Why Hiring Feels Harder Than It Should

Session Speaker: Colin Barnett, CB Talent Consulting
Theme: Business Processes
Date: Winter Trimester - February 2026

Recruitment is rarely the problem. Delayed talent thinking usually is.

It would be easy to say this session was about recruitment. It wasn’t.

It was about what happens when thinking about talent is left too late.

Colin Barnett covered employer brand, EVP, agencies, onboarding and retention. But beneath all of it sat a simpler point.

Recruitment becomes urgent when planning hasn’t been.

In many businesses, hiring only becomes a focus when action is required. Someone leaves. Growth stretches the team. A new capability is suddenly needed.

The role is drafted. An agency is briefed. Interviews begin. But...

By then, the options are already narrow.

Hiring is a process. But it is also a barometer.

It reveals how deeply embedded a leader’s thinking is in people, culture, and brand. It shows whether the organisation really is what it says on the tin.

Leaders often assume recruitment problems are market problems. Sometimes they are. But more often they are clarity problems. A lack of clarity about capability, about culture, about what good looks like. Recruitment simply exposes what hasn’t been resolved internally.

This isn’t unique to hiring. We’ve seen a similar pattern before. In Wellbeing as Capacity, performance was shown to erode long before it breaks. Talent works the same way. Pressure rarely starts at the moment of crisis. It starts earlier, in the absence of deliberate attention.

The always-recruiting mindset

When talent planning is deliberate and ongoing, recruitment feels measured. When talent planning is delayed, recruitment is asked to carry weight it was never designed to hold.

That weight shows up as cost. Friction. Compromise. Early turnover.

Employer brand matters. Employee Value Proposition matters. Agencies matter. But they work best when thinking about people happens before pressure arrives.

Hiring reflects how a business thinks about its people.
If that thinking starts early, recruitment feels measured.
If it starts late, recruitment carries weight it was never designed to hold.