Robin Schooling

Silver Medalists: The Hiring Race No On Wants to Run Again

The term “silver medalist” has been circulating in recruiting circles long enough to have earned its own bullet point in vendor pitch decks and its own session at talent acquisition conferences where people nod along and take notes they will never look at again.

The concept is simple: these are your near-miss candidates. They’re the ones who survived phone screens, panel interviews, hiring manager meetings, and possibly a reference check or two, only to lose the offer by a fraction. They’re qualified and already familiar with your organization, so when a future opening materializes, re-engaging them should save everyone significant time, money, and the particular misery of crawling back to the top of a cold applicant funnel.

It’s one of those ideas that sounds deceptively sensible, but I always wonder if it’s something talent acquisition teams are doing, or just a concept we get excited about during a software demo when we’re told we can “tag” candidate records?

The Gap Between the Tag and the Touchpoint

In theory, silver medalist programs are straightforward. You maintain detailed notes in your ATS, you flag strong candidates who finished second, you reach out shortly after the hire is made to keep the relationship warm, and when a relevant role opens up, you check that pool before you post externally. Clean, logical, and efficient.

In practice, the “#silver” tag sits in the system while the team turns its attention to the next open requisition, the next hiring manager who needs handholding, and the next crisis of the week. When a new requisition gets approved, sourcing always seems to start from scratch so the silver medalists (who spent hours of their time, navigated your multi-stage process with professionalism, and finished a genuine close second) hear nothing.

Months pass after a hire is made (any hire) and then the role opens up again. Someone remembers a #silver medalist (or remembers to run a query in the ATS) and this brings us to the awkward part: what does the outreach really look like?

Because if we’re being honest, the implicit message of a silver medalist re-engagement, when it finally does happen, is something like:

“we hired someone else, it didn’t work out, you were already pre-screened, and the new role needs to be filled quickly so how soon can you start?”

We dress it up in warmer language, of course, but candidates can read the subtext:

Bob sucked
You’re already in the system
The role is approved and open
Can you start Monday?

We expect them to feel honored by the designation and eager to re-engage when we come calling, apparently unbothered by the fact that we’re essentially describing them as the solution to a problem we created by not picking them in the first place.

What Candidates Already Know

But job seekers are exhausted by recruiters and HR. Not just mildly skeptical but genuinely, documentably and understandably pissed off.

We’ve built hiring processes that require applicants to complete assessments, submit work samples, participate in multiple interview rounds, and endure weeks (sometimes months) of ambiguous silence before receiving a decision. We put people through considerable effort to evaluate whether they meet our standards, and then we make them wait while we deliberate. And after all of that, if they finished second, we expect them to feel honored by the designation and eager to re-engage when we come calling.

That is a significant ask, particularly from an employer who may not have handled the original process especially well.

The silver medalist framework assumes a level of goodwill that organizations and recruiting teams must earn, and that goodwill erodes with every unreturned email, every vague “we’ll be in touch,” and every process that seems designed more for organizational convenience than candidate experience. If we treated the candidate well during the original search – communicated clearly, moved with reasonable efficiency, and delivered a timely and respectful decision – then yes, re-engagement is plausible. There’s a foundation to build on. But if we didn’t do those things, the #silver medal isn’t a distinction they’re going to be eager to hold onto.

The Work That Makes This Work

The underlying logic and concept of a silver medalist designation is sound; when executed well it can meaningfully reduce sourcing time and deliver better hire quality. This only functions however when the talent acquisition team has both the capacity to maintain those relationships over time and a candidate experience worth maintaining in the first place.

Which means the real conversation isn’t about ATS tagging conventions or re-engagement email templates. It’s about whether the broader hiring process is one that candidates would want to return to and whether TA teams have the time, the tools, and the organizational support to follow through on what the silver medalist concept requires.

A tag in the system is not a relationship, and a template is not a touchpoint. And a candidate who was treated as an afterthought the first time around is unlikely to be particularly receptive the second time – regardless of what we call them.

A silver medal handed out by an organization that sponsored a lousy race isn’t much of an honor.

*****

A Rose by Any Other Name: Titles and Identity

Earlier this week, I made an announcement – new job, new chapter – and did so in the manner of our times: LinkedIn posts, Facebook update, and everything short of choreographing a TikTok. The news was well-received by friends and family of course, but one comment caught my eye. When I shared that I’d started a new position as “Head of People,” someone replied with “Head of People? Really?”

I couldn’t quite tell if he was questioning the title, questioning my credentials, or questioning the general direction of HR nomenclature. So I kept it light: “It’s what all the kids are saying.” His reply – “Thanks. I’m completely out of touch but not completely out of mind” – made me laugh,

It also made me think; I had given my title real thought because I had the rare and genuinely enjoyable privilege of determining what I’d be called. And that’s not a decision I took lightly, even if the options sometimes feel like a choose-your-own-adventure through the world of HR branding.

And since “Queen of All She Surveys” seemed a touch presumptuous, I had to narrow it down.

The Taxonomy of HR Titles

Let’s be honest about what our titles signal – to others, yes, but also to ourselves. In HR, the job is fundamentally the same across a spectrum of organizations, but the label we slap on it carries an entire narrative, and those narratives have not aged uniformly well. Please note, of course, that this is a blog and these are my opinions; there is no shame in holding any of these titles and there are no aspersions being cast upon any HR professional who has one title or another.

HR Manager/Director/VP – whatever the level, this combination of letters tends to conjure a very specific image: someone in sensible slacks and a blazer, armed with a policy binder and a firm handshake. Let’s call her Jessica. Jessica knows every compliance requirement cold, she handles benefits open enrollment without breaking a sweat, and she will absolutely send you home for a dress code violation. Jessica is not without value – in fact, Jessica is essential – but “HR Manager” as a title leads people, immediately and almost involuntarily, to think about compliance, handbooks, and the more transactional machinery of the function. It positions the work before the person even walks into the room.

Head of HR is a step toward something – the “Head of” construction has a certain authority to it – but it’s still tethered to the same mental model. People hear “HR” and they think payroll, benefits administration, employee relations investigations, and the ever-present specter of legal liability. None of these things are unimportant; they are, in fact, critical. But if your title is leading with the administrative and operational infrastructure, you’re already managing perception before the first conversation begins.

Head of People is where I’ve landed before (circa 2018) and where I’ve landed again (circa 2026), because what it conveys – and perhaps more critically, what it declines to convey – aligns with the work I want to be doing. It’s strategic, yes, but it’s also humanistic without being saccharine. It implies that the function is centered on people as a genuine priority, not as a compliance category. It reads as modern and forward-leaning without, IMO, trying too hard. “Head of People” doesn’t announce itself by what it manages so much as by what it values.

People Operations is another iteration worth considering, and one I find incredibly compelling – it speaks the language of the business in a way that resonates with the CFO and the COO as much as it does with the employee base. “Operations” signals clarity, process, and a results orientation, which is useful in organizations where HR has historically been seen as occupying a softer, more peripheral lane. The combination says: “we understand how the business works, and we’re here to make it work better, for the people inside of it.”

Where I personally start to lose my patience is when “Culture” gets added to the title – as in, Head of People and Culture, a configuration that’s become genuinely fashionable. I understand the appeal; it signals intentionality about the kind of workplace an organization is trying to build. But culture is not a portfolio. It’s not a department, a program, or a function that any single person – however talented and however well-resourced – can own. Culture is a living, collective organism, shaped daily by every leader’s behavior, every hiring decision, every moment when stated values either hold up under pressure or quietly fall apart. Putting it in someone’s title, however well-intentioned, implicitly removes accountability from the people who actually determine what culture looks like on the ground.

Employee Experience carries similar risks, though for different reasons. There’s something aspirational and genuinely meaningful about centering the lived reality of work – what it feels like to be an employee here, in this organization, on any given day. But when the work environment is toxic or when trust has eroded or when a reduction in force is unfolding and people are scared – “Head of Employee Experience” can feel less like a mandate and more like a hostage situation. The title raises expectations it can’t always single-handedly meet.

What the Name Can and Cannot Do

None of these titles, of course, change the work itself. No matter what appears on the org chart or the email signature, the fundamental responsibilities of HR – developing people, building the infrastructure for performance, aligning talent strategy with business direction, navigating the gorgeous and occasionally maddening complexity of human beings at work – those remain. They evolve in how they’re done, as technology shifts and organizational models mature and the expectations of employees continue to outpace our ability to keep up. But they don’t evaporate because we’ve found a better word for the role.

What a title can do is signal intent. It can tell the organization, and the people in it, something about how this function sees its own purpose. It can attract or repel candidates who are reading between the lines. It can open or foreclose certain conversations before they begin. And perhaps most importantly, it shapes how the person holding the title internalizes the work – which is not a small thing.

Whether you’re an HR Generalist (a title I’ve grown less fond of as the years accumulate, largely because “generalist” has come to sound like a euphemism for “handles everything nobody else wants to deal with”) or a Chief People Officer or a Head of Workforce Experience, the professional imperative remains identical: expand your skill set, get fluent in the language and logic of the business, embrace the technology that moves the work of HR forward, and think strategically even when the day is demanding that you think tactically.

The name may matter to some degree. But the identity underneath it matters more.

*****

check out where I’ve landed: BelleSage Partners

Cultivating the Human Edge

Every year Deloitte releases its Global Human Capital Trends Report, and every year I pore over it (although I was, admittedly, late to the party this year). And I’d encourage every HR professional to do the same. Before you start with the “that’s for global audiences” or “we’re not enterprise, we only have 300 employees” or “that doesn’t apply to small-town USA,” let me save you the trouble.

It applies.

The future of work – or the world of work, call it what you will – doesn’t check your headcount before it arrives on your doorstep. What’s unfolding inside the Fortune 500 eventually shows up in your break room, your hiring pipeline, and your next round of performance conversations. The question isn’t whether you’ll be affected, but whether you see it coming or get flattened by it.

This year’s report, with a subtitle of “From Tensions to Tipping Points: Choosing the Human Advantage”, is worth your time. Here’s why.

From Tensions to Tipping Points

Last year’s Deloitte report was about navigating tensions: control or empowerment, stability or agility, automation or augmentation. Pretty much the classic HR balancing act. This year, Deloitte argues we’ve crossed a line and there are no longer tensions to manage; they’re tipping points demanding action.

Seventy percent of business leaders in the survey say their primary competitive strategy over the next three years is to be “fast and nimble,” The classic S-curve that once defined business growth – gradual lift, rapid acceleration, eventual plateau – is compressing as AI and workforce transformation are accelerating the climb and collapsing the plateau. This means that organizations that used to have years to plan their next move now have months … sometimes weeks. Historically, organizations jumped that curve by adding new technology – but that strategy is no longer enough.

The Human Edge

Here’s a line from the report that made me sit up and cheer: “Competitive advantage is now primarily less driven by technology differentiation and more by cultivating the human edge. Technology – especially something as increasingly ubiquitous as AI – is replicable. People aren’t.”

Read that again.

For years, HR has been angling for that cliched seat-at-the-table by learning to speak the language of technology, data, and business operations. Important and necessary work to be sure, but the pendulum is swinging, and the thing that can’t be bought off the shelf or duplicated by a competitor is the one asset HR has always understood: humans. Their judgment, creativity, adaptivity, and capacity to navigate uncertainty. That’s the edge.

Deloitte’s research backs this up with numbers.

Fifty-nine percent of organizations are taking a tech-focused approach to AI – layering it onto legacy systems and processes and hoping for magic. Those organizations are 1.6 times more likely to miss their AI investment returns.
Organizations that take a human-centric approach – intentionally redesigning how humans and machines interact – are nearly 2.5 times more likely to report better financial results and twice as likely to say they provide meaningful work.

The difference isn’t the tech. It’s the design.

Tipping Points Requiring Attention

The report identifies three shifts that organizations can no longer defer:

From human + machine to human x machine. Plus means side by side, while multiplication means in concert in order to multiply outcomes. The boundaries between people and intelligent agents are blurring, and how we design that collaboration – who decides, when do humans intervene, what data we trust – will define how value gets created.

From cost efficiency to value creation. Organizations that succeed won’t be the ones that automate the fastest, but rather the ones that channel efficiency into reinvestment that fuels new forms of value creation and worker performance. Cutting your way to growth has a ceiling while growing through human capability doesn’t.

From static plans to dynamic orchestration. Strategy and execution used to be sequential but now they coexist. Organizations need to orchestrate capacity and capabilities around outcomes – not job descriptions! – and build systems for continuous learning, experimentation, and reinvention.

The Knowing vs. Doing Gap

Here’s where the report gives me pause. Across every major trend Deloitte explored, somewhere between 57% and 88% of leaders said the issue was important. Somewhere between 5% and 7% said they were making great progress.

It’s a staggering gap:

Sixty-six percent of leaders recognize the importance of designing human-AI interactions while only 6% say they’re leading in this area.
Sixty-one percent flag the decline in trustworthiness of workforce data as important; 5% are making real progress.
88% say it’s extremely or very important to accelerate how people, skills, and resources are orchestrated – with just 7% making great progress.

The urgency is understood but how to execute is not. That gap, more than any specific trend, is the big story for organizations.

HR Voices

The report includes interviews with practitioners across industries, and a few quotes have rattled around in my head long after I closed the PDF.

“We design the way our people work with AI so that it provides an outcome. Too many organizations treat AI as an adoption problem without first asking how you can achieve the outcomes desired. What’s really required is behavioral change – not technical training.” – Michael Ehret, SVP and chief people officer at Walmart International

“Tech won’t solve trust issues. Only visible, consistent leadership and accountability can do that.” – Marcia Oglan, SVP of enterprise human resources at Highmark Health

“Leadership and culture are inextricably linked. The attitude and example set by those at the top have a significant impact on individual behavior throughout the organization.” – Zach Parris, formerly of Atlassian

This may be some old wisdom…but its wisdom applied to a newer, faster context.

What It Means for The Rest Of Us

If you’re in HR at a 300-person company, a regional nonprofit, or a scrappy team in the middle of nowhere, the instinct to dismiss a report like this is understandable. But the principles, as always, translate.

You may not be deploying agentic AI across seven business units, but you’re making decisions – right now – about how your people will work alongside emerging tools. You’re shaping the culture that will either absorb AI’s influence thoughtfully or accumulate what Deloitte calls “cultural debt” – the quiet erosion of trust that happens when organizations let AI reshape behavior without intention.

You’re also making decisions about your own relevance. Deloitte found that only 27% of respondents believe their organizations manage change effectively, and just 8% believe their organizations meet continuous learning needs. That’s a mandate for every HR practitioner to keep growing, keep questioning, and keep investing in your own capability – something I wrote about a while back in HR Career Realignment: Ditch the Logo, Chase the Impact.

The human edge isn’t just an organizational strategy; it’s a personal one. So read the report. Argue with it. Borrow from it. Because whatever comes next – and it’s coming fast – the organizations and the practitioners who thrive will be the ones who stopped waiting for the global picture to become a small-town problem.

It already is.

“Competitive advantage is now primarily less driven by technology differentiation and more by cultivating the human edge.” – 2026 Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report

*****

image credit NASA

Go Along to Get Along

Go along to get along. It travels easily, this expression. It presents itself as wisdom rather than warning: a pragmatic acknowledgment that harmony requires some measure of personal concession, that belonging has a cost, and that the prudent professional learns quickly which battles are worth fighting and which are best left quietly unconsidered. It sounds almost reasonable – right up until you examine what it produces.

The phrase, with roots in political culture, often becomes the unspoken operating code of legislative bodies; the implicit understanding that influence is accumulated through cooperation, that cooperation requires deference, and that deference, practiced long enough, becomes indistinguishable from conviction. What’s remarkable is how seamlessly organizations also absorbed this logic, because it turns out the incentive structures governing most institutions – corporate, civic, nonprofit – are not so structurally different from those governing legislative bodies. In both environments, conformity circulates as social currency, and the people who learn to spend it wisely tend to accumulate more of it, while those who refuse the transaction find themselves, gradually and then suddenly, outside the room where decisions are made.

What this produces, over time, is a particular kind of organizational silence – not the silence of consensus, but the silence of calculation. People learn, usually early and often through direct experience, that a dissenting view offered in a room full of nodding heads is a professionally expensive gesture. So they stop offering it, nod along with the others, and then carry with them a low-grade ambient frustration, accumulating in perpetuity.

The Silent Surrender

I wrote some years ago about the dangers of keeping sweet at work – a particular form of performative agreeableness that is the deliberate cultivation of a pleasant surface as a substitute for genuine engagement. Going along to get along is a more sophisticated version of the same instinct, but with a sharper strategic logic. Keeping sweet is essentially aesthetic; it’s about maintaining a palatable presentation. Going along to get along is a calculated trade; a considered decision to suppress one’s actual opinion in exchange for belonging, access, or the kind of professional safety that passes, for a while, as both acceptance and forward motion.

What makes this pattern so durable is that, in the short term, it works. The organizational immune system has been trained, across industries and decades, to read friction as dysfunction but to welcome agreement as competence. The people who push back get coded as difficult while the people who fall into alignment get coded as collaborative. The incentive structure we’ve built doesn’t require anyone to articulate this; it simply operates, quietly and consistently, and people read it accurately. The result is what social psychologists have long described as groupthink: a collective drift toward consensus that is more social than rational, more protective than productive, and that has an impressively consistent track record of enabling serious institutional failures. The employees who privately understand the risks stay quiet; they’ve already weighed the personal cost of candor against the perceived likelihood that it will change anything and concluded the math will never work in their favor.

Conformity Doesn’t Require a Mandate

What deserves closer examination is how organizations create these conditions, because the mechanism is rarely punitive and almost never explicit. It’s structural.

When leadership responds to challenge with defensiveness, when the person who surfaces a problem becomes the person responsible for solving it, or when candor is inscribed in the values statement yet quietly penalized, you don’t need to mandate compliance because it self-generates. Organizational conformity, in most cases, is not imposed from above but rather emerges from below, as people develop an accurate read of where the risk lies and calibrate their own behavior accordingly. This is the sophisticated part of the dynamic that tends to get underappreciated in the usual conversations about psychological safety: most people who go along are not passive, unthinking, or unaware. They are, instead, making a rational decision within an irrational system.

For HR, this matters in at least two directions simultaneously. We are, in theory, the function charged with organizational integrity, which means we depend on people being willing to tell us the truth. We also depend on having the standing and gravitas to carry uncomfortable truths upward through the organizational hierarchy. Yet, neither condition will hold in a culture that systematically rewards silence.

And it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that HR is not exempt from this pattern itself; we are entirely capable of going along with leadership decisions we privately assess as misguided, because we’ve learned, often correctly, that our position is conditional on a particular kind of usefulness. And that usefulness? Often defined as acquiescence.

From Structural Fix to Personal Reckoning

What organizations that manage to disrupt this pattern have in common is rarely an unusually courageous workforce. Rather, they possess leadership behavior and structural design that makes dissent feel like a safe and viable option rather than a calculated risk. In practice, that looks like leaders who respond to challenge with genuine curiosity rather than subtle retaliation, who make their own course corrections visible enough to demonstrate that input does matter, and who create the conditions under which raising a concern is understood as contributing rather than complicating. It also looks like an HR Leader who is willing to name that which needs adjustment; to identify, specifically and with evidence, where the gap between stated values and actual organizational behavior is widest, and to treat that gap as the problem it is.

Because going along to get along is, at its foundation, a rational response to irrational incentives. The behavior will persist as long as the incentives do, and the incentives will persist as long as we treat the silence as a feature of the culture rather than a signal about it. The hidden conversations – the real ones, the candid ones, the ones that contain truthful organizational intelligence – are already happening. We just need to be willing to listen.

In our organizations, the first question belongs to leadership: not simply whether dissent is technically permitted, but whether the organization is structurally and emotionally prepared to be challenged and changed by what it hears. That’s a hard ask, and one that requires some soul-searching.

The second question is yours, and it travels with you everywhere – into your workplace, your community, and into the civic and volunteer spaces where you give your time and carry your personal beliefs and values. Those are the places where you need to raise your concerns. To name the things others are avoiding. To share your opinions, ask the pointed questions, and push for discussion.

The case for going along to get along is, in the end, a case for other people’s comfort at the expense of your own integrity – and that’s a trade-off that will never look as reasonable in hindsight as it might in the moment.

******