Welcome to The Hero 🗞️. This is approximately a 3.5-minute read.

800 applications… 24 hours.

One job.

At 20 seconds per profile, that's 5+ hours of screening - for a single role.

Before one interview… before anything actually happens.

Now imagine you have 10 open reqs 🤯

That’s not a hiring problem - that’s a math problem.

So you do what anyone would:

Skim the top, advance whoever looks okay, ignore the rest, and hit bulk-reject when the job closes.

88% of applicants aren’t qualified anyway - so it feels fine.

The truth is, "most people aren't a fit" isn't a reason to stop looking…

It's a reason to stop looking manually.

The full breakdown is just below - don’t miss it! 😉

Here are some of the best links I’ve found since last time I emailed you: 

10 Proven Employee Retention Strategies for 2026 and Beyond (link)

Top Employee Retention Strategies for 2025 (link)

 61% of Recruiters Predict Market Stability: What 2026 Holds (link)

9 Staffing Industry Trends to Watch in 2026 (link) 

AI Adoption in Recruiting: 2025 Year in Review (link)

AI Recruitment Trends & Statistics in 2026 (link)

Talent Acquisition Trends to Watch in 2026 (link)

79% of companies say they use automation in their application tracking system.

Which means most already have the fix.

They just don’t set it up all the way…

And many more all have automation that could be handling the grunt work for you, right now:

Most teams flipped on the basics during onboarding (never went back), and have been doing by hand what their software could've done for them ever since.

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Four moves.

No new software budget required.

Open your ATS.

Go to automation settings.

Look at everything that's off.

Start with the highest-impact wins:

Not sure what else your ATS can do?

Ask ChatGPT - it'll surface things you didn't know existed… 👀

Use this prompt:

Here's what no ATS does well:

Evaluate 800 applicants in seconds and tell you who's actually worth a conversation.

That's the bottleneck - and it's where most recruiting hours quietly disappear.

Metaview's Application Review agent just dropped last week, and it's the best tool I've seen for this.

Here’s how it works:

No auto-rejections.

You make every final call.

Metaview just makes sure you're making the right one.

This should take you 10 minutes to set up and fixes one of recruiting's worst habits.

Most applicants never hear back 👻

They apply, wait weeks, and eventually piece together that they didn't get it.

That silence costs you - on Glassdoor, in your reputation, and every time a candidate asks a friend what it was like to apply at your company.

One rule changes all of it:

Anyone sitting in "Applied" seven or more business days with no movement gets a short, respectful decline.

Automated. Done.

It also sets a clear expectation with hiring managers - feedback delays have real consequences, and this makes that visible.

Most recruiters move candidates through stages and say nothing until the next invite lands.

That's a missed opportunity every single time.

Set up automated emails that fire every time a candidate advances - each one tailored to what comes next.

Use AI to pull together company research, role-specific interview tips, and context they'd otherwise have to dig up themselves.

Build the template once.

Let it run forever.

The candidate feels prepared, impressed, and genuinely cared for.

👉 And that's the kind of experience that gets you referrals - even from people you don't hire.

You already own the tools…

You just haven't turned them on.

Spend an afternoon in your settings.

Set up these four things.

Let the system do the work it was built to do.

Fix your setup before you buy anything else 😇

There are a few ways:

Or you can just reply to this email.

I reply to absolutely everyone who writes me back 🙂