The Itch

There's a tiredness that doesn't go away with sleep. I've spent years watching this from both sides the candidate waiting, and the recruiter making call fifty of the day.

There's a tiredness that doesn't go away with sleep. I've felt it after nine-hour shifts where nothing dramatic happened just the same small failures, repeating in slightly different shapes. A candidate who never got a callback. A recruiter making the fiftieth follow-up call of the day, voice running thin somewhere around call thirty.

I think that's the part most people miss. I've spent years watching this from both sides the candidate refreshing their phone, waiting to hear back, and the recruiter on the other end, drowning in calls that could've been one clear message instead. Neither side is wrong. Both are just stuck inside a process that was never designed to be light on either of them.

My room right now is a double-sharing PG packed, one shared cupboard, my side of it barely wide enough for a laptop and a cup of chai. Not much space to think in, honestly. But somehow that's where most of this thinking happens lying on the bed after a long day, running the same question on loop: what would this look like if it actually respected both people's time, not just one side's convenience?

I used to think noticing the problem clearly was half the job. It isn't. Everyone in this field can list what's broken in five minutes. Almost nobody sits with both sides of it long enough to see the whole shape of the problem not just what's hard for the candidate, and not just what's hard for the recruiter, but where those two hard things are actually the same hard thing.

I didn't plan to become someone who builds things. I planned to be good at hiring. But watching this gap from both chairs, month after month, stopped feeling like an observation. It started feeling like an itch.

No neat ending here. Just writing it down before it becomes background noise again.