The other side of the table is closer than we think

I had a sales meeting scheduled for Monday.

On the Friday before, the person I was supposed to meet asked whether we could change the location and send the invitation to a different email address. Nothing particularly unusual there. I assumed we were sorting out logistics.

Then they explained why.

They had been laid off the day before.

The decision was economic. Their role had become too expensive for the company, and after years of being the person responsible for hiring, developing people and thinking about what made employees stay, they suddenly found themselves on the other side of the employment equation.

The sales meeting obviously no longer made sense. If a company is reducing costs to that extent, turning up a few days later to pitch them recruitment services would be tone-deaf at best. So we cancelled it.

Instead, we kept talking.

What had been scheduled as a conversation with a potential client quietly became a conversation with someone thinking about their own career. I went from preparing to understand their company's problems to asking what they wanted to do next.

The whole thing happened in a few minutes.

I haven't stopped thinking about that transition.

Recruitment encourages us to put people into categories because categories make complicated processes manageable.

Candidate. Hiring manager. Client. Recruiter. Employee. Job seeker. Decision-maker.

CRM systems literally require us to do this. Someone needs a status, an owner, a stage and usually several tags before the machinery around them knows what to do next.

The problem is that life has very little respect for our dropdown menus.

The person sitting opposite you as a client today may be a candidate tomorrow. The candidate you reject may eventually become a hiring manager. Someone interviewing confidently from a position of security may be looking for work unexpectedly a few months later. The colleague whose performance you are discussing may eventually become your manager, client or competitor.

None of this is particularly profound when written down. Careers are long and things change.

What struck me this week was the speed.

There wasn't a transition period during which this person's identity slowly changed from one category to another. There was no convenient moment when the old version ended and the new one began. On Thursday, they were employed and involved in conversations about their organisation. On Friday, they were talking to me about what they might do next.

Same person. Same experience. Same intelligence. Same values.

Different label.

That difference affects how the professional world responds to them far more than I think we like to admit.

I have lived through enough restructurings to know intellectually that jobs disappear. I've watched talented people leave companies through decisions that had surprisingly little to do with how talented they were. I've also watched the people who remained try to absorb the work, uncertainty and emotional aftershock.

Still, there is something different about hearing somebody describe the first 24 hours.

What interested me about this particular conversation was how quickly they began reconstructing the story of themselves professionally. They weren't only asking, "Where can I find another job?" They were trying to articulate what they actually wanted the next chapter to contain.

They talked about curiosity. Learning. Building things. Understanding what motivates people. They described the parts of their work that had consistently given them energy and the things they had discovered about themselves over decades.

In other words, almost immediately after an organisation had decided that their role no longer fitted its economic reality, they were trying to separate the value of the role from the value of the person who had occupied it.

That distinction sounds obvious from the outside.

I'm not convinced it feels obvious when it happens to you.

I remember something similar from much earlier in my own career, except I experienced it from the other end. When I first arrived in Luxembourg looking for work, I had almost no professional identity at all. I walked around the city with printed CVs, knocking on recruitment-agency doors because I didn't have much else to work with. When people didn't respond, it was remarkably easy to interpret the absence of interest as evidence about my own value.

Maybe I wasn't experienced enough. Maybe my profile wasn't good enough. Maybe Luxembourg simply didn't have a place for me.

Years later, after sitting on the other side of thousands of applications, I understand how dangerous that interpretation can be. Hiring decisions contain budgets, timing, internal politics, language requirements, changing priorities, headcount freezes, stronger applicants, weaker processes and occasionally pure chance.

Sometimes the person isn't wrong.

The circumstances are.

This may be one reason candidate experience matters to me more than the usual employer-brand argument suggests.

The conventional business case says candidates are potential customers, future applicants or people who might tell others about your company. All true. A good candidate experience can absolutely have commercial value.

But there is a more basic reason to treat someone well during a hiring process: you don't actually know which side of the table either of you will occupy next.

I have rejected people who later became clients. I've seen candidates re-enter processes because a different role suddenly made their experience relevant. I've spoken with senior people whose careers looked completely stable until they weren't. I have also been the person looking for work with no network, and the recruiter with hundreds of names sitting in an ATS waiting for an answer.

Once you've occupied enough of those positions, the hierarchy starts to look a little artificial.

That does not mean recruiters should avoid rejecting people, hiring managers should lower standards or companies should pretend difficult economic decisions don't exist. Humane treatment is not the absence of difficult decisions. In some ways, it matters most when the decision itself cannot be made pleasant.

It means remembering that a hiring decision answers a relatively narrow question: Does this particular arrangement make sense for us, here, now?

We often communicate it as though we have answered a much bigger one.

The person I spoke with had spent years trying to understand what intrinsically motivates people. They were interested in what AI might eventually contribute to that work and where technology could help recruiters understand candidates beyond experience and skills.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the same question from another direction.

This week alone, several of my conversations involved systems: cleaning databases, improving prospecting automation, structuring recruitment workflows, preserving knowledge when colleagues move between assignments, and making technology better at identifying potentially relevant people.

I am enthusiastic about most of this. There is an extraordinary amount of recruitment work that software can do better than we currently do it manually.

But the conversation on Friday was a useful reminder of what those systems are actually processing.

A CRM would have described the person I was supposed to meet as a prospect. Twenty-four hours later, that information was already wrong.

A recruitment system might now describe them as a candidate.

Neither description tells you very much about them.

The data changed because their circumstances changed. Their experience didn't disappear overnight. Their curiosity didn't disappear. Their ability to build teams or understand people didn't disappear. Their professional value did not reset to zero because somebody changed a field somewhere from "employed" to "available."

The more sophisticated our systems become, the easier it may become to confuse the quality of our categorisation with the quality of our understanding.

Those are not the same thing.

I sometimes think people outside recruitment underestimate how strange this job can be.

You can meet someone for the first time and, twenty minutes later, be discussing why they left a company, what they earn, whether their manager values them, whether they are willing to move countries, what their partner thinks about that move, what they are afraid of losing and what they hope their life might look like in three years.

On Friday, I had expected to talk about a business problem.

Instead, I found myself asking someone who had lost their job the previous day what was going through their head and what they wanted to do next.

I don't think I did anything remarkable in that conversation. In fact, that is probably the point.

A sales opportunity had disappeared. The person hadn't.

There was still a useful conversation to have.

One of the strange privileges of recruitment is seeing people repeatedly change roles in relation to you.

Candidates become clients. Clients become candidates. Junior employees become leaders. People who once needed an introduction eventually become the person making introductions for somebody else.

I have experienced versions of that myself. I once walked into recruitment agencies hoping somebody would give an inexperienced Canadian graduate ten minutes. Today, companies pay my team to advise them on whom they should hire.

I would be lying if I said I never notice the irony.

But I hope the experience has made me less interested in which side of the table somebody happens to occupy.

Because the table turns surprisingly quickly.

The person with the impressive title still worries about whether they are good enough. The candidate waiting for feedback may eventually be the executive deciding whether to hire you. The colleague whose contribution looks expensive on a spreadsheet may wake up tomorrow having to explain to themselves why losing the role does not mean losing their value.

And the prospect in your CRM may stop being a prospect between Thursday and Friday.

We build a lot of professional behaviour around roles that are much less permanent than the people occupying them.

Perhaps remembering that is enough to change how we treat one another while we still have the choice.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Sincerely. I’m grateful you’re here.

If anything made you think, react, or question, let me know by responding directly to the email.

Until next time 🍁