dave in Software Architecture was lying in a ditch somewhere because apparently we needed him urgently.

This isn’t really about recruiters having their time wasted either. That’s part of the job, and I’ve been doing it long enough to know what I signed up for.

The bigger problem is what happens to the candidates. You tell someone the client wants to move quickly, so they get excited. They update their CV, take your call during lunch, start thinking about whether they’d actually leave their current company and perhaps even tell their wife or husband about this interesting opportunity.

Then you spend the next two weeks telling them, “I’m still waiting for feedback.” You slowly start looking like you made the whole thing up.

And somewhere around day ten, one of those good candidates understandably disappears because another company actually spoke to them.

Then the original client finally comes back. “We really liked Sarah. Can we arrange an interview tomorrow?” Sarah accepted another job on Tuesday.

Everyone is disappointed. Nobody quite understands what happened. I do. Urgency without action isn’t urgency.

Sometimes things genuinely change. Budgets get pulled, somebody goes on holiday, priorities move and hiring managers have their own jobs to do as well. I completely understand that.

But if a vacancy really is urgent, the recruitment process probably has to behave like it is. Candidates don’t sit in a cupboard waiting for us to come back when everyone finally finds 30 minutes in their diary. They carry on with their lives.

And usually, the best ones carry on pretty quickly.

P.S. Recruiters have homework here too. We probably need to stop telling every candidate that every vacancy is “urgent” because somebody wrote ASAP on a job description. Sometimes ASAP apparently means “whenever Steve gets back from annual leave.”

Photo Source via Pexels/Monstera Production

21/09/2026

Seven years ago, when I incorporated Elvis Eckardt Recruitment, I made myself one promise. 20% of our annual profit would go back into the communities around us.

Not as a marketing campaign or because there was a clever ROI behind it. Simply because I believe businesses should leave something behind in the places that support them. "Legacy" is a word I thought about a lot back then

Seven years later, we’ve helped kit out more than 50 grassroots teams and supported clubs and organisations including Bolton Wanderers Official, Leigh Leopards, Leigh RUFC - Ltd, FC Erzgebirge Aue back in Germany where my professional football career started, FC Thüringen Weida, East Leigh A.F.C and many others along the way.

Some are professional clubs, some are tiny grassroots teams where the biggest concern on a Sunday morning is whether everyone has matching shirts and enough footballs.

And that second group is probably where it means the most.

The picture below is a pretty good reminder of why we started doing it.

You can talk about giving back, community and social responsibility all day long. But sometimes it’s simply eight kids standing on a football pitch wearing a kit that somebody helped make possible.

I moved away from home at 16 to chase football myself, and the sport ended up shaping a huge part of my life. If what we build as a business can help give another kid somewhere to belong, something to look forward to, or a few memories they’ll still talk about in 20 years, then that 20% has done its job.

Seven years in, the business grows and the commitment hasn’t changed.

18/09/2026

A Day in the Life of a Sponsor.

18/09/2026

How exactly are young people supposed to get experience if nobody wants to hire them without experience?

It’s one of those recruitment questions that sounds ridiculously simple until you look at what is happening in the UK jobs market.

Graduate vacancies at the country’s biggest employers have reportedly fallen for the fifth year in a row, with recruitment now more than 25% below 2022 levels, while new research from City & Guilds points to more than one million young people currently outside employment, education or training.

At the same time, employers regularly tell us they want candidates who are commercially aware, confident communicators, comfortable in the workplace and able to hit the ground running.

All perfectly reasonable things to want.

But where exactly are people supposed to learn them?

We seem to have created an interesting contradiction where businesses want young employees with workplace experience while simultaneously reducing many of the opportunities that traditionally gave young people that experience.

Even some supposedly junior jobs now come with shopping lists of requirements that would have looked perfectly respectable on a mid-level CV a few years ago.

From a recruitment perspective, I think there’s a bigger question here than simply whether companies should hire more graduates.

Perhaps we need to reconsider what “entry level” actually means.

If someone is intelligent, curious, reliable, communicates well and has demonstrated that they can learn, should we really expect them to arrive knowing how to operate inside a business already?

Companies understandably want to reduce the risk of making a bad hire, particularly in a difficult economy, but removing the opportunities where people learn could create a much bigger skills problem several years down the line.

You can't hire five years' experience in 2031 if nobody was prepared to give someone year one in 2026.

So I’d be interested to hear this from employers, recruiters AND people trying to start their careers:

Are we expecting too much from entry-level candidates?

And what should somebody genuinely need to demonstrate to deserve that first opportunity? 👇

Photo Source: Pexels/fauxels

17/09/2026

More candidates. Fewer jobs. So why are some roles STILL so difficult to fill?

The latest UK labour market figures are interesting for anyone involved in recruitment, because on paper you would expect hiring to be getting considerably easier. #

UK vacancies have fallen to around 702,000. There are now 2.5 unemployed people for every vacancy, and the number of payrolled employees has also been falling.

In other words, employers have a bigger pool of people to choose from while competing for fewer active vacancies.

Recruitment should be easy then, right? Not quite.

The Bank of England’s latest conversations with businesses suggest candidate availability has increased and general recruitment difficulties are below normal, but employers are STILL reporting shortages in specialist and technical roles.

That probably explains something we see regularly in recruitment. A difficult job market does not automatically create the right candidates.

You can receive 200 applications for a vacancy and still have three people who genuinely match what the business needs.

And perhaps this is where employers need to be careful. When applications increase, it becomes tempting to make the specification tighter because suddenly you have more choice.

Five years’ experience becomes seven, three essential skills become six, another interview stage gets added, and the search for someone who can do 80% of the job turns into a search for somebody who has already done 100% of it somewhere else.

The irony is that companies can end up complaining about a skills shortage while rejecting perfectly capable people because they’re missing one line from the job description.

A candidate-rich market and a talent-rich market are not necessarily the same thing.

So here’s today’s question: If a candidate can already do 70–80% of the job extremely well, should companies be more willing to hire them and teach the remaining 20–30%?

Or, in a market with more applicants available, is it reasonable for employers to wait for someone who ticks almost every box?

Interested to hear this one from both sides of the hiring table. 👇

Photo Source: Pexels/Ann H

14/09/2026

Something we probably need to talk about in recruitment: Applying for jobs might have become too easy.

A former VP of Talent Acquisition reportedly applied for 300 jobs over 11 months without receiving a single offer. That is particularly interesting because if anybody should understand how recruitment processes work, you would expect it to be somebody who has spent their career in Talent Acquisition.

The numbers give us some idea of what is happening. Greenhouse data shows the average vacancy now receives 242 applications, almost three times as many as in 2017. That means more choice for employers, but it also means recruiters are dealing with considerably more applications for every position they advertise.

AI has accelerated this. 74% of candidates surveyed by Greenhouse said they use AI during their job search, and there are now tools capable of finding vacancies, adapting applications and even applying automatically. Applying to 50 jobs takes a fraction of the time it would have taken a few years ago.

The problem is what happens next. More applications create more competition. More competition means fewer responses. Fewer responses encourage candidates to apply for even more jobs. Recruiters then have even more CVs to review, and eventually everybody starts looking for shortcuts.

A perfectly suitable candidate can apply for a role and never get anywhere near an interview. Not necessarily because somebody looked at their experience and decided they weren't good enough, but because the employer already found enough suitable candidates before reaching their application.

Greenhouse is experimenting with an interesting idea where candidates can mark one application each month as their “Dream Job”. Early results suggest those candidates are five times more likely to be hired. Perhaps that tells us something important: when applications are unlimited, showing genuine interest becomes increasingly difficult.

Imagine instead that a job board only allowed you to make 10 applications per month. You would probably read the job description properly, research the company, think carefully about whether the position genuinely suits you and spend more time making each application relevant. Employers might receive 50 serious applications instead of 500 applications made because clicking “Apply” costs virtually nothing.

For years, recruitment technology has focused on making applying quicker and easier, and on the surface that sounds like progress. But perhaps we have reached the point where removing every bit of friction has actually made the experience worse for both sides.

Maybe the next improvement in recruitment technology is finding a way to make every application mean something again. How good would that be?!

Photo Source: Pexels/Polina

09/09/2026

What if your next job offer came with a piece of the company?

For decades, company shares were largely associated with founders, executives and highly paid senior employees, but that club appears to be getting much bigger.

The number of sales employees receiving equity grants has reportedly risen almost 30% since mid-2025, marketing is up 24%, and the number of workers in Germany receiving stock awards has increased by a huge 62% in just one year.

For candidates, that could make comparing job offers considerably more interesting. A £50,000 salary is easy to understand, but what about £45,000 plus £10,000 in equity? It might eventually be the better deal, but those shares could take years to vest, be difficult to sell or ultimately be worth very little.

So perhaps the question shouldn’t simply be, “How much equity am I getting?” but rather, “Is this on top of a competitive salary, what do I actually own, when can I access it, and what could it realistically be worth?”

From an employer’s perspective, there’s an interesting argument too. If employees genuinely own part of the business they’re helping to build, does the relationship begin to shift from “I work for you” towards “we’re building this together”?

Recruitment might have to adapt as well. Salary will always matter, but candidates could increasingly compare opportunities based on total compensation, ownership and long-term upside rather than base salary alone.

There is a risk, of course, if your salary, career AND personal wealth are tied to one employer, a bad year at the company could hit all three.

But here’s the question we find more interesting: If employees are the people creating shareholder value every day, should owning a small piece of the company eventually become a normal employee benefit rather than an executive privilege?

Would equity make you more likely to join or stay with a company?

Photo Source: Leeloo The First via Pexels

08/09/2026

There’s a lot happening in recruitment and the wider world of work at the moment, and if you spend enough time on LinkedIn you’d be forgiven for thinking that every development is either going to “change recruitment forever” or apparently requires a photograph of somebody pointing at a whiteboard.

We’re going to try something slightly different with our company page.

Rather than filling your feed with posts telling you how fantastic we are at recruitment (we’ll save that for our mums), we want to use this page to share interesting stories from recruitment, business and the world of work, and actually have a proper conversation about what they might mean.

Because there’s plenty to talk about.

Graduate vacancies have fallen dramatically, AI is beginning to change which skills businesses are willing to pay for, salary expectations and company budgets seem to be living in different postcodes, return-to-office policies are still dividing opinion, and some employers are simultaneously saying they can’t find people while putting candidates through four interviews, a presentation and what occasionally feels like an audition for Britain’s Got Talent.

Behind the headlines, though, there are much bigger questions about where hiring is going and what employers, recruiters and candidates need to do differently.

That’s the bit we’re interested in.

We’ll share stories that catch our attention, add our perspective from the recruitment side and, importantly, ask you what you think, because the view from a recruiter’s desk can be completely different from the view of the person applying for their 47th job or the hiring manager wondering why their vacancy has been open for three months.

We don’t expect everyone to agree with us either. In fact, it’ll probably be considerably more interesting if you don’t.

So consider this our little corner of Facebook for discussing what is actually happening in recruitment and the workplace, without pretending we have a revolutionary seven-step framework to solve everything.

To kick things off, I’m curious: If you could change ONE thing about recruitment tomorrow, what would it be? The application process? Recruiters? Hiring managers? Salaries? Job adverts? AI? Ghosting? Four-stage interviews?

Or is there a much bigger problem nobody seems to be talking about?

Over to you. 👇

Picture Source: Pexels (Daniel Reche)

07/09/2026

Breaking news from HQ:

We bought a fruit basket.

No steering committee, no consultancy, no 47-slide deck. Just £8.60, a Tesco receipt and a reckless belief in vitamin C.

Early feedback is strong. The bananas have already gone. The apples are entering a difficult change-management phase.

Please respect our privacy as we scale.

Elvis Eckardt Recruitment

07/10/2026

29/09/2026

21/09/2026

18/09/2026

18/09/2026

17/09/2026

14/09/2026

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07/09/2026

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