Why you got fifty CVs and none of them fit
The economics behind the stack — and how to tell in one phone call whether an agency will do it to you.
You briefed an agency on Monday. By Thursday there are fifty CVs in your inbox, and by the second page you can tell the sender never read your JD. It feels like laziness. It’s actually economics — and once you see the arithmetic, you’ll never be surprised by the stack again.
The arithmetic of the stack
Most recruitment in India runs on contingency: the agency is paid only if their candidate joins. Now put yourself in the agency’s chair. The same role is typically given to three, four, five agencies at once. Whatever the quality of their work, each agency’s expected win rate on any mandate is a fraction — and they know it.
What’s the rational response to a lottery? Buy more tickets, cheaply. Speed beats depth: the first CV in your inbox stakes a claim on the candidate. Volume beats judgement: fifty CVs cost almost nothing to send, and if two stick, the month is made. Spending six hours genuinely assessing candidates for a mandate you’ll probably lose to a faster competitor is, in strict economic terms, irrational.
So the work is structured accordingly. A junior recruiter — often months into their career, carrying a weekly CV target — runs a keyword search on a database, harvests whatever matches, and forwards it. Nobody speaks to the candidates. Sometimes the candidates don’t know their CV travelled at all, which is how your head of engineering ends up interviewing someone who thought they’d applied to a different company.
None of this makes the people involved villains. The structure produces the stack. Change the structure and you change the output — which is exactly the principle Inside Cubicle is built on.
The one-phone-call test
You can detect the stack before it happens. On the first call with any agency, ask four questions:
“How many live mandates does the person working my search carry?” If the answer is fifteen or twenty — or if there’s a pause while they decide what you want to hear — you know how much attention your role gets. There are only so many hours in a recruiter’s week; divide them by the mandate count.
“Will you have spoken to every candidate before I see them?” Not “screened,” not “our team evaluates” — spoken to, personally, about this role. Watch for the we: “we assess every candidate” often means software did.
“What happens if you only find two people worth my time?” The honest answer is “you get two.” Anyone who promises a full slate regardless has just told you the slate will be padded.
“Who exactly works my search?” The senior person who takes your brief and the junior person who runs the database query are, at many agencies, different people. Ask whether the person taking your brief will personally speak to the candidates. The handoff is where briefs go to die.
Four questions, ten minutes, and the answers are very hard to fake — because faking them requires committing to a way of working the agency’s economics won’t support.
What the other structure looks like
Flip each incentive and you get a different animal: senior judgement on every conversation instead of a keyword net, candidates spoken to at length instead of harvested from a database, a shortlist built on assessment instead of a race to your inbox. The output flips with it — three candidates who’ve each been properly assessed, with notes on why they fit and where they’ll stretch.
That’s not virtue. It’s just a different business model. Fifty CVs and three candidates aren’t two qualities of the same service; they’re two different products. It helps to know which one you’re buying before the stack arrives.
Amrita HazariFounder, Inside Cubicle
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