About The Recruiting Lattice
Every week, a new tool promises to fix recruiting. Most of them are gone within two years. The problems they claimed to solve remain, because they're structural. How organizations make decisions under uncertainty. How interviewers construct narratives from incomplete data. How feedback loops in hiring pipelines fail silently.
These problems have been studied for decades in fields that have nothing to do with talent acquisition. Behavioral economics, decision science, systems thinking, evolutionary biology, narrative theory. The research is there. Almost none of it has been translated into language that recruiters, TA leaders and hiring managers can use on Monday morning.
The Recruiting Lattice does that translation. I read the books (Kahneman, Sapolsky, Taleb, Tetlock, Cialdini, and a growing list) and extract the mechanisms that actually operate in hiring. Each article takes one of those mechanisms or lenses and traces how it plays out in a specific talent acquisition situation.
A few of these articles will make you uncomfortable about a practice you've been defending for years. Others map an entire hiring process through a lens you've never applied to it. Some just hand you a single question that rewires an intake meeting. You'll diagnose stuck searches faster, run sharper debriefs, and stop building processes that produce the problems you're trying to solve.
What you'll get
A new article lands in your inbox every Tuesday. Each one stands alone, but they connect. A model from one article may surface in a later piece, applied to a different problem. Over time, the articles build into a lattice of thinking tools that compound.
The source material comes from full reads of serious books ("Thinking, Fast and Slow", "Behave", "Antifragile", "Influence", "Superforecasting", and more), not summaries of summaries. Every claim traces back to the original research. When the evidence is thin, the article says so.
Who this is for
Senior in-house recruiters, TA partners, talent sourcers, heads of TA, and hiring managers who are good at their jobs and want to get structurally better.
You've probably noticed that the same problems keep recurring across different roles, teams, and companies. Different hiring managers, different markets, same patterns. The Recruiting Lattice is built on the bet that those patterns have explanations, and that the explanations live in fields most TA professionals never encounter.
You don't need academic background in any source discipline. Each article explains the mechanism from scratch, then builds the application step by step.
Who writes this
Joonatan Hongell. I recruit senior and executive-level leaders globally for Metso, an industrial technology company with 18,000 people in 51 countries. Before that, over a decade in agency and in-house TA across the IT and tech industry. Based in Helsinki.
The Recruiting Lattice is a personal project, not a Metso publication. The ideas come from reading widely and applying what sticks to the structural challenges of talent acquisition.
Where to start
IRead an article or subscribe and start with whatever arrives next. The ideas were useful before applicant tracking systems and AI existed. They'll be useful after whatever replaces them.