by Lou Adler, CEO and founder of The Adler Group
In today’s competitive hiring landscape, two distinct talent markets operate in parallel, yet with dramatically different outcomes. The traditional high-tech, transactional approach dominates roughly 80% of hiring processes, while a “hidden” high-touch market accounts for the remaining 20-25%. Unfortunately the public and easy-to-find talent market offers only fool’s gold — a short-term and seemingly low-effort way to fill jobs but at a high long-term hidden cost. This is apparent from Gallup’s engagement surveys indicating that only one-third of the U.S. workforce is fully engaged.
Understanding the stark contrast between these two approaches reveals why the hidden high-touch talent market offers something special — highly satisfying long-term career opportunity. These are the people who are fully satisfied. In the past it was difficult to find people in the hidden talent market due to the customisation required. AI technologies, like the Performance-based Hiring GPT, now remove these obstacles.
The Traditional Talent Market: High Volume, High Cost, Low Results
The traditional talent market operates on volume and standardisation. Job descriptions list requirements and qualifications rather than actual challenges. Hiring teams cast wide nets through job boards and direct sourcing channels, creating massive candidate funnels that require extensive screening mechanisms.
The public talent market prioritises efficiency over effectiveness.
The candidate experience becomes diluted as recruiters spread their attention across hundreds of applicants. Assessment methods rely heavily on inconsistent behavioral interviews, yielding low predictive accuracy for actual on-the-job performance.
The transactional nature of this market is evident in its technology-heavy infrastructure: applicant tracking systems, automated screening tools, and API integrations that move candidates through predefined stages.
While this creates an appearance of sophistication, the end result is often disappointing: low satisfaction rates, high turnover, and merely average performance from new hires.
Despite its prevalence, this market’s flawed foundation leads to significant hidden costs. Companies must continuously refill positions, interview too many candidates to make one marginal hire, invest in extensive onboarding, and cope with productivity gaps. The high cost coupled with low return on investment makes this approach increasingly unsustainable in a knowledge economy where talent quality determines competitive advantage.
The Hidden Talent Market: Exceptional Hires with Exceptional ROIs
By contrast, the hidden talent market operates on fundamentally different principles. Rather than offering lateral moves to similar roles, these opportunities represent clear career advancements. Job definitions focus on challenges to be solved rather than requirements to be met. Sourcing happens primarily through networking and referrals, tapping into pre-established credibility.
The hidden talent market prioritises quality of hire over speed to hire
This market takes a solution-selling approach, where each hiring process resembles a consultative conversation rather than a standardised assessment. Recruiters and hiring managers are able to spend more time with fewer candidates by using advanced AI sourcing tools and prequalifying prospects before reaching out. Assessment becomes evidence-based, drawing heavily on known past performance and demonstrated capabilities.
The results speak for themselves: high satisfaction on both sides, exceptional performance from new hires, and dramatically lower turnover. By focusing resources on attracting and engaging the right candidates rather than screening out the wrong ones, companies achieve a much higher return on their hiring investment.
This high-touch market is where internal promotions happen and where former colleagues reconnect. It’s the mechanism through which high-performers move between organizations, bringing their established track records and networks with them. While less visible than the traditional market, it consistently delivers superior outcomes.
The Paradox of Adoption
Given the clear advantages of the high-touch approach, why does the traditional market remain dominant? The answer lies in scalability and institutional inertia.
The high-touch model has historically been resource-intensive and difficult to scale. It requires significant time investment from senior stakeholders and a customised approach to each hire. Many organisations default to the traditional model simply because it’s more easily systematised and appears more cost-effective on the surface.
Additionally, performance metrics in recruitment often emphasize activity over outcomes –time-to-fill and cost-per-hire rather than quality-of-hire and retention. This creates incentives to optimize for speed and volume rather than quality and fit.
AI: The Bridge Between Markets
The emergence of sophisticated AI technologies is fundamentally changing this equation. Tools like the Performance-based Hiring GPT and the PbH Delphi Oracle now enable organisations to scale previously unscalable high-touch practices. These systems can:
- Convert traditional job descriptions into compelling career moves
- Create custom performance-based interviews and scorecards
- Negotiate Win-Win Hiring offers and offer realtime advice for candidates, hiring managers and recruiters
- Find exceptional candidates for any job more quickly and at far less cost
By automating the labor-intensive aspects of high-touch hiring while preserving its relationship-centered core, AI makes it possible to extend these best practices across the entire talent acquisition function.
The Future of Talent Acquisition
As AI continues to mature, we’re witnessing the beginning of a major shift in how organisations approach hiring. The artificial boundary between the traditional and hidden talent markets is dissolving, creating opportunity for forward-thinking companies to gain significant competitive advantage.
Organisations that successfully bridge these two worlds — applying high-touch principles at scale through intelligent technology — will experience measurable improvements in quality of hire, reduced hiring mistakes, and stronger talent retention. Rather than choosing between high-tech efficiency and high-touch effectiveness, the most successful talent acquisition functions will harness AI to deliver both.
About the author
Lou Adler is the CEO and founder of The Adler Group – a training and search firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring℠. Adler is the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller, Hire With Your Head (John Wiley & Sons, 3rd Edition, 2007). His most recent book has just been published, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013). He is also the author of the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! Using Performance-based Hiring to Build Great Teams (2007). Adler holds an MBA from the University of California in Los Angeles and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University in New York.
