Everyone's doing "best practice" hiring. That's the problem.

Most talent acquisition functions are broadly functional. Roles get filled. Processes run. The business keeps moving. And nobody stops to ask the obvious question.

Is any of this actually working?

Not filling roles, that part mostly works. But what about building something?A genuine competitive position in the talent market, a hiring capability that grows, a function that shapes outcomes rather than just responds to them. That part is where the question gets avoided.

The question doesn't get asked because answering it requires something most TA functions aren't structured to do: deviate from the accepted way of doing things.

Best practices in TA aren't best practices because they're proven. They're best practices because the profession collectively decided they were. Nobody validated that this combination of job boards, structured processes, EVP frameworks and LinkedIn sourcing, applied universally, produces optimal outcomes. We just started doing it. Then we called it strategy.

The risk of doing something different isn't career risk. It's delivery risk. The knowledge that if you build something unconventional and it doesn't work, you'll spend a long time explaining why you didn't just do what everyone else does.

So, most don't. Not out of laziness. Because the path of least resistance runs straight through consensus.

This isn't a criticism of the people. The system makes the incentives clear.

Some practices earn their place regardless of context. Structured interviewing holds because human bias doesn't change with sector or size. Clear job analysis holds because clarity always beats assumption.

But most of what gets called best practice is borrowed behaviour. It gets adopted because others are doing it and stays because deviation is harder to defend than conformity.

What works when candidates are already looking for you fails when they've never heard of you. The practice stays the same. The assumption underneath it doesn't.

The organisations that hire well consistently ask a different question. Not "what does everyone else do?" but "what is actually true here?"

They're not doing the same things more efficiently. They're doing different things because their context demands it.