Elvis Eckardt Recruitment

25/06/2026

Redundancy Reveals What Businesses Already Know

Redundancy is the only business decision that gets announced with a town hall and a counsellor, which tells you everything about how businesses feel about it.

No company brings in emotional support because they're launching a new product. Or opening a new office. Or hiring fifty people.

They do it when they're taking livelihoods away.

provides emotional support when

Because beneath the spreadsheets, cost-saving targets and restructuring plans, everyone knows this is different.

Businesses call redundancies "necessary". Sometimes they are. But necessary does not mean painless.

The hardest part is not always the people leaving. It is often the people staying.

The trust changes. The optimism fades. The conversations become quieter.

Every announcement feels loaded. Every meeting invitation carries a little more anxiety than it did the week before.

We talk about reducing headcount, but it also reduces confidence in the business.

The numbers disappear from the payroll overnight. The culture often takes years to recover.

A well-managed redundancy process can preserve dignity. A badly managed one can damage an employer's reputation for years, making every future hire just that little bit harder.

Redundancy is sometimes unavoidable. But how you treat people on their worst day is still a choice.

So here is the uncomfortable question. If a business needs counsellors, town halls and carefully scripted speeches to explain a decision, what does that tell us about the decision itself?

24/06/2026

Most businesses are looking for a rescue mission with a LinkedIn profile.

They want someone strategic, but hands-on. Senior, but affordable. Commercial, but technical. Independent, but easy to manage. Ambitious, but happy to wait two years for progression. Experienced, but not too experienced. Perfect, but available immediately.

Then they call it a difficult market. No, the market is not always the problem.

Sometimes the brief is a fantasy document with a salary attached to it.

This is where hiring goes wrong before a single candidate has even been approached.

The business has not agreed what the person actually needs to do. The hiring manager wants one thing. HR advertises another. Finance approves something else entirely. Then recruitment gets blamed when the market does not produce a mythical creature by Friday afternoon.

It´s probably less a talent shortage than it is a clarity shortage. A clear brief attracts the right people. A confused brief attracts everyone and fits no one.

And the worst part is that good candidates can feel it immediately. They read the advert and know the business has not made up its mind. They get to interview and realise the goalposts are already moving. They ask simple questions and get vague answers wrapped in corporate language.

You cannot hire well from confusion.

So here is the uncomfortable question: are you struggling to find the right candidate, or have you not properly decided who the right candidate is yet?

23/06/2026

Brexit did not just change trade relationships and border arrangements. It quietly removed a generation of talent from the UK labour market, and most businesses are still pretending they have not noticed.

Before 2020, a business looking for a skilled candidate had access to half a billion people who could move here, work here, and build a life here without a visa, a sponsor, a points threshold or a five-figure immigration bill.

That pool is gone. Not reduced, gone! And the hiring market has never properly reckoned with what that actually means in practice.

This so-called skills shortage is a consequence. The skills did not disappear. The people who had them became inaccessible overnight because of a political decision that was never properly costed in human capital terms and still has not been.

The construction site that used to hire across twelve EU nationalities now cannot fill three roles. The hospitality business that ran on European labour is now running on skeleton staff and extended hours for the people who stayed.n The care sector that relied on freedom of movement to plug a chronic domestic shortfall is now in genuine crisis. The tech business that wanted the best person regardless of passport is now paying a premium to sponsor someone for a role that used to take a fortnight to fill.

None of this is a political argument. It is a recruitment reality.

Whatever your view on Brexit, the labour market arithmetic is not negotiable. Fewer people are eligible to work here without high cost and bureaucracy.

Roles that were straightforward to fill are now genuinely difficult. And the businesses feeling it hardest are not the large corporates with legal and HR teams who can navigate the visa system. They are the small and mid-sized businesses who cannot absorb the cost or the complexity.

The politicians debated sovereignty. The recruiters inherited the vacancy list.

The response from most businesses has been to wait for the domestic pipeline to catch up, retrain existing staff where possible, and quietly accept that some roles will stay open longer than they should.

None of those are solutions! They are adaptations to a problem that was chosen rather than arrived at.

A hard-to-fill role costs time. A hard-to-fill market costs growth. A generation of businesses hiring in a permanently restricted talent pool costs the economy something it will take decades to properly measure.

Brexit happened. The talent gap it created is not going away. The question now is whether businesses are being honest about its cost, or whether they are still filing it under skills shortage and hoping nobody looks too closely at why.

22/06/2026

Every business makes a bad hire eventually. What happens next is the most honest thing you will ever learn about that business.

A failed hire is one of those moments that strips away everything performative about a company's culture and shows you what is actually underneath.

The values poster. The employer brand. The talk about people being the most important asset. None of it means anything until something goes wrong with one of those people and you watch how it is handled.

The mature response is to ask questions.

Who wrote the brief? Who ran the process? What was missed and why? Whether the onboarding gave this person a fair chance? Whether the manager had the tools to support someone who was struggling? Whether the exit was handled with basic dignity or whether it was rushed, cold and designed primarily to protect the business from a conversation it did not want to have?

The immature business blames the candidate and moves on. The immature business blames the candidate and moves on. The immature business tells the team as little as possible and hopes the awkwardness fades. The immature business replaces the person with an identical brief and wonders why it keeps happening. The immature business never once asks whether the failure started long before the person walked through the door.

The mature business does something much harder. It looks at itself. It asks whether the role was clearly defined, whether expectations were communicated, whether the person was set up to succeed or set up to be managed out quietly at month four. It treats a failed hire not as an embarrassment to be buried but as information that the process is trying to give it.

A failed hire handled badly damages one person. A failed hire handled well improves every hire that comes after it.

There is also the human dimension that almost nobody talks about. The person who did not work out is still a person. They still have a mortgage. They still have a professional reputation. The way they are treated on the way out will be talked about. Not loudly. But in the industry, in their network, in the Glassdoor review written six months later when enough time has passed that it feels safe to be honest.

You handle it badly once, and one person leaves with a story. You handle it badly consistently, and that story becomes your reputation. You never examine why it keeps happening, and eventually the story finds its way into every candidate conversation before they have even met you.

The question is never just what went wrong with the hire. The question is what your response to that says about the kind of business you actually are when nobody is watching.

If the same role has turned over more than once, the answer is rarely in the next CV. It is usually in the conversation nobody has had yet.

19/06/2026

There is now a word for what job seekers are doing out of sheer desperation. It is called doomjobbing.

Sixteen applications in one sitting, thirty seconds per job description, hope outsourced entirely to volume.

New research from Monster puts numbers on something recruiters have felt for a while. Almost half of candidates do not read the full job description before applying.

A third spend under a minute deciding whether a role is worth their time. Over four in ten people apply to four or more jobs in a single session, treating the search like a slot machine rather than a decision.

Nobody applies to sixteen jobs in an evening because they cannot be bothered to read them properly. They do it because they have already read two hundred job descriptions that promised something the role did not deliver, applied to fifty roles that never replied, and learned the hard way that effort and outcome stopped being connected months ago.

The candidate stopped tailoring their CV because nobody read the tailored version either. The candidate stopped writing covering letters because nobody opened them. The candidate stopped checking the salary because half the adverts hide it anyway. The candidate stopped believing the process was fair, so they stopped engaging with it as if it was.

Businesses complain that candidates are not engaging properly with the process. The process stopped engaging properly with candidates a long time before that.

And here is the part that should genuinely worry hiring teams. Doomjobbing does not just hurt candidates. It floods every open role with volume instead of fit, making it harder to find the person who was actually right, buried somewhere in a pile of applications submitted in under a minute by someone who had simply stopped caring whether it mattered.

A slow, unclear process loses good candidates quietly. A broken one loses them in bulk. A genuinely careless one trains an entire generation of job seekers to stop trying properly at all.

If candidates are applying carelessly, the real question is not what is wrong with them. It is what your process taught them to expect.

18/06/2026

New guest post by Janet Lovelace on our Company Blog:

Topic: Building a Passion-Driven Career Path for Lasting Fulfilment

For career changers with solid experience and lingering career dissatisfaction, work can start to feel like a trade: stability in exchange for motivation. The tension is real: pursuing passions in careers sounds compelling, yet a passion-driven career transition can feel risky, unclear, or even irre...

15/06/2026

Recruitment that gives something back.

We are looking for one North West business that is hiring and wants its next recruitment fee to do more than just fill a vacancy.

Over the years, we have proudly supported grassroots sports clubs across the region, as well as professional clubs including Bolton Wanderers Official and Leigh Leopards.

Now we want to take that one step further.

For one company, we will run a recruitment search as normal.

We find the candidates. You hire the right person. You pay the agreed recruitment fee.

And we invest 100% of that fee into a local grassroots sports club.

That could mean new kits, better equipment, pitch improvements, travel support, coaching costs, or simply giving a club some breathing space at a time when many are struggling.

Same recruitment process. Same professional service. Same commitment to finding the right person.

But this time, the full fee goes back into local sport.

If your business is hiring and you like the idea of your recruitment spend making a real difference in the community, get in touch.

Let’s fill a role and fund a grassroots club at the same time.

15/06/2026

There is a shift happening in recruitment. Everyone can feel it.

The old model was simple. Post the job, wait for applicants, filter the CVs, complain about quality, boost the advert, complain again, repeat.

For years, the job board sat at the centre of hiring. It was the place employers went when they needed people, and the place candidates went when they needed work.

That behaviour is not disappearing. Employers will still post jobs. Candidates will still search for them. But the business model underneath the traditional job board is starting to look very tired.

The market is already showing it. WorkTech’s latest analysis says the marketplace job board category was the number one funded category in its dataset in 2017, 2018 and 2019, but fell to number eleven in 2024, with investment dropping from a 2021 peak of $2.4bn to $220m in 2024.

The value is moving away from traffic and towards outcomes. Away from clicks and towards quality. Away from “we got you 300 applicants” and towards “we helped you hire the right person.”

And honestly, it is about time. Because a job advert was never a hiring strategy. A flood of applications was never the same as a shortlist. A sponsored listing was never a substitute for market understanding.

And a platform sending more people into the funnel does not help much if nobody understands who should actually come out the other side.

This is where a lot of businesses get recruitment wrong. They think visibility is the problem. Sometimes it is. But more often, the real problem is clarity.

The role is not clear, the salary is not clear, the process is too slow, the expectations are unrealistic, the market has moved, but the hiring manager has not, the advert is live, but the message is weak.

The company wants “top talent” but has not worked out why top talent would move. And then everyone blames the job board. The uncomfortable truth is that job boards did not create poor hiring processes. They just made it easier to hide them behind volume.

AI will make that even more obvious. If every employer has tools to find candidates, and every candidate has tools to find roles, the middle layer only matters if it adds real intelligence. Not noise. Not clicks. Not dashboards full of vanity metrics. Real intelligence.

Who is actually available? Who is actually suitable? Who would genuinely move? What does the market really look like? What is the role competing against? Why would someone pick your opportunity over the one they already have? That is the work. Understanding the difference between someone who can do the job and someone who will actually take the job.

The job board is not dead. But the idea that a job advert alone will solve a hiring problem probably should be. The future of recruitment belongs to the people and platforms that can create trust, clarity and outcomes.

12/06/2026

There is a list. It is never written down. It is never acknowledged. But everyone in the industry knows it exists, and everyone has added a name to it at some point.

Candidate blacklisting is one of the most quietly practised and least discussed realities in recruitment.

A candidate drops out late in the process. A candidate negotiates harder than expected. A candidate asks too many questions about the role, the culture, the real reason the last person left.

And suddenly, without any formal decision being made, they become someone who never quite gets put forward again.

The candidate's action made the process uncomfortable for the business or the recruiter, and the consequence is invisible, permanent, and unacknowledged.

The candidate never finds out why the calls stopped. The candidate never gets the feedback that might help them understand. The candidate applies again months later and wonders why nothing ever progresses. The candidate is unaware that a conversation they had eighteen months ago is still affecting them.

The uncomfortable truth is that the candidates who end up on these lists are often the ones asking the most legitimate questions.

They wanted to know the salary before committing four rounds of their time. They pushed back on an unreasonable timeline. They withdrew from a process that moved the goalposts. In other words, they behaved like professionals. And they were quietly punished for it.

Businesses expect candidates to be transparent about their experience, their intentions, their other offers. They extend none of that transparency in return.

There are also legal dimensions here that most businesses and agencies have not thought through carefully. Holding undisclosed information about a candidate that affects their prospects without their knowledge sits in uncomfortable territory under data protection law. The fact that it lives in someone's head rather than a spreadsheet does not make it less real or less consequential.

A candidate gets quietly shelved. They never know why. They lose opportunities they deserved. And the person who put them there has forgotten the conversation entirely.

If a candidate behaved professionally and you still would not represent them again, ask yourself honestly whether the problem was really theirs. Or whether they just made your process look at itself for a moment and you did not like what you saw.

We believe candidates deserve the same professional standards we expect from them. If you have ever wondered why a good candidate went quiet, sometimes the list is on our side of the desk.

11/06/2026

The values are on the wall. They are on the website. They are in the onboarding deck. They play absolutely no role in who gets hired.

Most businesses spend considerable time and money deciding what they stand for. Integrity. Collaboration. Innovation. Courage.

The words get workshopped, designed, framed and mounted. And then the next role opens up, and the shortlist is built on whether the CV looks familiar and whether the hiring manager got a good feeling in the room.

The candidate who fits the culture is almost always the candidate who looks and sounds like the people already there. Which means the values on the wall are not shaping the culture. The culture is reproducing itself and calling it values.

Nobody asked how the candidate demonstrates integrity under pressure.

Nobody explored what collaboration actually looks like in how they work.

Nobody tested whether their idea of innovation matches yours or is just a word they used because it was on your website.

Nobody designed a single interview question around a single value on that wall.

But the wall looks great, very on brand.

The businesses that take their values seriously in hiring do something very simple. They turn each value into a behaviour. Then they build interview questions that surface evidence of that behaviour. Then they assess candidates against it consistently, across every interviewer, for every role. It takes an afternoon to design. It changes everything about who ends up in the building.

A value written on a wall is an aspiration. A value embedded in a hiring process is a standard. One decorates the office. The other shapes it.

You hire without the values. You onboard without them. You manage without them. And then one day something goes wrong with someone in the team, and you point at the wall and wonder why it did not prevent it.

If your values are genuinely important to how your business operates, when did you last check whether your hiring process reflects any of them?