Pakistan doesn’t have a talent shortage. It has a broken hiring system

After nearly 13 years working across HR, operations, hiring and business leadership, I have sat on both sides of the same frustrating conversation. Employers tell me, “We cannot find good people”. Jobseekers tell me, “There are no good opportunities”. For years, I treated these as two separate problems. I no longer do. Speaking directly with employers, recruiters, and jobseekers has made one thing increasingly clear to me: Pakistan does not only have an unemployment problem or a skills problem. We also have a hiring infrastructure problem. The right candidate may already be in the pile Take a very normal hiring situation. A company posts one vacancy and receives 500 applications. That looks like abundance. In reality, it often becomes a filtering problem. If a recruiter spends only two minutes reviewing each curriculum vitae (CV), that is almost 17 hours of work before a single proper conversation has taken place. Add shortlisting, calls, scheduling, no-shows, interview notes and follow-ups, and the cost of one vacancy starts looking very different. This is why I am cautious whenever somebody says, “There is no talent in the market”. Sometimes there is no shortage of talent. The right person may simply be sitting at application number 347 while the recruiter has only reached number 120. We made applying easier, not hiring better Technology has made it incredibly easy to apply for jobs. A candidate can submit ten applications before breakfast. That improved access, but it also created noise. Employers now receive more applications than ever, while candidates still feel invisible. The old recruitment model was built around distribution: post the vacancy, collect CVs, search a database and filter applicants. The next model has to be built around decision-making: help the employer identify the few people worth speaking to, faster and with better information. A CV is useful, but it should not decide everything I have seen excellent candidates with average CVs and average candidates with beautifully optimised CVs. That is not a criticism of candidates. It is a limitation of the tool. Today, candidates are taught how to beat Applicant Tracking System (ATS) filters, insert the right keywords, and redesign their profiles for algorithms. There is value in learning how to present yourself, but we should also ask a harder question: are we teaching people how to become better candidates, or simply how to pass the system? A better hiring process should bring more signals forward earlier: relevant experience, structured responses, communication, availability, salary expectations, practical knowledge and role-specific understanding. The CV should remain part of hiring. It just should not carry the whole burden. Why are we still repeating the same first interview 20 times? This was one of the problems that pushed me deeper into recruitment technology. Suppose an employer wants to conduct a 30-minute first-round screening with 20 candidates. That is 10 hours of interviews, before the serious evaluation stage even begins. And much of that time is spent asking the same opening questions: Tell me about yourself. Why this role? When can you join? What are your salary expectations? What experience do you have with this skill? These questions matter, but they are highly repeatable. This is where automation should help. Not by making the final hiring decision. Not by replacing recruiters. But by handling repetitive screening and presenting structured information so recruiters can spend their time where human judgment actually matters. Candidates should not disappear after clicking Apply There is another side of the process that deserves more attention: transparency. A candidate applies and then hears nothing. Was the CV viewed? Was the vacancy closed? Did somebody else get hired? Was the application rejected? From the candidate’s side, every scenario looks exactly the same: silence. I understand the employer side. When hundreds of people apply, manually responding to everyone is difficult. But once technology can automate screening, reminders and workflows, it can also improve communication. Candidate experience should not be treated as a polite HR slogan. It should be built into the system. Universities need hiring data, not only employability workshops We regularly tell universities that graduates are not industry-ready. Sometimes that criticism is justified. But employers also need to give universities a better feedback loop. If hundreds of finance graduates repeatedly reach screening stages but lack Power BI, universities should know. If software employers are increasingly asking for a particular technology, students should know before graduation. If candidates are technically strong but repeatedly fail interviews because of communication or practical application, career offices should know. Recruitment data should become labour-market intelligence. That can help universities improve career services, help students invest in the right skills and help employers build stronger pipelines. It is far more useful than simply forwarding vacancies into WhatsApp groups. Pakistan does not need another job board Pakistan does not need another website whose main achievement is collecting more CVs. We already know how to do that. The opportunity is to reduce the distance between “I need someone” and “I have found the right person”. That means better talent discovery, structured screening, smarter use of AI, stronger employer-candidate transparency, university connectivity and better recruitment data. The goal should not be to generate 1, 000 applicants. The goal should be to help an employer identify the right 10 faster. AI should make recruitment more human There is a temptation right now to attach AI to everything. Recruitment will be no different. But AI itself is not the strategy. Hiring remains a human decision. Motivation, judgment, leadership, integrity, team fit and potential cannot responsibly be reduced to one automated score. Technology should organise, structure and accelerate the process. Humans should make the important calls. That is the future of recruitment I believe in: let technology remove low-value repetition so recruiters can spend more time actually understanding people. The question we should be asking Pakistan has young people looking for work. It has companies looking for capable people. It has universities producing graduates every year. The missing piece is not always supply or demand. Sometimes it is the bridge between them. After almost 13 years around people, operations and hiring, I remain convinced that Pakistan has exceptional talent. But exceptional talent is useless to an employer who cannot find it, and an excellent opportunity is useless to a candidate who never gets seen. We have spent years asking whether Pakistani jobseekers are ready for the future of work. Perhaps it is time to ask another question: Is Pakistan’s hiring system ready for them? The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.

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