Most hiring problems do not start with a bad resume.
They start with a conversation that never went deep enough.
That is a big reason I’m starting Better Hiring Conversations. Every Friday, I want to take the thoughts I’ve had throughout the week, the LinkedIn posts I’ve shared, the conversations I’ve been part of, and the patterns I keep seeing in recruiting and hiring, then bring them together in one place.
I’m Brandon Labonte, SHRM-CP. I’ve spent more than 15 years in recruiting, HR, talent strategy, onboarding, employee experience, and leadership. I’ve worked across healthcare, technology, professional services, mechanical construction, HVAC, plumbing, sales, administrative roles, skilled trades, and leadership hiring, heck I even set my brother up with a few girlfriends.
So this is not something I started thinking about yesterday because I had a strong cup of coffee and a LinkedIn account.
This comes from years of sitting in the middle of hiring decisions and hiring strategy. The candidate is trying to figure out if the opportunity is real. The hiring manager is trying to figure out if the person can actually do the work. The company is trying to protect the team, the culture, the customer, and the future. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the interview is supposed to help everyone make a clear decision. No pressure, right.
What I’ve learned is that hiring is rarely as simple as matching a resume to a job description. That part matters. Experience matters. Skills matter. The ability to actually do the job matters. Nobody wants to hire someone into a technical role and later discover their strongest qualification was confidence and a well-lit profile picture.
But the best hiring decisions usually come from something deeper.
They come from understanding how people think, what drives them, how they respond when the work gets hard, and whether they actually line up with the role, the team, and the direction of the business.
That is what this newsletter is about.
Each Friday, I’ll pull together the themes that showed up during the week and talk about why they matter. Some weeks it may be about candidate motivation. Some weeks it may be about interview mistakes. Some weeks it may be about core values, alignment, onboarding, hiring manager expectations, or the gap between what a company says it wants and what the conversation actually uncovers.
let me leave you with this, Christopher Voss talks about listening in a way that helps people feel understood. In recruiting, that matters because candidates rarely give you the whole story in their first answer.
Sometimes the real answer shows up after they realize you are actually listening.