Most Talent Shortages Are Screening Shortages

Ask a hiring team why a role has been open for two months and you'll usually hear the same answer: there aren't enough good people out there. It gets said so often that it has become background, the kind of thing boards nod along to and hiring managers write into headcount requests. But if you look at what's actually happening in the pipeline, the explanation starts to look odd.

If good candidates were scarce, you'd expect applications to be scarce too. They aren't. Since AI tools made it easy to produce a resume and apply in a few minutes, postings draw far more applicants than they used to, often hundreds in the first week for an ordinary professional role and more for high-volume jobs in logistics, retail, or customer service. Whatever else is going on, companies are not short of applicants.

What they are short of is time to talk to them. Think about what one recruiter can do. On a good day, with no offer negotiations and no hiring manager calls eating the afternoon, a recruiter might hold eight to twelve real screening calls. Over a month that's a couple of hundred conversations at most. One busy campaign can bring in more applicants than that in a week.

So most applicants never get a conversation. They get an automated status update, then eventually a rejection email, and no person ever spoke to them. Meanwhile the team forms its view of "the market" from the slice of the pool it had time to call. That slice is picked mostly by timing: whoever applied first, whoever landed when a recruiter happened to have a gap in the calendar, whoever came in through a referral.

Now imagine the person who would have been best for the job, and suppose they applied on day three. By then the recruiter's calendar was full of day-one applicants, and by the time anyone got to the backlog, the role was filled or the candidate had taken something else. Nothing records this. Applicant tracking systems report on the people you spoke to. The qualified person you never called doesn't appear as a data point anywhere, except perhaps weeks later as a reopened req when the hire doesn't work out.

This is why the distinction matters. A talent shortage means the right people don't exist in your market. A screening shortage means they existed, they applied, and they left because your process couldn't get to them in time. The two call for different fixes. If the problem is supply, you spend on employer branding, higher pay bands, and more sourcing. If the problem is throughput, all of that makes things worse, because it brings in more applicants you already can't talk to.

I suspect the shortage story survives partly because it's comfortable. If the right people simply aren't out there, nothing inside the company has to change. A screening shortage is an internal problem, and admitting it means admitting that some of your best candidates were sitting in the pile the whole time.

Where exactly is the bottleneck? Walk through the stages. Panel interviews, hiring manager time, and offer discussions are all sized for a filtered set of candidates, and they mostly cope. The constraint comes before any of that, at the first conversation. It's the one step whose cost grows with every extra applicant, and it's the one step nobody has scaled.

That first conversation is what we built Asendia to handle. We make software that phones each applicant soon after they apply and interviews them, following up on what they say, and it puts a ranked summary of every conversation into the ATS, so a recruiter's morning starts from people who have actually been talked to instead of a few hundred unread applications.

What changes is that the whole pool gets worked, not just the sixty or so people who happened to apply when a recruiter had an open slot. The day-three applicant gets a call like everyone else, and ends up on the shortlist if they belong there. I've written separately about why most hiring tools stop short of moving the pipeline at all, in the post on agentic recruiting.

If you think your company has a talent shortage, here is a simple test. Pick a role that's been hard to fill and count how many of its applicants a person actually spoke to. If the answer is a small fraction of the pile, you don't yet know whether the talent exists. You only know you haven't looked.

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