Hire for the path, not the vacancy

01The ordeal, on both sides of the table

Anyone looking for work in 2026, and for several years before that, has most probably been through an ordeal, first when filling in applications and then once invited into an interview process. Too many steps, too many interviews, too much ambiguity, and a lack of basic courtesy when a company does not even reply to the candidates it rejects. In a large German survey run by a job board, most job seekers said that at least one company had never got back to them after they applied [1].

Hire for the path and for what people leave behind, not for the vacancy.

For years, and still in many European countries, revealing the pay to candidates up front has been a choice, so many have found out it was too low only after a tedious process, several appointments and sometimes real work in the form of assignments that are mostly unpaid, with very few exceptions. In Greece that has recently changed. Since 1 November 2026, under Law 5316/2026, which brings the EU pay transparency directive into Greek law, applicants are entitled to know the starting pay, or its range, within a reasonable time before the interview, and employers, or anyone acting for them, may no longer ask what they earn now or earned before [2].

The digitisation of hiring has not made things better either. On one large hiring platform, applications per job doubled from 2022 to 2025 while recruiters per company more than halved, and UK graduate employers say AI is pushing their volumes up and the quality down [3]. And in my experience, very good candidates are often interviewed by the wrong people, who judge them by criteria outside their own field.

Ghosting, which is another phenomenon, has been observed on both sides. In the same German survey, most HR managers said that candidates had ghosted them in the past year [1], and a candidate who vanishes after the second interview is no better than the firm that never replied.

02Two kinds of hiring firm, and neither has it right

Large firms hire directly through their HR departments, or through big recruitment firms, under structured processes that are now mostly automated, and lately with AI "magic" applied too. Their problem is how to handle volume while retaining quality standards. The bigger the name, the more applications, and at that volume there is little room for real human interaction, so the first round is automated against fixed criteria. The employers themselves agree: in a 2020 Harvard Business School survey, 88% of those using recruiting software replied that it at least sometimes screens out qualified, highly skilled candidates because they do not match the exact criteria of the job description [4], which in my experience often comes down to how the application is worded. Now there are AI interviews as well, and the jury is still out on whether they work.

Then there are the small and medium-sized firms, and here the news is not good. In my experience most have no formal process, or a half-baked one, not necessarily a bad one, but technically incomplete, and British research has long found that small firms rely on informal, word-of-mouth hiring [5]. That might not be the case in every country, but word-of-mouth advice seems to be common practice among owners looking to employ people, especially in senior positions, where trust becomes more critical.

Beyond the process itself, the main problem is that a smaller firm asks for people with very wide job specifications, because its size does not allow for specialists. One person ends up covering several roles that would normally be separate: an engineer is asked to sell alongside production, or to do some of the marketing. The owner has no time and no HR team to sort the flood of applications, does not really know how to interview or score a candidate, and has never prepared a short, targeted assignment, paid or small enough to be fair. So the firm sometimes hires on the soft skills it can see in the interview, only to be let down later on the technical side, or by a lack of experience, or by no real connection to the work. With no hiring system in place, both sides often end up frustrated.

03Why does it happen? Mostly, firms hire for a vacancy

The whole process is built to fill a vacancy with someone who can take on a long list of tasks that need to be done "now", urgently, and sometimes only when "push comes to shove". At the same time, nobody describes clearly (or at all) where the role leads, so nobody can judge who will grow into it, and the interview ends up testing the list rather than the person.

By "the path" in the article title, I mean a wider scope, new skills, earlier trust, and pay that rises with them (not simply a salary), with or without a new title. The same breadth that makes hiring so hard for a small firm is what it can offer in return, as long as it says so. In my experience, once the advert says where the role leads, more people with real drive and "thirst" to evolve will apply. Then the interview can test where a candidate is heading, and both sides know from the first day what they have agreed to. On whether people then stay, there is evidence as well. One study found that support for development cut voluntary turnover when employees saw a career ahead in the firm, and raised it when they did not [6].

When I hire, the technical side has to be settled first, and most of the time it is a necessity in my line of work. Then I read the person tête-à-tête. The single most important thing that wins me over is the drive for more, and the curiosity to look beyond what meets the eye. It is the thirst and the enthusiasm to learn and get better, to produce quality results, and to earn more, in rank and in money, and that kind of drive needs somewhere to go.

If a firm cannot say where a role leads, it is not ready to hire for it yet. And yes, that includes the roles that seem to lead nowhere: a good assistant can grow into running the office, the scheduling or the client administration, with pay that follows. If a role genuinely leads nowhere, say that too, because some good people want exactly that stability, and they deserve to know what they are signing up for.

04"Why invest in people who will leave anyway?"

This notion is popular and I admit I used to be torn over it for several years too. But the answer starts with the premise: people who can see a path ahead tend to stay longer, although they still leave, just less often. If you want to keep talent, you have to pay it fairly, and give it work through which it learns and grows, so that it can be paid even more later. I say it very drily, but that is how it is. A small firm does not have to match what the big firms pay to do this, because what it competes on is the path itself.

I studied economics before I ever ran a single project, and economists have known since Gary Becker why firms are reluctant to pay for training: a skill that is useful anywhere can walk out of the door [7]. Later work on Belgian firms found that training raises productivity by more than it raises wages, so the firm keeps much of the gain [8]. Yet in 2020, 82.2% of Greek enterprises with ten or more staff provided no continuing vocational training, against 32.6% across the EU [9]. In the EU's latest surveys, Greek adults take part in education and training less than in any other member state, and when so many young Greeks left during the crisis, most of them graduates, the majority said they saw no prospects at home [10]. I cannot prove that the lack of training and the departures are connected, but I find it hard to believe they are not.

And when someone does leave, because they have to, and you should encourage them if there is no room left to grow, pause and look at what they leave behind... company knowledge, a method for their successor, a contribution to the culture, and an example for those who stay and those yet to come.

Around 2003, when we set up a new company with two partners from the technology sector, we hired an accounting assistant. He already had a master's in finance, like me, and kept pace with two very experienced accountants: meticulous, precise, always on time, eager to learn. Soon he was suggesting how to improve our processes and producing useful statistics that nobody had asked for, but that we needed. He stayed about two years, and when he moved on, he left behind his notes and his method, written down like a standard operating procedure, and he helped his replacement settle in and carry on smoothly. Today he holds a regional senior finance role at a global technology company, and we are still friends.

When you have nothing left to teach your best person, help them leave well. Some will repay you from the outside. A study of US patent lawyers suggests that those who move to client firms can bring business back [11]. An employee who was only filling a vacancy leaves a vacancy.

So what does the owner get out of all this? People who stay longer because they can see where they are going, and who get better at the work while they are doing it; and when they do move on, a method and a trained successor instead of a gap. In the end, growing your people grows your company too, because a small firm can only take on as much as its people are able to carry.

05What an owner can do on Monday

For the next role you open:

1. Write where the role leads in two years, next to that "list of tasks".
2. If the role really is three jobs in one, say so in the advertisement, and pay for it.
3. Decide in advance how you will score candidates (framework), and who in the room can judge the technical side (you or your best technical expert). This step has the strongest evidence behind it: the same job-related questions for everyone, scored against a guide agreed in advance, predict performance about twice as well as a free-form chat [12].
4. Give the starting pay, or its range, before the first interview, before the candidate travels to see you. In Greece that is now the law, no longer a courtesy.
5. Plan from day one what the person will hand over when it is time to leave: who they will train, and what they will write down. None of it stays by itself unless there is a process in place.

06If you are the one being hired

Remember that the firm is presenting its side of the offer as well, and it should show you, openly, why it is worth it. So before you decide how much of yourself to put in, ask where the role leads in two years, ask for the pay or its range (in Greece, that is now your right before the interview), and ask who will assess you, and how. Then show not only what you can do but your enthusiasm and your will to learn, as long as you know you will be rewarded for it, in money and with a path that keeps improving your position as you walk it.

07Why I speak, and what I am not

I am not an HR professional. I have hired people myself and watched some of them grow far beyond the role I hired them for, I have helped friends through the process and prepared them for interviews many times, and years ago I worked on a team building a large HR software platform that now lives under the umbrella of a well-known multinational corporation. I am not claiming the law fixes any of this, that automated screening is the villain, or that Greek firms do not train at all. The process is wrong when it hires for a vacancy, whoever runs it.

Hire for the path and for what people leave behind, not for the vacancy. This is a mindset before it is a process.

Owners: could you say, today, where your last hire's role leads in two years? Everyone else: what did a firm tell you during hiring that made you want to stay for years?

This note describes the law for context. It is not legal advice.

08Sources

• [1] StepStone Group, Hiring Trends Index, press release 14 July 2025: 8,100 employees in Germany surveyed online, 31 March to 7 April 2025, including more than 500 recruiters (job-board survey): gettex.de
• [2] Law 5316/2026, ΦΕΚ Α' 105, 6 July 2026: article 9 (amending article 41 of the Labour Code), article 4 (scope, new article 47(3)) and article 48(2) (start date): taxheaven.gr/…/9, taxheaven.gr/…/4, taxheaven.gr/…/48. Directive (EU) 2023/970, articles 2, 5 and 34: eur-lex.europa.eu
• [3] Greenhouse, The Hire Standard recruiting benchmarks, March 2026, platform data from more than 6,000 companies (vendor): greenhouse.com. Institute of Student Employers, record graduate applications, 17 October 2024: ise.org.uk
• [4] J. Fuller, M. Raman et al., Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, Harvard Business School and Accenture, 2021 (employer survey of 2,275 executives in the US, UK and Germany, January to February 2020; figure 10): hbs.edu
• [5] M. Carroll, M. Marchington, J. Earnshaw and S. Taylor, Recruitment in small firms: processes, methods and problems, Employee Relations 21(3), 1999: research.manchester.ac.uk. J. Forth and A. Bryson, The impact of management practices on SME performance, UCL DoQSS working paper 18-04, 2018: repec.ucl.ac.uk
• [6] M. Kraimer, S. Seibert, S. Wayne, R. Liden and J. Bravo, Antecedents and outcomes of organizational support for development, Journal of Applied Psychology 96(3), 2011, 264 employees and their supervisors: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• [7] G. S. Becker, Human Capital, 3rd edition, University of Chicago Press for NBER, 1994 (first published 1964), chapter III: nber.org
• [8] J. Konings and S. Vanormelingen, The impact of training on productivity and wages: firm-level evidence, Review of Economics and Statistics 97(2), 2015: econpapers.repec.org
• [9] Eurostat, Continuing Vocational Training Survey 2020, dataset trng_cvt_01s, non-training enterprises, EU-27: ec.europa.eu
• [10] Eurostat, Labour Force Survey 2025, dataset trng_lfse_01 (adults 25 to 64, education and training in the last four weeks), and Adult Education Survey 2022, dataset trng_aes_100 (last 12 months): ec.europa.eu. S. Lazaretou, Bank of Greece Economic Bulletin 43, 2016: ideas.repec.org. L. Labrianidis and M. Pratsinakis, LSE Hellenic Observatory GreeSE Paper 99, 2016: lse.ac.uk
• [11] D. Somaya, I. Williamson and N. Lorinkova, Gone but not lost: the different performance impacts of employee mobility between cooperators versus competitors, Academy of Management Journal 51(5), 2008: pages 936 to 953, doi:10.5465/AMJ.2008.34789660, pure.psu.edu
• [12] P. Sackett, C. Zhang, C. Berry and F. Lievens, Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection, Journal of Applied Psychology 107(11), 2022, doi:10.1037/apl0000994; table reproduced open access in Industrial and Organizational Psychology 16, 2023.