The New Talent Bottleneck Isn’t Hiring. It’s Attention.

Most companies don’t have a hiring problem.

They have an attention problem, and they’re measuring the wrong thing.

I’ve been talking with a lot of recruiting leaders lately, and the conversations tend to follow the same arc.

They start with frustration. Pipelines feel thinner than they should. Time-to-fill keeps creeping up for key roles. The quality of inbound applications feels off, even with healthy budgets and capable teams in place.

The explanations all feel plausible…

“It’s just the market right now”
“Candidates have more options at the same pay”
“The recruiting team isn’t efficient enough”

“It’s the economy.”

None of these are necessarily wrong. All with merit. But it’s an incomplete story. Having run near 30 audits this year, I continue to find that the real constraint is something most organizations still don’t measure.

It's not candidate supply......

It’s the supply of qualified *candidate attention*.

How Job Search Quietly Changed

Ten years ago, a well-written job posting on the right boards could generate hundreds of qualified applicants. Not just applicants….qualified and interested applicants. Today, that same posting often generates plenty of applicants, but struggles to break double digits for relevant and qualified. This is happening even when the role is competitive and the company is generally recognizable.

The mistake is treating the applicant pool as one population.

It’s not.

The market has split into two distinct behaviors:

Low Friction mass appliers--Optimizing for speed, not fit

High-intent selective candidates--Optimize for alignment, not convenience

Old recruiting models assumed one middle. That middle is gone.

Applicant volume hasn’t disappeared. In many cases, it’s exploded, just not in a useful way.

Applying for jobs has never been easier. One-click applies, autofill resumes, and broad job distribution mean a subset of candidates can submit dozens of applications in minutes, often with little filtering or intent. That behavior creates the illusion of a great pipeline, all while masking the harsh reality.

At the same time, the candidates companies actually want behave very differently. They apply selectively. They scrutinize before engaging. They rule employers out quickly based on reputation signals, clarity, and credibility, often without ever entering the funnel.

In other words, ease of application has increased noise, while attention scarcity has reduced signal.

Research supports this shift. LinkedIn reports that the majority of candidates research a company’s reputation before applying, and multiple studies show employer brand perception influencing the vast majority of application decisions. Yet only a minority of organizations systematically measure how they’re actually perceived outside their own channels.

Why This Creates a Real Bottleneck

When attention becomes scarce, weak or inconsistent signals compound into a real hiring drag.

As conversions drop, recruiters become increasingly dependent on job boards, which eats dollars and delivers diminishing returns.

The companies performing best right now aren’t necessarily spending more. They’re showing up more clearly and more credibly in the places candidates look first, before active job search even begins.

This is where a useful analogy helps. Marketing teams distinguish between demand generation and demand capture. Most recruiting technology focuses on capture: sourcing tools, ATS workflows, automation. Very little illuminates the generation side; how awareness, familiarity, and trust form before the funnel exists.

That blind spot is now the bottleneck.

Making the Invisible Measurable

The encouraging part is that this isn’t abstract. It’s diagnosable.

A proper employment brand audit maps how a company shows up across the channels that shape early perception: organic search visibility, review site sentiment, competitive positioning during side-by-side research, and how content travels beyond owned channels.

When leadership teams see this clearly, the conversation changes. It moves from “Why aren’t we getting enough applicants?” to “Where are we losing attention from our core candidate pool — and what’s the highest-leverage fix?”

I’ve seen this unlock hiring across multiple organizations: faster fills, better quality, lower cost-per-hire, all without adding budget or headcount.

We built TalentSignal for exactly this reason.

Too many teams were making six-figure recruiting budget decisions while guessing about where and why candidates were coming in and dropping off. TalentSignal pulls those upstream signals together so leaders can see, with precision, how their employer brand actually competes in the attention market.

If you’re a CHRO or TA leader seeing strong applicant volume but weak signal, it’s worth diagnosing where attention is leaking before the funnel even starts.

If you’re noticing these trends and want to see how they apply to your own organization, you can run a free visibility score here: ​Run Your Free Visibility Score​.

It takes under a minute and surfaces the key upstream signals we discussed."

If instead you want to see what that looks like in practice, just hit reply and I’ll share a sample report.

I’m happy to share.

To your success,

Alden

Founder, Talenta HR Group