Think about the last person you turned down for a job. What would they say about your business? 

Even though they might have been disappointed, they may still have been impressed by the people they met. Or perhaps they’re wondering what really happened, when the interview seemed to go well but their next communication from you was a rejection letter. 

Now imagine those candidates describing their experience to someone you’d love to hire. Would they make your workplace sound like one people would actually want to join? 

Your hiring process is a preview of your workplace 

You know what it’s like to work in your business, but candidates don’t. The only glimpses they’re likely to get are the job advertisement, perhaps a recommendation from someone they know and the interactions they have with you during the recruitment process. 

Based on that alone, they’re likely to form an impression about everyday working life. On this front, an interviewer who has read their application and can explain the role properly gives a very different impression from one who arrives unprepared. Two managers offering conflicting accounts of the position could leave them wondering whose expectations they would need to meet. 

The research reinforces that candidate experience is not a nice-to-have extra. A meta analysis covering 86 samples and 48,750 participants found that positive perceptions about the selection process were associated with more favourable views of the employer, along with stronger intentions to accept an offer and recommend the organisation to others. 

Put simply, while you’re assessing candidates, they’re assessing you. So, if you want potential employees to perceive your organisation as respectful, collaborative and well organised, recruitment is an important place to demonstrate it. 

Better hiring starts with a clearer brief 

A good recruitment process begins before you advertise. Everyone involved should understand what the person will actually do, what success looks like and which capabilities they’ll need to bring to achieve it. 

That sounds straightforward, but a vacancy can expose differences you haven’t properly resolved – or perhaps even thought about – internally. Those differences matter because candidates may experience them as moving goalposts, inconsistent feedback or unclear expectations. 

For instance, one manager might want an experienced operator who can take responsibility immediately. Another might be looking for someone they can develop. Unless they agree, candidates could be assessed against different expectations or find the requirements changing as they progress. 

When you’re making these calls, be sure to distinguish what’s essential from what’s desirable, including any skills or capabilities someone could reasonably learn once they join. This helps you write a more useful job advertisement and gives candidates a clearer basis for deciding whether to apply in the first place.  

Also agree who will assess the candidates against which criteria, who makes the final decision and who keeps candidates informed. A shared brief gives your team a consistent basis for selection and helps prevent candidates becoming caught in an internal debate about what you need. 

Give candidates structure so they can show what they can do

Once you know what you’re looking for, the next question is how you’ll recognise it.  

Often employers engage candidates in unstructured conversation that leaves everyone feeling positive but gives little insight into their ability to do the job. 

A 2022 reassessment of recruitment research ranked structured interviews highest among the selection methods examined for predicting job performance. The researchers also found that the predictive power of many selection methods – including cognitive ability tests, work-sample tests and unstructured interviews – had previously been overstated.

A structured interview uses consistent core questions linked to the role’s requirements, with an agreed approach to assessing answers. You can still ask follow-up questions and let the conversation develop but the structure gives you a common basis for comparison. 

For example, if managing competing deadlines is essential, ask each candidate to describe a situation where they had to prioritise conflicting demands. Assess how they made decisions, communicated with others and handled the outcome. 

Ask interviewers to record their assessments before discussing candidates together. This gives everyone’s observations a chance to be considered before a confident or senior colleague shapes the conversation. 

A short, relevant practical task can also help potential employees demonstrate their capabilities. Explain what it assesses and how long it should take, and keep the demands proportionate to the role. 

Every stage should help answer a question about suitability. Adding more interviews or a lengthy assignment without a clear purpose creates extra work for everyone and can tell candidates something you didn’t intend to about how your business operates. 

Keep people informed even when there’s no decision yet 

A recruitment delay might be easy to explain from your side: a manager is away, interviews need rescheduling or you’re waiting for approval. From the candidate’s side, however, silence can undermine their confidence in you.  

They don’t know whether they’re still being considered, whether the role has changed or whether they should move on. That’s especially damaging if they’re also weighing another opportunity. 

Set expectations early. Explain the stages, who candidates will meet, any assessment tasks and when they should expect to hear from you. Give them a contact for questions and make someone responsible for providing updates. 

If you miss a promised deadline, acknowledge it. A brief message explaining the delay and giving a realistic date for the next update helps candidates plan, even if you honestly can’t yet give them a decision.

Automated acknowledgements and reminders can help you stay organised. Just be sure to keep them to the initial phases. Once someone has invested time in interviews or an assessment, a personal update shows that you recognise that effort. 

Reliable communication also gives candidates a practical example of how you handle expectations when things don’t go to plan. 

A rejection doesn’t have to end the relationship 

Most candidates won’t get the job.  

That means much of your reputation as an employer will be shaped by people you turn down. 

Research published in 2025 examined rejection timing across two studies involving 264 and 259 candidates. Faster communication improved the candidates’ perceptions of fairness and satisfaction, along with candidates’ intentions to reapply and recommend the employer to others. The comparisons included rejection notifications sent after seven versus fourteen days. 

The practical lesson is to close the loop promptly once you’ve made a decision. Leaving someone waiting doesn’t soften the disappointment. 

How you communicate should also reflect how far they’ve progressed. An applicant rejected at the initial screening stage may need a straightforward notification. Someone who’s attended several interviews and completed an assessment deserves a more personal response. 

For finalists, useful feedback can explain the decision against the role’s requirements. For example, saying that the successful candidate demonstrated more experience managing a team gives someone more to work with than a vague reference to “fit”. 

That said, you will never make every candidate happy with the outcome. But you can help them leave knowing their application was considered seriously and their time was respected.  

That leaves the door open for a future opportunity, even when this one hasn’t worked out.

Treat the process as part of your recruitment strategy 

It’s easy to judge a recruitment campaign by whether you filled the vacancy. But it’s also worth asking how you reached that decision and what candidates experienced along the way. 

Did everyone involved understand the role? Did your assessments give candidates a fair opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities? Were timelines realistic, updates reliable and decisions explained respectfully? 

You can ask candidates for feedback, too – including those you didn’t hire. Their answers might just reveal problems your team couldn’t see, such as repeated questions across interviews or unclear instructions for an assessment. 

For the person who joins, the process has already begun setting expectations about working with you. They’ve seen how you prepare, communicate and make decisions. Following through on that experience once they start helps turn early confidence into an ongoing working relationship. 

And for those you turn down, a thoughtful process gives them a reason to consider you again… or recommend you to someone else. 

Want more? 

Catalina Consultants can review your recruitment approach, clarify what you need from a role, and then build a process that supports both sound hiring decisions and a positive candidate experience.  

Contact us to discuss your next hire.

By their very nature, hiring decisions are imperfect.

CVs can embellish what someone’s actually achieved. Candidates can come across much better – or much worse – in an interview than they’re likely to perform in reality. And the judgement of hiring managers isn’t always as objective or reliable as we might  like to believe.

This creates an unavoidable problem. How do you decide whether to hire someone before you have access to the clearest evidence of all – actually seeing them do the job?

Psychometric testing aims to reduce that uncertainty by providing insight into how someone is likely to think, communicate and behave at work before they begin.

Depending on the assessment, it can reveal information about a potential employee’s cognitive abilities, personality, workplace preferences and emotional intelligence that may not emerge from a CV or conventional interview.

But psychometric testing isn’t a crystal ball. Its usefulness depends on what’s being assessed, how relevant that is to the role and how the results are interpreted.

So, do psychometric tests actually work? And if so, when should you use them? We explore what employers need to know.

 

Why employers use psychometric testing

Anyone who’s an experienced interviewer will tell you that when you interview several candidates for the same role, you’re rarely comparing like with like.

One candidate could be highly polished, convincing and personable, but scratch the surface and they might turn out to be an unreliable employee. Another could have excellent skills and judgement but struggle to demonstrate them in an unfamiliar or high pressure setting.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. An even bigger issue can sometimes be the conversation itself. What gets discussed can change between interviews – and potentially explore completely different territory – depending on the answers given, the  questions asked and the rapport between candidate and interviewer.

Psychometric testing aims to remove some of these variables and let you compare potential employees based on the underlying qualities that actually matter in the role. It can also uncover potential strengths or weaknesses that haven’t emerged elsewhere in  the interview process, challenge impressions you’ve already formed and highlight issues worth probing further in a second interview or reference check.

 

What are the different types of psychometric tests?

Virtually everyone has done a form of psychometric testing at some stage in their careers, and one reason for that is that it’s a very broad term.

“Psychometric testing” doesn’t refer to one particular assessment or even one type of information. Instead, in recruitment, tests generally fall into several categories.

Cognitive ability and aptitude tests

These assess how someone processes information, learns, reasons and solves problems. Depending on the role, this might include numerical, verbal, abstract, spatial or mechanical reasoning.

Cognitive ability and aptitude tests aren’t usually designed to measure what someone already knows but to assess their capacity to understand information and apply it.

Personality assessments

These tend to look at relatively stable traits and behavioural tendencies. They may explore qualities such as conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness, adaptability or extraversion.

Unlike aptitude tests, there’s usually no “correct” personality profile. The relevant question is whether particular traits are likely to help – or hinder – someone in the role they’re applying for.

Workplace behaviour assessments

These focus more specifically on how someone is likely to operate at work. For instance, they may provide insight into how a candidate communicates, collaborates, makes decisions, responds to pressure or approaches risk and detail.

Emotional intelligence assessments

These examine how well someone recognises, understands and manages emotions – both their own and other people’s. This can be especially relevant when you’re recruiting for leadership, management, sales or other roles involving complex interpersonal situations.

Some recruitment processes also use situational judgement tests, job-knowledge assessments and work samples. While these aren’t always described as psychometric tests, they can apply similar principles to assess how candidates respond to realistic  problems or perform tasks they would encounter in the role.

The Australian Psychological Society says employment-related testing commonly covers reasoning ability, personality and vocational preferences, but may also examine areas including integrity, leadership and emotional intelligence.

Do psychometric tests actually work?

The short answer is yes. But not simply because someone has put the word “psychometric” on the box.

For any assessment to be useful, it needs to clear two separate hurdles.

First, it must be reliable, meaning it measures the relevant characteristic consistently. Second, it must be valid for the purpose for which you’re using it. In recruitment, that means there should be credible evidence connecting what the test measures with  performance in the particular type of role.

The truth is that some assessments clear that bar more convincingly than others.

A major reanalysis of decades of research into employee-selection methods found that structured interviews had an average correlation of 0.42 with subsequent job performance. Job-knowledge tests recorded 0.40, work-sample tests 0.33 and cognitive-ability tests 0.31. In this context, the higher the correlation, the stronger the relationship between the assessment result and later performance.

The same research found that personality assessments became more predictive when questions were placed specifically in a work context. In other words, asking someone how they tend to behave at work can be more useful than asking broad questions about  what they’re like generally.

This is really at the heart of whether psychometric testing works. If it’s not being used to measure a quality that’s genuinely required in the role, it’s also not likely to be useful.

For instance, a numerical-reasoning test may tell you something important about a financial analyst but very little about whether someone will be an effective people leader. Likewise, a candidate’s degree of extraversion may matter in some roles but be almost irrelevant in others.

What the critics of psychometric testing say

Psychometric testing has no shortage of critics, and some of their criticisms may be well founded.

One obvious shortcoming is that candidates know they’re being assessed. In a personality questionnaire, they might choose the answer they think the employer wants rather than the one that most accurately reflects how they behave.

In fact, one meta-analysis comparing how the same people completed personality assessments in real job applications and lower-stakes settings found that applicants tended to give more socially desirable answers when employment was on the line. Their  answers also became less varied, making it harder to distinguish meaningfully between candidates.

Another problem is that not every test commonly used in workplaces was designed to predict job performance.

Four-quadrant personality assessments – which divide people into colours, letters, animals or other broad “types” – can be engaging and useful for prompting conversations about communication, teamwork and self-awareness.

But that doesn’t necessarily make them suitable for deciding who gets a job.

As the Harvard Business Review has observed, these assessments can be relatively easy to manipulate, meaning they can measure preferences or temporary “states” that change with context, rather than stable traits. Many also lack the reliability, comparison  data and demonstrated connection with job performance required for high-stakes hiring  decisions.

Testing conditions can also create problems. A candidate’s result can be affected by time pressure, anxiety, language, cultural background, disability or simply unfamiliarity with the testing format.

So, unless those factors are genuinely relevant to the job, the assessment might end up measuring how well someone takes the test rather than how well they could perform the  role.

 

How to effectively introduce psychometric testing into your organisation’s recruitment process

If you’re going to introduce psychometric testing, it needs to be designed into your recruitment process rather than simply bolted onto it. Here’s how to do it effectively.

  1. Start with the requirements of the role

Identify the abilities, behaviours and personal qualities that genuinely influence success in the position. The Australian Human Rights Commission says psychological and aptitude testing should only be used when it’s reasonably required to determine whether someone can perform the specific requirements of a job.

  1. Choose a test that actually measures those qualities

Don’t choose an assessment simply because it’s popular, inexpensive or produces an impressive-looking report. Ask the provider what the test measures, how reliable it is and what evidence connects its results with performance in comparable roles.

  1. Decide where testing belongs in the recruitment process

Testing every single applicant is likely to waste time and discourage good candidates. It’s often more useful to introduce psychometric testing after an initial shortlist, when you can use the results to inform subsequent interviews and reference checks.

That’s broadly how we hire at Catalina Consultants: a brief initial conversation and two interview rounds before psychometric testing.

  1. Determine how much weight the results will carry

Decide this before you see anyone’s score. Otherwise, there’s a risk you’ll embrace a result that supports your preferred candidate while dismissing one that challenges your existing view.

  1. Explain the process to candidates

Tell candidates why they’re being tested, what the assessment involves, how the results will be used and who will have access to them. You should also give them an opportunity to raise anything that may affect their ability to complete the assessment and provide reasonable adjustments where appropriate.

  1. Make sure the results are interpreted properly

A percentile, colour or personality label rarely tells the whole story. Make sure someone with the right training interprets what the results mean (and equally importantly, what they don’t mean) in the context of the role.

  1. Use the results to ask better questions

Treat the assessment as a source of questions rather than a final answer. If the results suggest a potential strength, risk or inconsistency, explore it with the candidate and, where appropriate, their referees. Look for evidence rather than assuming the test must be right.

  1. Carry the insights into onboarding

Once the successful candidate starts, relevant findings can help their manager understand how they prefer to communicate, receive feedback and approach their work. They may also identify useful development priorities or potential sources of friction  within the team.

But the assessment should remain a starting point for discussion, not a permanent label. Once you’ve seen how the employee actually performs, their real behaviour should always carry more weight than a prediction made before they began.

  1. Review whether the assessment is working

Compare test results with employees’ subsequent performance, retention and development over time. If the assessment isn’t helping you make better appointments (or if it consistently disadvantages particular groups) you need to reconsider the test or  how you’re using it.

 

Better information, not perfect prediction

Psychometric testing can’t eliminate the risk involved in hiring. No assessment can tell  you with certainty how someone will perform once they’re working inside your  organisation.

Used well, however, it can reveal information you might otherwise miss, challenge assumptions formed during interviews and help you make a more considered decision. The same insights can then support better conversations about communication,  management and development once the successful candidate begins.

The real value isn’t in the test itself, but in how intelligently you use the information it gives you.

 

Want more?

If you’re considering introducing psychometric testing or want to improve your recruitment and onboarding processes, Catalina Consultants can help. Contact us to find out more.

A recruiter contacts a promising candidate about a role. The candidate researches the organisation, prepares for the interview and rearranges their working day to attend. The conversation goes well, and the recruiter promises to provide an update by the end of the week.

And then … silence. 

The promised update never arrives, follow-up emails go unanswered, and the candidate is left to work out what happened.

Alternatively, a candidate stops returning calls, fails to attend confirmed interviews or even accepts a job offer and then disappears before their first day of work.

This is ghosting, and it’s on the rise. We explore why, how it’s hurting businesses as well as candidates, and how you can break the cycle and restore some trust to your organisation’s recruitment process.

 

What is ghosting?

Not every unanswered application necessarily amounts to ghosting. Job ads often make it clear that only shortlisted candidates will be contacted, so failing to contact everyone of the many applicants for a position isn’t really ghosting. It’s just acting in the way you said you would. 

An automated rejection isn’t necessarily ghosting either. It may feel impersonal, especially when it arrives almost immediately, but it at least gives the candidate an answer.

Instead, ghosting occurs when one party suddenly stops communicating without explanation, despite creating a reasonable expectation that the conversation will continue.

In each of these cases, the problem isn’t so much the rejection or a change of mind – those are just natural and largely unavoidable parts of the recruitment process. Nor is the problem necessarily a delay: hiring decisions frequently take longer than expected and candidates’ circumstances can change quickly.

Ghosting happens when reasonable expectations meet unexplained silence: it’s when someone leaves another person to guess what’s gone on after giving them reason to expect an answer.

 

How common is ghosting in recruitment?

Research suggests ghosting is now common on both sides of the recruitment process.

A 2024 survey by hiring platform Greenhouse found that almost 45% of UK candidates had been ghosted by a recruiter after an initial conversation. And, significantly, respondents from historically underrepresented backgrounds were more likely to report being ghosted than white candidates. More recent Greenhouse data puts the figure even higher, with 61% of job seekers now reporting they’ve been ghosted after an interview.

Recruiters and employers are experiencing similar behaviour. In fact, Forbes Magazine reported that Gen Z candidates ghost employers or recruiters about 54% of the time – after already accepting a formal job offer.

The studies involve different groups and measure different behaviour, but together they reveal how easily the behaviour can become self-reinforcing. Candidates who’ve repeatedly been left without an answer conclude that recruiters don’t value their time. Meanwhile, recruiters who’ve been repeatedly ignored or stood up decide there’s little point investing in candidates until they have demonstrated a serious commitment.

Both responses may be understandable, but they lead to a low-trust system in which each party tries to minimise its investment and keep its alternatives open… until ghosting stops looking like a breach of professional courtesy and starts becoming accepted as simply how recruitment works.

 

Why has ghosting become so common?

There’s no single explanation for the rise of ghosting. But changes in how organisations recruit (and how candidates apply) have made the process increasingly impersonal.

Technology allows job seekers to find and apply for more positions, while generative AI can help them produce tailored applications in a fraction of the time. 

This means employers must then process a greater volume of CVs and cover letters. And that, in turn, encourages heavier reliance on applicant tracking systems, automated screening questions and AI-assisted assessments. 

But what happens inside these isn’t always transparent. Candidates often don’t know whether a recruiter considered their application, whether a knockout question excluded them or whether an automated tool ranked their experience poorly. A capable candidate may have relevant or transferable skills but describe them differently from the language the system has been configured to identify.

Over time, this opacity can change how people behave. Candidates who suspect nobody is meaningfully reading their applications become less inclined to invest in each one. This perpetuates their inclination to apply for several positions, use AI to reproduce the language in job advertisements and keep several options open simultaneously.

Employers then receive more formulaic applications from candidates who may have only limited interest in the position. That creates still more pressure to automate screening and reserve personal communication for a small number of applicants.

But technology isn’t the only cause. Hiring priorities change, positions are placed on hold, and recruiters can be left waiting for decisions from hiring managers. Sometimes responsibility for updating candidates is unclear. At other times, people simply avoid the discomfort of delivering a rejection or admitting that a decision has been delayed.

Candidates can be equally reluctant to have an awkward conversation. They might receive a better offer, lose interest in the position or become concerned about something they encountered during the recruitment process. Saying nothing can feel easier than formally withdrawing.

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: the less human recruitment feels, the less personally responsible people feel for bringing a conversation to a proper end.

 

The damage ghosting does

Ghosting may avoid one uncomfortable conversation, but it usually creates larger problems for everyone involved.

When candidates disappear, recruiters may need to revive an old shortlist or restart the search entirely. Interviews have to be rescheduled, hiring decisions are delayed, and important positions remain vacant for longer. If someone disappears after accepting an offer, it can get worse still – especially if the employer or recruiter has already informed other candidates they were unsuccessful. 

Candidates may find that ghosting cuts out their options for future roles. A recruiter or hiring manager who has been ignored, stood up or left without an employee on the agreed starting date is unlikely to consider that candidate favourably when another opportunity arises.

Finally, for employers, the damage extends beyond the immediate vacancy. Recruitment is often a candidate’s first direct experience of how an organisation operates. Repeated delays, broken promises and unexplained silence can suggest that the organisation is disorganised, indecisive or indifferent to people’s time.

That impression doesn’t necessarily disappear easily: an unsuccessful candidate might later apply for another position, refer someone else, become a customer or influence how others view the organisation. 

Viewed this way, candidate experience isn’t separate from employer brand – it’s part of a wider pattern of recruitment friction that can repel top talent.

 

Who should break the cycle?

Recruiters, employers and job seekers all share responsibility for communicating professionally, but they don’t have equal control over the recruitment process. 

Employers decide how positions are advertised, which technology screens applications, how many interviews candidates must complete and how long decisions take. And that also gives them the greatest ability, and therefore the greatest responsibility, to set a better standard.

Not that this absolves job seekers of their own responsibility to withdraw honestly rather than disappear. But because employers and recruiters hold the most control over the process, breaking the cycle has to start with them.

 

How you can help break the ghosting cycle in your business

People will always change their minds, accept other opportunities and occasionally behave badly. But a well-designed recruitment process can make disappearing less likely and make professional communication easier for everyone.

1. Set expectations from the beginning

Candidates should know what the recruitment process involves, how long it’s likely to take and who will keep them informed.

Recruiters should also ask how candidates prefer to be contacted and encourage them to disclose if they are considering other opportunities or working to another deadline. Candidates, in turn, should be clear about their level of interest and availability.

Neither party should have to guess what happens next.

2. Give people an actual update date

“We’ll be in touch” creates no meaningful expectation. “We will update you by Friday” does.

Sometimes Friday will arrive before the employer has made a decision. That shouldn’t prevent the recruiter from contacting the candidate with a short message explaining that the process has been delayed.

3. Match the communication to the investment

Not every candidate requires the same level of personal attention.

An automated acknowledgement or rejection might be appropriate for someone who has only submitted an initial application. But once a recruiter has spoken to a candidate, communication should become more personal.

Anyone who takes the time to prepare for and attend an interview deserves a clear outcome. Someone who completes several interviews, assessments or reference checks – the kind of multi-stage process a thorough hiring approach involves – deserves a direct conversation and, where possible, useful feedback.

The greater the investment you ask of the candidate, the greater your obligation to bring the process to a proper conclusion.

4. Automate administration, not relationships

Technology can improve the candidate experience when it’s used to acknowledge applications, arrange interviews, issue reminders and prevent people from being forgotten.

Problems arise when automation replaces communication or makes important decisions unnecessarily opaque.

Make sure you understand how your screening systems work and regularly check what kinds of candidates they exclude. A rigid system can overlook valuable transferable experience simply because it is described differently from the language used in the advertisement.

Once a meaningful human exchange has begun, technology should support the relationship rather than providing an excuse to withdraw from it.

5. Make honest withdrawal easy

Candidates sometimes disappear because formally declining an opportunity feels awkward. You can reduce this by providing a simple and stigma-free way to withdraw.

A short email, text message or link in your recruitment platform may be enough. Recruiters should also make clear that circumstances change and that an honest withdrawal will be treated more favourably than silence.

6. Make communication part of the process

Communication shouldn’t depend entirely on individual memory or goodwill.

You can assign responsibility for updates at every stage, establish expected response times and track candidates who’ve not received an outcome – see our guide to streamlining your hiring process in 8 weeks for a practical framework. 

Also, if you find a pattern of ghosting occurring at the same point of your recruitment process, that may be a sign of excessive delays, unclear information, unnecessary assessments or a gap between the advertised position and the role candidates encounter.

Instead of treating every disappearance as evidence that candidates are unreliable, employers should ask whether the recruitment process is contributing to the behaviour.

 

Restoring the lost art of replying

Recruitment will always involve rejection, changed circumstances and difficult conversations. Ghosting avoids none of these things. It simply transfers the uncertainty and discomfort to someone else.

Recruiters and job seekers won’t always have the answer the other person wants but, in most cases, any honest answer is better than silence.

In short, by treating communication as part of the process rather than an afterthought, employers can begin rebuilding trust and hold candidates to the same standard.

The lost art of replying isn’t especially complicated: it begins with recognising that there is still a person waiting at the other end.

 

Want more?

If your organisation needs help creating a more effective recruitment process or finding the right people, contact Catalina Consultants.

In 2026, graduate hiring is in trouble, and the numbers aren’t subtle about it. 

Australian graduate job postings had already fallen 24% in 2024 compared to the year before, and were tracking a further 16% lower in early 2025. By December 2025, just 9% of Australian SMEs were actively hiring graduates, down from 19% two months earlier. 

But the trend isn’t confined to our shores: globally, entry-level hiring has fallen an estimated 29% since January 2024.

In short, many businesses are no longer hiring recent graduates at all. 

On one hand, it’s understandable employers have become frustrated by graduate work-readiness (more than half now say graduates don’t meet expectations on self-awareness). They’re also concerned about their resilience and written communication, you’d be excused for thinking that there was little point bucking the trend.

And yet, despite all of this, there’s still a strong case for hiring graduates. Here’s why. 

What the best employers are doing when it comes to hiring grads in 2026

Despite the widespread cuts, 91% of large employers globally are still recruiting graduates, even if many of them are trimming at the margins. In Australia, the companies most serious about long-term performance have never wavered from their policies about hiring lots of graduates. 

As smaller businesses cut back, year after year, through boom and contraction alike, the world’s largest organisations run structured graduate programs. In doing so, they invest in onboarding, mentoring and rotation and, above all, they compete hard with one another for the best candidates.

These aren’t naive operators ignoring the numbers and sticking to what they’ve always done. They’re the most analytically sophisticated employers in the country who’ve taken the view that the pipeline matters too much to interrupt.

There’s a reason for this too: experienced hires don’t appear from nowhere. The senior consultant you need in four years is the graduate you hire today. The organisations that understand this think about their talent pipeline the way good businesses think about any long-term investment, i.e. not quarter to quarter, but across a cycle.

So what the current pullback mostly reflects isn’t a rational reassessment of graduate value. It’s short-term budget pressure producing long-term consequences that won’t become visible for years. 

And, by the time they do, it will be too late to do much about them. That’s because the cost of cutting graduate recruitment gets deferred.

The pipeline doesn’t send you a warning email

When employers froze graduate intake during the GFC, the consequences weren’t immediate. Initially. budgets looked better and headcount was leaner, but when the recovery came the mid-level talent that should have been there ready to move the business forward simply wasn’t. 

A Hudson survey of more than 600 Australian and New Zealand employers taken in the aftermath of the GFC found that 84% regretted making too many redundancies during the crisis. Because, while the cuts had looked rational at the time, the consequences arrived later, quietly, in the form of capability gaps and recovery plans that took longer and cost more than anticipated.

Meanwhile, US employers who cut graduate hiring by 22% in 2009 later told the National Association of Colleges and Employers they wouldn’t do it again, because reducing graduate recruitment during the downturn had created a measurable disadvantage when the economy eventually recovered. 

The same principles applied to training junior staff. When the GFC hit, training budgets were among the first things cut and economists have since argued that this systematic underinvestment in developing employees was partially responsible for the talent shortages that followed. 

Put simply, of you don’t hire graduates in year one, by year three or four, you won’t have the junior-to-mid talent you need to service growth, deliver on projects or backfill senior roles vacated by people moving up or moving on. 

You then have to go to market for experienced hires, and you pay a significant premium for people who are, in many cases, doing the job your unhired graduates would have been doing by now.

This isn’t a new pattern. Research into the wave of training and development programme cuts in the 1980s found the same dynamic playing out over a longer timeframe: no immediate impact, then a skills drought a decade later, as the generation that wasn’t developed failed to materialise in mid-level roles. 

The wrong conclusion from the right data

Of course, none of this helps overcome the very genuine work-readiness concerns many employers have today. These are genuine observations from experienced hiring managers across a wide range of industries.

But there’s a logical leap happening between the evidence and the response, and it’s worth naming.

Graduates needing development is not a new phenomenon. It is, and has always been, the entire premise of a graduate programme. The question has never been whether graduates arrive ready because they don’t, and nobody seriously expected them to. The question is whether the investment in bringing them up to speed pays off. 

And on that question, the evidence consistently says it does.

What’s changed is not that graduates are less valuable. It’s that the post-pandemic cohort of students – who completed significant portions of their education in lockdown – tended to receive less work experience, less face-to-face feedback and less exposure to professional environments. This means they often need more deliberate onboarding than their predecessors.

The appropriate response isn’t to stop hiring, but to provide more structured support. After all, the work-readiness gap doesn’t close itself, it closes when employers invest in closing it. And organisations that understand this are turning a market-wide concern into a hiring advantage. 

Which brings us to what they’re actually doing differently… 

The organisations that keep hiring are pulling ahead

When graduate hiring contracts across a market – just as it’s doing now – the employers who maintain structured programmes actually improve their position against competitors. 

They’re recruiting from a larger pool of candidates competing for fewer spots and paying less of a premium to do so. They’re also shaping those hires around their own culture and way of working at precisely the moment when their competitors have stepped back.

The Big Four professional services firms understand this arithmetic instinctively. So do Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie, Canva and the major government departments. They run structured graduate programs not out of a sense of social obligation but because they’ve done the maths on what it costs to buy experienced talent on the open market versus growing it internally and the internal number wins, consistently and by a significant margin.

The cost of hiring an experienced employee in Australia has more than doubled since 2020, now averaging nearly $24,000 per hire. And that’s before salary premiums for mid-level experience are factored in. Growing that talent internally, from graduate level, is demonstrably cheaper. 

But the same logic extends well beyond large organisations. 

Any business that competes for mid-level talent (which is most businesses) is affected by the same pipeline dynamics. The experienced hire you need in three years doesn’t materialise from nowhere. They come, in most cases, from a graduate program somewhere. If that program is yours, you’ve shaped them. If it isn’t, you’re bidding against everyone else for a finite pool of people who were shaped by someone else’s priorities.

There’s also a timing argument that doesn’t get made often enough. A contracting graduate market is one of the few moments when the balance of power in early-career recruitment genuinely shifts toward the employer. Application volumes are up – the ISE data shows employers receiving record numbers of applications despite fewer roles. The candidates are there while the competition for them, from other employers, is reduced. 

Running a serious graduate program right now, when others aren’t, is about as close to a buyer’s market as this space ever gets.

What a good structured graduate program looks like (if you’re not in the Big Four)

A structured graduate programme doesn’t require a dedicated team, a branded cohort experience or a rotation schedule. For most Australian businesses, it needs just four things.

 

The difference between graduate hiring that works and graduate hiring that doesn’t is rarely about the quality of the graduates. It’s almost always about the presence or absence of those four things.

The organisations pulling ahead right now are those running intentional programs in a market where application volumes are at record highs and competition for graduate talent among employers has softened. 

After all, the window to do this well (and cheaply) is  open right now. But it won’t stay open for long.

Want more?

Thinking about building a graduate hiring strategy that works for your business? Talk to our team of HR experts.

In the age of LinkedIn profiles and email, it’s tempting to think that there’s no need for a cover letter. I’d argue the opposite is true. In fact, when it comes to human resources, I think it’s more important than ever. It’s a great opportunity to demonstrate how you’re the perfect candidate for that new job you’ve always wanted.

Are cover letters required in HR anymore?

I could be going out on a limb here, some HR professionals have declared the cover letter dead. And figures from a Jobvite survey last year in the US show many job applicants agree. Actually, 47% of Americans didn’t use a cover letter when they applied for the job they’re currently in.

Also, the younger you are the more likely you are not to bother with one. With 58% of those aged between 18-22, don’t send a cover letter.

This is certainly a trend here in Australia when we recruit for our clients or for ourselves at Catalina Consultants. Many applicants leave off a cover letter, assuming their CV or LinkedIn profile will do all the convincing for them. But it’s not a wise idea.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to get a job without one. Many people succeed in getting a job based on their CV alone. And some companies using an online system for applications allow no space to add one. So there are circumstances in which you safely say you won’t need a cover letter.

But in most situations, speaking from experience in HR, if you leave a cover letter out you run the risk of someone who values them ignoring your application altogether just because it is undifferentiated from the pile other applications they’ve received.

Why we need cover letters for talent recruitment

That’s what a good cover letter does. It shows why you’re different to everyone else who’s applied. Explains why I should read your CV in the first place. It draws the connections between what you’ve done – your education, skills, experience and past career – and the job you’re applying for.

In doing so, it makes the HR department or recruiter’s job easy by doing the heavy lifting and letting you explain yourself up front so that you’re on the front foot when it comes to helping them form an opinion of you.

What it does for talent recruitment

While a CV is somewhat formulaic and static no matter what the job is, a cover letter is bespoke. It lets you talk about the specific role and argue your case. Why choose me?

It’s no easy task to write a good one (which is one of the main reasons I think many people prefer to skip it altogether). But here are the key characteristics I think a good cover:

Make your cover letter recruitment worthy

I know, I know. It’s hard to do all of this in four paragraphs. When I said it wasn’t going to be easy I wasn’t lying. But use your judgement. The right ingredients for your cover letter will depend on you personally, the job you’re applying for, and the company and industry it’s in. The nice thing about cover letters is there’s no right or wrong: it’s about introducing yourself and presenting yourself in the best possible light so you have the best chance of showing you’re a good fit for the role and snaring yourself that all-important interview.

Keen to find out more?

If you’d like to know more about what to look for in a cover letter or have any questions about HR or talent recruitment, then get in touch.