Talent leaders and candidates are grading the same interview process. In research released today, Textio and Kyle & Co found that employers scored their own interview process at +48.25 on a standard recommendation scale, while candidates scored the process they had just been through at +2.87. Job seekers were eight times more likely than talent leaders to rate the process poorly. For CIOs, CISOs and VP IT Operations leaders, that gap is not a branding detail. The interview process is where scarce technical hires are won or lost.
What did the new research actually measure?
Start with what candidates say quality means. Two thirds of candidates in the Textio and Kyle & Co survey said a high quality process comes down to how fair and consistent it felt and how well the company communicated. Fewer than 6 percent said it was whether they got the job. Against that standard, the experience is uneven: 48 percent of candidates said their most recent process felt at least partly improvised, and 7 percent said it felt totally improvised. Ninety percent of organizations said ghosting at their company is rare or never happens, while 57 percent of job seekers said it has happened to them. Eighty one percent of talent leaders said rejected finalists always or usually receive substantive, personalized feedback, while 57 percent of candidates said they received a templated line, no feedback, or no reply.
The trust gap runs in both directions. Talent leaders rated their interviewers 8.1 out of 10 at detecting live AI assistance during an interview, yet 39 percent of job seekers said they have been wrongly suspected of cheating or misrepresenting themselves. The cost extends past the requisition: 35 percent of job seekers said a bad experience would stop them from buying from the company and from reapplying, and more than half said they would never apply again. The distance between intent and experience is where strong candidates quietly withdraw.
Why is the process falling behind the job itself?
Because the jobs are changing faster than the language and process used to fill them. In a second report released today, Oyster found that 95 percent of HR professionals say employees use AI tools daily in roles where AI is not part of the official job description. Two thirds of companies have added AI skill requirements to traditionally non technical roles, and among those companies 46 percent have not formally communicated the change, while 62 percent changed neither the title nor the pay. Oyster analyzed more than 15,000 job descriptions and surveyed more than 1,000 HR and people management professionals. Its platform data show AI requirements in filled roles tripling since 2022, from 5 percent to 15 percent, with nine in ten of those roles not naming AI in the title. A candidate can therefore be interviewed against expectations that appear nowhere in the posting.
Adecco Group executives are making the same point from the employer side. Reporting by HRD Canada on October 7 described Adecco leaders arguing that roles need to be broken down into tasks before hiring begins, with a clear decision on which tasks technology handles and which human skills remain. In Adecco research cited there, only 36 percent of C suite leaders said their talent strategy shows employees that AI will create opportunities rather than replace them, across 2,000 executives surveyed in 13 countries. When the role definition lags, interviewers improvise around the gaps, and candidates experience that improvisation as inconsistency.
What does the wider labor market add to the picture?
That leadership capacity itself is getting scarcer. The SHRM Q3 2026 Labor Demand and Shortage Review, built on Lightcast posting data, found people management among the fastest growing skills in demand, up 40.1 percent over the past year, with engineering practices up 34.4 percent. The same review found occupational mismatch widening: the share of postings that cannot be filled due to mismatch rose from 35.3 percent in April 2026 to 36.6 percent in July, and management occupations accounted for a rising share of those unfillable postings, from 10.6 percent in April to 15 percent in July.
Hiring difficulty is broad, not anecdotal. In its ninth annual Hiring Benchmark Report, released October 6, Criteria Corp surveyed 1,027 United States hiring professionals: 52 percent say hiring is harder in 2026, 55 percent say finding high quality candidates with the right skills is their biggest challenge, and nearly two thirds expect headcount to grow next year. Read each figure as its publisher presents it. Together they point one way: demand is rising, candidate signals are under strain, and the process candidates experience is now a competitive variable.
How should talent leaders close the gap this quarter?
Run the playbook in five moves. First, measure both sides separately: score the process from the candidate side at each stage, and never let the hiring team grade be the only grade on the dashboard. Second, write the evidence rubric before sourcing starts. For firmware, test and validation, cybersecurity, network, SRE, ERP and data center roles, name the tasks, the judgment calls, and the proof a candidate can show for each, agreed by the hiring manager in advance. Third, put communication on a clock: every finalist receives substantive feedback or a dated update, and silence past the date is tracked as a defect. Fourth, when AI changes a role, update the title, the requirements and the pay band together, and communicate the change formally, so nobody is interviewed against a hidden standard. Fifth, debrief on structured, comparable evidence that can be shared back with the candidate and checked later against how the hire performed. It requires a leader who treats the candidate record with the same discipline as the requisition.
What should you check before the next requisition opens?
Run five checks. Does the posting describe the job as it is done today, including any AI assisted tasks? Is the rubric written, shared with every interviewer, and tied to evidence rather than fit? Do candidates receive a named contact, a timeline, and specific feedback? Is anyone measuring the candidate score separately from the hiring team score, by stage? And is the search reaching beyond inbound applicants to the employed specialists who will judge your process hardest? That is the work UPPER handles end to end: sourcing across multiple channels, scoring candidates against the requirements of the role, and running outreach until top ranked candidates with resumes are ready to be contacted. In a market where leaders score their process 48 and candidates score it 3, the advantage goes to the team that closes that gap first.