“You complete me” is more than a line from a popular movie. It’s the feeling employers and job candidates dream of having when they find their perfect match. Unfortunately, in today’s job market, that degree of compatibility is as hard to come by as meeting your forever mate at a speed-dating event.

Hiring is the only process where companies say, “People are our greatest asset” and then evaluate them using a one-page document written at 1 a.m. with the help of a chatbot. We have all hired someone who looked amazing on paper and then taught us the true meaning of regret.

That’s why at JobCommander, we’re simplifying the hiring process through compatibility to help you overcome the 10 biggest challenges hiring teams face today.

Challenge 1: Resumes Do Not Give Good Reasons to Hire

Resumes are going the way of the dodo bird because both employers and job hunters are waking up to the fact that using a brief, two-dimensional tool to hire a multifaceted flesh-and-blood human makes no sense. A resume is nothing more than a greatest hits album. You have no way of knowing whether the person behind it will fit your company’s rhythm, or show up with intense confidence, a different tempo, and just enough misunderstanding to keep everyone slightly uncomfortable.

Don’t even think about scanning a resume to get a handle on someone’s communication style since, according to several independent studies, 68% of job seekers are letting AI write their resumes for them. If you could easily identify a robot-generated resume, you would at least have insight into someone’s questionable work ethic, but 75% of employers cannot.

Challenge 2: Hiring for Skills Instead of Fit

You can teach a new employee your software, but you can’t give a personality upgrade. Companies that hire only for skills and experience often pay for it later in turnover and disengagement.

Groundbreaking entrepreneurs who make personality, values, and character priorities when hiring include Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, Tim Brown of IDEO, and Bob Iger of Disney.

At 26, Daniel Bennett quit working as an ad agency account executive in mid-pandemic to start his social media consulting business, DX Creative. He knows he was a personality hire, and that was fine with him. Approaching the agency, he says, “My goal going into it was to make the interviewers like me … I ended up beating out two people with three or four years of experience, even though I had zero experience.” He adds, “Companies that take pride in having ‘disruptive’ and different work cultures need personality hires because otherwise, who’s going to build that culture?”

Challenge 3: The Cost of a Bad Hire Is Massive

The adage “cheaper to retain than to train” is a huge understatement. A bad hire costs at least 30%-50% of a first year’s salary. For mid- to senior-level roles, a failed hire can cost $100,000 to $240,000. Not counting your time, your sanity, and at least one awkward team meeting.

Bad hires impact productivity and morale. Think Debbie Downer meets Oscar the Grouch. The ones who will not admit they are wrong for the job blame everyone from the CEO to the summer intern for their poor performance. The ones who know they are hopeless misfits but hang on for the pay take up competent employees’ time with whiny requests for help they shouldn’t need.

Most companies do not realize how expensive the wrong fit becomes until it is too late. Bad hires are most often unintentional, due to factors like rushed hiring decisions in emergencies and inadequate screening for technical and cultural fit.

Challenge 4: Turnover Happens Faster Than Anyone Admits

About 30% of new hires leave within the first 90 days, long before they have a chance to contribute meaningfully. Equally troubling is the trend toward detachment and disengagement — workers hanging on to jobs they don’t care about until something they like better comes along. U.S. employee engagement hit an 11-year low in 2024, and there is no end in sight.

These are often signs that no one evaluated compatibility early enough. HR experts concur that the secret to retention isn’t more pay, benefits, or perks. Although all are important elements, retaining talent relies on better leadership, connection, and engagement. No amount of onboarding fixes the feeling of “This was not what I signed up for.”

Challenge 5: Too Many Applicants, Not Enough Matches

In 2026, hiring managers and recruiters are in crisis. Overwhelmed by the high volume of applications, they struggle to identify top talent to interview for a job. Meanwhile, the compatible match who’s hiding in the towering pile of resumes may never surface.

Hundreds of applicants does not mean better options; it means more noise. Instead of feeling like a meaningful task that makes a positive contribution to the company, hiring becomes one of those “it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it” situations that turns into scrolling fatigue with a spreadsheet.

Compatibility scoring is a commonsense solution that gives employers clarity before they invest their time in reviewing applications and conducting interviews.

Challenge 6: Hiring Takes Too Long

The average hiring process takes 44 days, plenty of time for your top candidate to accept another job and forget your company exists. It’s no wonder that applicants’ contentment has been dropping while their resentment has been rising.

Kevin Grossman, vice president of ERE Media, which has conducted wide-ranging surveys on the subject, points out that candidates who have suffered through a bad recruiting process are less likely to apply to the offending company again, refer others, or purchase that company’s products or services.

JobCommander’s compatibility-driven approach streamlines hiring by evaluating culture fit and value alignment before candidates ever apply. By requiring a minimum compatibility threshold, both sides move forward with clarity from the start. Employers spend time only on candidates who already align with what they are looking for, and candidates apply knowing the opportunity fits who they are and how they work.

Challenge 7: The Black Hole Hiring Experience

Candidates apply, hear nothing, and assume their resume fell into a digital black hole. Ghosted again and again, their patience wears thin along with the good feelings they originally had about the companies they applied to. Oftentimes, a candidate receives an automated, AI-generated email response from an employer many months after they first applied.

HR consultant Bryan Driscoll says ghosting is up because companies “expect professionalism, patience, and prompt replies from candidates, and then vanish without a trace the moment it’s inconvenient for them to respond.”

In Reddit’s subreddit called Recruiting Hell, one member observes, “Messing with any kind of job board (internal or external) is like playing the lottery, I don’t care how qualified you are. … In this job market, we have to find somebody, anybody, who can get our resume past the recruiters and onto the hiring manager’s desk.”

Employers lose trust and brand credibility when communication lacks transparency in the hiring process.

Challenge 8: Bias Sneaks In Even When We Try to Avoid It

As limited a view as traditional resumes and applications give of a candidate, they have the power to introduce subliminal bias into the hiring process.

You see that a certain university, the biggest rival for the one you played soccer for, is the applicant’s alma mater, and you recall every crushing defeat. Or you notice a candidate’s hometown and cringe as you remember all the horrible experiences you had when you lived there. No federal law or amount of well-intentioned inclusivity can incinerate those postcards from the subconscious.

Compatibility scoring helps reduce bias by focusing on alignment instead of assumptions.

Challenge 9: Recruiter and Hiring Manager Burnout

The conventional hiring process frustrates the people doing the hiring as much as the job candidates. They are burning out. Facing application overload and finding few qualified candidates, their morale suffers, and they become emotionally exhausted, according to George Zimny, co-founder of ProducifyX. And they sometimes feel that applicants are ghosting them.

Hiring fatigue leads to shortcuts, rushed decisions, and repeated mistakes. When teams are burned out, quality suffers even with the best intentions. Exhaustion is not a hiring strategy, but it is surprisingly common.

By analyzing compatibility and alignment, JobCommander removes the burden from employers and allows them to focus on finding the right person for their company’s vision and culture.

Challenge 10: No One Is Measuring Compatibility

Most platforms measure who qualifies. Few measure who fits. Compatibility matching leads to employee engagement, which, according to Gallup, fosters the growth of a company and its culture. Gallup’s analysis concludes that recognizing employees’ contributions to their organization is a major factor in engagement.

When JobCommander’s compatibility matching guides the hiring process, applicants feel valued even before they join a company. Unlike resumes, our platform captures their personalities and values as well as their skills, giving employers a comprehensive view of who they truly are. When they match with an employer before applying, candidates no longer feel the need to prove that they’re the round pegs that can fit a company’s role hole.

Better Hiring Starts With Better Alignment

Hiring should not feel like gambling with better dressed odds. At JobCommander, the process is totally transparent, with each candidate receiving a compatibility score showing how closely they align with the employer’s ideal match. Green checks = strong alignment; red X’s = misalignment. This sets both employers and applicants up for a positive interviewing experience rather than something that makes them wish they were seeing their dentist for a root canal instead.

As a bonus, compatibility-based profiles often uncover opportunities candidates did not know existed at companies they never imagined working for. JobCommander’s dual matching system evaluates every candidate against every role and every role against every candidate, creating a double-blind experience similar to a dating platform. Sometimes the best matches are the ones that surprise both sides.

When you measure compatibility first, hiring finally stops feeling like a coin flip.