I recently watched a developer rant about recruiters that perfectly captured why the entire recruiting industry needs to be rebuilt from scratch. The frustration was palpable, the examples were brutal, and the conclusion was devastating: "You're not a person. You're inventory."
As someone who spent 20+ years as a software developer and recently experienced 9 months in healthcare recruiting, I've seen this broken system from both sides. The pain is real, the incentives are wrong, and the solutions being offered are making things worse.
The Pain Points That Broke My Heart
The developer's complaints weren't just whining—they were a systematic breakdown of everything wrong with recruiting:
"Recruiters think 'junior role with 5+ years experience' is normal." This isn't stupidity; it's a symptom of recruiters who don't understand the technologies they're hiring for. When you're measured on volume, not quality, you post unrealistic requirements because you don't know better.
"Copy-paste messages pretending they looked at your profile." Every developer has received the generic "I think you'd be a great fit" message for a completely unrelated technology stack. It's insulting because it reveals the truth: recruiters are playing a numbers game where individual people don't matter.
"You're not a person, you're a checkbox - Python 3 years, willing to relocate." This hit hardest because it's exactly right. Traditional recruiting reduces humans to keyword lists. Python developer. Three years experience. Willing to relocate. Next.
"Graded on resumes pushed through, not whether you get a good job." Here's the core problem: recruiters are incentivized for activity, not outcomes. They succeed by moving resumes, not by making good matches.
It's Not Evil—It's Broken Incentives
Here's what the developer got absolutely right: "Recruiters aren't evil. They're just broken by the system."
Most recruiters I've worked with are genuinely trying to help people find good jobs. But they're trapped in a system that rewards them for:
- Volume over quality: More resumes submitted means better performance reviews
- Speed over understanding: Faster turnaround beats deeper candidate relationships
- Quantity over relationships: Finding new candidates is valued more than nurturing existing ones
- Activity over outcomes: Metrics focus on calls made, not careers improved
When your compensation depends on pushing as many candidates as possible through the pipeline, treating people like inventory isn't just likely—it's inevitable.
What Both Sides Actually Want
After experiencing this system from both perspectives, I know what's really needed:
What Developers Actually Want:
- Someone who understands their technology stack and experience level
- Personalized outreach based on their actual skills and interests
- Realistic job requirements that match their experience
- Respect for their time and career goals
- To be treated like a human being, not a commodity
What Employers Actually Need:
- Candidates who actually match the role requirements
- Higher interview-to-hire conversion rates
- Less time wasted on poorly matched candidates
- Recruiting that scales without losing quality
- Transparent, predictable hiring processes
The tragedy is that both sides want the same thing: better matches based on actual compatibility, not keyword soup and volume metrics.
Why Traditional Solutions Won't Work
The recruiting industry's response to these complaints has been predictable and inadequate:
More training for recruiters doesn't solve systemic incentive problems. You can't train someone to care about match quality when they're measured on submission volume.
Better recruiting tools still depend on human recruiters making the same volume-driven decisions. Putting a better interface on a broken process doesn't fix the underlying economics.
AI-enhanced recruiting typically just automates the keyword matching and form-driven thinking that creates these problems in the first place.
These are all retrofit solutions trying to improve a fundamentally broken system.
The AI-Native Alternative
At Semantic Recruitment, we asked a different question: What would recruiting look like if we built it from scratch using conversational AI to understand both candidates and employers as complete humans?
The answer is fundamentally different:
Natural conversation instead of forms and keyword matching. Our AI learns what developers actually want from their careers, not just what technologies they've used.
Semantic understanding instead of checkbox filtering. We analyze compatibility across skills, culture, growth potential, and career trajectory—not just resume buzzwords.
24/7 relationship building instead of business-hours-only contact. Developers can have meaningful career conversations whenever it's convenient for them.
Consistent quality instead of human-dependent variability. Every developer gets the same high-quality experience, regardless of which human recruiter they're assigned to.
Most importantly: We're incentivized for successful placements, not activity volume. Our success comes from making matches that work long-term, not from pushing resumes through pipelines.
Treating People Like Humans, Not Inventory
The developer's phrase "You're inventory" crystallizes everything wrong with current recruiting. But it also shows us the solution: build a system that treats both developers and employers like complete human beings with complex needs and goals.
When AI can conduct natural conversations and understand nuanced career preferences, we can move beyond the checkbox mentality that reduces people to keywords and requirements.
When success is measured by long-term placement success rather than short-term activity metrics, everyone's incentives align around making good matches.
When automation handles the repetitive work, human decision-making can focus on what actually matters: whether this person and this role are truly compatible.
The Choice Every Company Faces
If you're hiring developers (or anyone else), you have a choice:
Continue using recruiting approaches that treat candidates like inventory—and wonder why your interview-to-hire ratios are terrible and your best candidates accept offers elsewhere.
Or embrace recruiting that treats both candidates and employers like the complex humans they actually are.
The technology exists now to build relationships with candidates based on understanding their actual career goals, not just their resume keywords. To match based on comprehensive compatibility, not just skill checklists. To provide consistent, high-quality service that respects everyone's time and intelligence.
The developer who made that rant was right: the current system treats everyone like inventory.
We're building something that treats them like humans.
Jesse Hogan is the Founder & CTO of Semantic Recruitment, building the first AI-native recruiting platform that replaces traditional recruiting agencies through conversational automation while preserving all meaningful hiring decisions for humans.
Are you tired of being treated like inventory in your job search? Or frustrated with poor-quality candidates from traditional recruiting? Let's talk about how AI-native recruiting can work better for everyone.