Why I Call Myself The Humane Recruiter

Before I had a career in recruitment, I walked around Luxembourg City with a stack of printed CVs and Google Maps open on my phone. It was 2017, right when that picture was taken.

My wife and I had already been doing loooong distance for four years. I was finishing my studies, she was working in Luxembourg, and we were surviving mostly on hope. I had no real network in the country, no professional experience to speak of and no particularly sophisticated strategy beyond trying to get in front of people who might be willing to give me a chance.

So while she was at work, I mapped out the recruitment agencies in the city and went door to door.

Literally.

I handed people paper CVs and introduced myself as a young graduate interested in sales, marketing, communications, anything that might create a way into Luxembourg. Recruitment was not part of the pitch because recruitment was not a career I had seriously considered. I am not even sure I really understood it as a profession at that point.

Most places were polite. A couple invited me to sit down for short conversations. A few people gave me enough encouragement that I thought something might come from it, only to disappear when I followed up.

I remember both groups.

That is one of the strange things about being a candidate. The person on the other side may process dozens of people that week, but you remember the interaction because you only have a handful of them. You remember who made time for you, who looked at your CV, who gave you some direction and who made you feel, even briefly, like you might have a place in the market.

You also remember who vanished.

Eventually, somebody took a chance on me. Nicholas Hurlin offered me my first recruitment job, and I have never looked back.

I did not know it at the time, but that walk around Luxembourg with paper CVs would shape a lot of how I think about this profession today.

Recruitment did not have a great reputation when I entered it. I knew that much, but I did not fully understand why.

As a candidate myself, I had internalized most of the rejection. I was young. I did not have much experience. Maybe I simply was not good enough yet. It was easy to assume that silence from employers said something about my value rather than about the process around me.

Then I started speaking to candidates every day.

One of my earliest calls still makes me smile. I phoned someone about a job they had applied for, and they responded, let’s say, much less politely than telling me it was a bad time to speak.

My first reaction was particularly simple. I thought: this person must be having a terrible day.

And I guess that’s just it, isn’t it? I could have decided they were rude, difficult or unprofessional. Instead, something in me defaulted to curiosity. I did not know what had happened before I called. I did not know whether they had just received another rejection, argued with someone, lost their job or simply had a miserable morning.

I could not control their reaction, but I could control mine.

That sounds almost embarrassingly basic when written down, but I think a lot of candidate experience starts there. You decide what kind of interaction you want to create even when the person in front of you does not make it easy.

The more candidates I met, the more I began hearing the same stories: no feedback, no follow-up, interviews followed by silence, recruiters disappearing once the immediate opportunity disappeared. None of these stories was particularly dramatic on its own. What surprised me was how normal they seemed to be.

And what surprised me even more was how little effort it took not to behave that way.

A message takes a few minutes. A quick call takes a few more. Even a short note saying, “We’re still speaking with people, but I haven’t forgotten about you,” can change how someone experiences an entire process.

I began realizing that what I thought of as basic professional courtesy was not always experienced as basic at all.

In my first agency role, I started recruiting senior profiles relatively quickly. At the time, that was intimidating. I was early in my career and speaking with executives who had decades more experience than I did.

I placed one of them successfully, and afterwards they told me how personal and transparent the process had felt. Eventually, that candidate became a client.

That was probably the first time I understood that the things I thought were simply “doing the job properly” could actually differentiate the work.

I had not developed a methodology. I had not built a personal brand. I was not thinking about candidate-experience metrics or employer-brand ROI. I had just tried to be honest with somebody, keep them informed and treat their career decision with the seriousness I thought it deserved.

The fact that this stood out was flattering.

It was also slightly disappointing.

Years later, that tension is still there. I am grateful when candidates tell me they appreciated the experience. At the same time, part of me always wonders why the bar is low enough for normal communication to feel exceptional.

The moment that eventually gave The Humane Recruiter its name came later, when I was working internally at a global SaaS company.

At one point, we had a recruitment team of around twelve people. Over time, through a very difficult period for the technology sector, that team became one person.

Me.

I was responsible for recruitment across multiple departments and offices in roughly ten countries. Sales, engineering, marketing, HR, finance… whatever opened, it came through me.

The strange thing was that while hiring volume was not enormous, applicant volume was.

Within twenty-four hours of opening a role, I could have hundreds of applications. Sometimes well over 500.

Anyone who worked in SaaS between roughly 2021 and 2024 will recognize the shift. One year, companies were competing desperately for talent, inflating salaries, opening offices and adding benefits because candidates held all the leverage (remember the Great Resignation?). Not long afterwards, offices were closing, restructuring became normal, recruitment teams themselves were cut and huge numbers of talented people found themselves competing for a much smaller number of opportunities.

I watched that shift happen on my screen.

Names stacked on top of names in the ATS, page after page.

There was no realistic way I could personally write a bespoke rejection message to hundreds of people for every vacancy. So I did what most recruiters would do: I created templates.

The difference, if there was one, was that I spent a lot of time trying to make those templates sound like something I would be pleased to receive myself.

I created versions for different situations and different rejection reasons. I tried to give enough context that somebody would know there had actually been a human decision somewhere behind the email. I tried to imagine receiving the message in a market where I might already have been rejected ten times that month.

Then one day, instead of sending one of those rejection messages from the usual no-reply address, I accidentally sent it from mine.

My inbox exploded.

Candidates replied just to say thank you… I had rejected them.

They thanked me for closing the loop, for giving them some explanation and, most of all, for making them feel that somebody had actually seen the application they had taken the time to submit.

Several used the same word.

Humane.

That is where The Humane Recruiter came from.

Not from a branding session. Not from a content strategy. Not because I sat down one afternoon and decided I needed a catchy title for LinkedIn.

Candidates gave it to me.

And if I am honest, I have always found something slightly ironic about it.

Every recruiter should be humane.

We work with people and for people.

Why should that need its own label?

That period changed how I saw technology too.

I do not believe humane recruitment requires rejecting automation or pretending every interaction has to be handcrafted from scratch. The opposite, actually.

Templates allowed me to communicate with hundreds of people I could not possibly have written to individually. An ATS allowed me to keep track of conversations across several countries. Today, AI and automation can remove even more administrative work.

The question is what you do with the capacity technology gives you.

In recent weeks, I have been in several conversations about exactly that with my work at skeeled.

One client is spending hours manually dealing with candidates who apply across several vacancies. Better automation could remove a huge amount of low-value administration. In another discussion, we were trying to teach an AI matching system how experienced recruiters actually evaluate candidates, and we immediately ran into the things that do not fit neatly into a CV: transferable experience, work permits, motivation, context, the difference between three years of difficult work and five years of repetitive work.

That tension interests me enormously.

The better technology becomes at processing people, the more important it becomes to understand what should not be reduced to processing.

A rejected candidate from three months ago may suddenly be relevant because the job changed. Someone who looks wrong on paper may become compelling once you understand why they made a career move. An international candidate may have excellent experience but face an immigration constraint that has nothing to do with their ability. A person may turn down a perfectly good offer because the other job gives them another hour with their family every day.

Those are not edge cases.

Those are the work.

This is probably the part of recruitment I take most seriously now.

I might conduct five or ten interviews in a busy day. For me, interviewing is routine. I have done it thousands of times.

The person across from me may do ten interviews in their entire life.

That imbalance matters.

It is one of the reasons I try to send candidates information before interviews. I want them to know what to expect, who they are meeting and how they can prepare. Not because I want to give them the answers, but because I want to see them perform at something close to their real level rather than testing how good they are at handling avoidable uncertainty.

That becomes even more important when we think about neurodivergence and the extraordinary variety in how people process unfamiliar situations.

I do not think interviews need to be obstacle courses.

I want candidates to do well.

That does not mean everyone should pass. It does not mean avoiding difficult feedback or pretending somebody is right for a role when they are not. Being humane is not the same as being soft.

Some of the most respectful conversations I have with candidates involve telling them clearly why they are not moving forward.

Sometimes I advise somebody to finish another process even though I would quite like them to accept my client's job. Sometimes I tell them the commute, salary or schedule probably makes the other opportunity more sensible for their life. Sometimes somebody gets rejected and we revisit them months later because the context changed.

I do not see any contradiction there.

The job is not to maximise enthusiasm for every vacancy.

It is to help people make informed decisions.

Moving from agency recruitment into an internal role changed my perspective again.

I became responsible not just for getting candidates through a process but for seeing what happened after they arrived.

Hiring managers could walk into my office and ask why there were not more interviews booked. Teams felt the pressure when roles stayed vacant. New hires changed the dynamic of those teams, sometimes positively and sometimes not.

I also lived through several rounds of restructuring and saw great people leave. I saw the pressure that remained on the people who stayed. I saw what “doing more with less” actually looks like once it stops being a phrase in an executive presentation and becomes someone's Monday morning.

That gave me a much broader understanding of what “the right person, in the right place, at the right time” actually means.

It is not a slogan.

There are human consequences in every direction.

The candidate wants stability, progress, money, meaning, flexibility or simply a chance.

The hiring manager needs somebody because the work does not disappear while the vacancy is open.

The existing team absorbs that gap.

The company has to make decisions with imperfect information.

The recruiter sits somewhere in the middle trying to understand all of it.

That is why I still find this work endlessly interesting.

I get to listen to people's stories for a living.

Sometimes I get to influence what happens next.

That is a privilege I try not to take lightly.

I have been writing on LinkedIn for roughly seven years.

It has given me opportunities I could never have imagined when I was walking around Luxembourg handing out CVs.

I came to this country with no network and very little idea of how I was going to build a life here. Today I lead a recruitment-services business, manage people, work with companies across Europe and have a network that I genuinely value. My family and I have even found ourselves featured in Luxembourg's national-branding work, which is the sort of sentence that would have sounded ridiculous to the version of me carrying those paper CVs around the city.

LinkedIn has been a huge part of that journey.

But short-form content captures moments.

I want somewhere to capture the thinking between them.

The things I hear repeatedly from candidates. The contradiction a hiring manager accidentally reveals. A conversation that makes me reconsider something I thought I understood. The uncomfortable parts of recruitment that do not fit neatly into a post. The things happening around AI, careers, leadership, salary, relocation, identity and work that become more interesting when several conversations are placed beside one another.

I also want to leave a record.

Becoming a dad has changed the way I think about that.

This may sound slightly egoistic, and perhaps it is, but I like the idea that my son could one day read something I wrote and understand how I thought at a particular moment in my life. Not just what job I had or what I achieved, but what I questioned, what I cared about and where my mind changed.

Maybe that is ultimately what this newsletter is.

A record of conversations.

Mine and other people's.

A record of the things I notice because I happen to spend my week sitting between candidates, hiring managers, executives, colleagues and companies while everyone is trying to make decisions that affect their lives.

I did not choose recruitment because I had some lifelong calling to become a recruiter.

I needed a job.

Someone gave me a chance.

Then candidates taught me what the job could mean.

And somewhere along the way, I fell completely in love with it.

Seven years of writing later, I am still curious enough to feel like I have only started understanding why people choose what they choose, why companies hire the way they do and why something as simple as making somebody feel seen can still be unusual enough to deserve its own adjective…

That is what I want to explore here.

Not recruitment theory from a distance.

What actually happens when people try to find work, hire people, lead teams, make career decisions and build lives around all of it.

Welcome to Humane, Actually.

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

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this first edition, so please send me your initial feedback.

Until next time 🍁