Field note · August 2026

The recruiting speed problem

Most people think recruiting is a search problem. They picture a recruiter scrolling through resumes, sifting a giant pile of candidates until the right one surfaces. That picture was accurate twenty years ago. It is not accurate now.

Candidate access has been solved. LinkedIn alone holds hundreds of millions of profiles searchable by skill, title, and location in seconds. Job boards, alumni networks, and referral tools have made finding a plausible candidate the easy part of the job. Anyone with a laptop can build a shortlist in an afternoon.

The recruiters winning placements right now are not the ones with the deepest database. They are the ones who heard about the opening first.

What has not been solved is timing. A company does not need help finding candidates most of the time. It needs help the moment a role opens, when three or four other recruiters are circling the same client and the first real conversation usually wins the mandate. That is a speed problem, not a search problem, and almost nobody structures their pipeline around speed.

This is the gap I work in. I track the signals that tell me a company just opened a role, tech or healthcare, before most recruiters know it exists, and I connect it to the recruiters positioned to move on it immediately.

The value is not the resume database. It is being early.

— Jesse Murdock, routing between companies hiring and the recruiters who place for them.