After a rough 2025 for many of our members, we have seen a nice bounce in placement activity in 2026. The latest recruitment trends indicate some of the areas where we’ve seen increased activity year-over-year: Read the rest of this entry »
2026 Recruitment Trends: Where Hiring Is Bouncing Back
by Veronica BlattThe Rise of Fake Candidates: How Recruiters Can Protect Themselves (and Their Clients)
by Liz Carey
The hiring market has always had its share of embellished resumes and exaggerated accomplishments. But today’s recruiting landscape is facing something entirely different: sophisticated fake candidates.
Artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to create convincing resumes, fabricate employment histories, generate polished interview answers, and even alter voices and video during virtual interviews. Organized fraud rings are also targeting remote jobs, using stolen identities or proxy interviewers to land positions they have no intention—or ability—to perform. Read the rest of this entry »
Candidate engagement strategies that keep candidates responsive in 2026
by Veronica Blatt
Today’s guest blogger is Stormie Haller. She is the Director of Marketing at Tracker, an AI-native CRM and ATS platform serving recruitment agencies worldwide. With over a decade of experience helping staffing agencies and tech companies shape their marketing strategy, she has become a trusted voice on brand, growth, and the human side of technology adoption. In the post below, Stormie shares insights on candidate engagement strategies to employ in 2026. Tracker is an Endorsed Enterprise Partner of NPAworldwide.
Higher application volume sounds like a good problem to have. It isn’t, not when most of the volume is noise. Candidate engagement has become the difference between a filled role and a stalled pipeline.
This article covers a practical model for the five moments candidates disengage and the strategies that prevent it. Read the rest of this entry »
Culture Renovation
by Veronica Blatt
Today’s guest blogger is Bill Benson with WilliamCharles Search Group located in Grand Rapids, MI and Pittsburgh, PA. WilliamCharles is an executive search and professional recruiting firm specialized in finding managerial and executive talent in finance, HR, operations, sales/marketing as well as president/CEO roles. They have a concentration of clients in Michigan, but they also work across the US. Bill is a former chair of the NPAworldwide board of directors. Bill shares his thoughts on culture renovation below.
For many family-owned and middle-market companies, culture is one of the biggest reasons for their success. It reflects the values of the founders, the relationships built over years or even decades, a commitment to customers, and a genuine sense of pride in the business. In fact, when we talk with owners and executives, they often describe their culture as one of their most valuable assets. Read the rest of this entry »
AI-Generated Images Are Quietly Killing Recruiter Credibility
by Liz Carey
AI-generated images on recruiter social media posts are increasingly turning off candidates and clients, who read them as a signal of low effort and low credibility. Independent recruiters, whose business runs on trust and human connection, are especially vulnerable to this perception. Authentic, real imagery consistently outperforms AI-generated visuals in building the kind of trust that leads to placements.
Scroll through LinkedIn for five minutes and you’ll spot them. Impossibly polished office scenes. Stock-perfect professionals with suspiciously smooth hands. Motivational graphics layered over AI-generated imagery that looks like it was assembled in thirty seconds …because it probably was.
Audiences have developed sharp pattern recognition for this kind of content. And their reaction? They keep scrolling.
For independent recruiters, that scroll-past isn’t just an engagement problem. It’s a credibility problem. Your social media presence is often the first impression a candidate or client has of you. When that impression reads as “couldn’t be bothered,” you’ve already lost ground before the conversation begins. Read the rest of this entry »
Protect Yourself from Job Scams
by Veronica Blatt
I’ve written recently about a new job scam where someone is impersonating a member of our team and approaching job seekers about phony opportunities. Since then, I have seen an explosion of posts on LinkedIn from recruiters or people who are adjacent to the recruitment industry, who are also being impersonated. AI is making it easier than ever for bad actors to run scams at scale, so today I am sharing some tips about how job scams work, how to recognize them, and how you can protect yourself. As scammers and scams become more sophisticated, both job seekers and employers are increasingly at risk. Read the rest of this entry »
Split Placements: Why Trust and Relationships Matter in Recruitment
by Veronica Blatt
The Resilient Recruiter Podcast with Mark Whitby recently featured an interview with several NPAworldwide members sharing their thoughts and experiences about split placements, our network, and more. The entire episode is available here, but I want to share a few highlights from the interview. Read the rest of this entry »
Are You Looking for Experience—or Looking for Talent?
by Liz Carey
Every recruiter has a placement that didn’t make sense on paper.
The candidate’s résumé wasn’t packed with the “right” titles. They came from a different industry. Their career path zigged when everyone else’s zagged. If you had relied on a keyword search alone, they probably never would have made it into the interview process.
And yet, they’re the person who went on to become one of the strongest hires.
It’s a good reminder that résumés tell us where someone has been. Conversations reveal where they can go.
That’s where great recruiting makes all the difference. Read the rest of this entry »
Choosing the Right Split Placement Network
by Veronica Blatt
You have great clients but no candidates to match them. Or you have stellar candidates and no open roles. Sound familiar? This is the daily bottleneck for solopreneurs and boutique agency owners. A split placement network solves it by connecting you with trusted partners to share fees and close more deals. But how do you separate a network that drives revenue from one that drains your time? Let’s break it down. Read the rest of this entry »
Hiring Demand Remains Positive—But Cooling Slightly
by Veronica Blatt
The latest ManpowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey offers a timely snapshot of both where hiring demand is strengthening and where caution is emerging. For independent recruitment firm owners, the message is clear: opportunity remains strong, but success will depend on focus, adaptability, and positioning. Read the rest of this entry »