The best hiring happens when both sides are honest about what they need. When decisions are made in the dark, recruitment becomes a game of fill-in-the-blanks.

To avoid that guesswork, improve retention, and lower recruitment costs, every hiring process needs to define and test what good looks like.

Here’s what Trust in SODA recommends.

Redefine Cultural Fit

An over-reliance on hiring candidates for culture fit results in one of the biggest visibility gaps in hiring. What’s hailed as value-alignment often becomes synonymous with uniformity, where familiarity replaces curiosity and the talent pool narrows.

The focus must change from fit to contribution. It’s surprising to see how many companies lock themselves out of a superb hire because of a rigid cultural scoring criterion that rewards similarity.

Start by defining what the team is missing. This includes hard skills, perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds, and build your process around these gaps.

Look for what someone adds to the picture, not how neatly they match it.

Cultural fit is indispensable when it translates to shared values, but too often it’s applied as a filter for comfort.

Know Your Market

Pay isn’t static, and neither is talent. The more oversight into the shape of the current market you have, the easier it will be to build (and negotiate) attractive remuneration packages. Local salary rates, competitor packages, and migration trends shift constantly, especially in tech.

The rise of AI has pushed premiums higher, with candidates commanding up to a 5% salary lift and around a 20% equity uplift for specialist skills.

Market insight closes the gap between intention and reality.

Knowing the market means knowing what you’re competing with, and where. What feels competitive in Dublin likely won’t land in Berlin or Boston. Candidates weigh total value (flexibility, purpose, progression, and the chance to work with modern tools), not salary alone.

Specialist recruiters should have the tools and know-how to develop bespoke market guides for you, and they should include where and why talent is moving, how much they’re being paid, who’s hiring, and how your offer compares.

Close the Communication Gaps

Most hiring processes lose momentum in silence. Candidates chase updates, interviews drift, and feedback arrives too late to matter. The gaps leave people guessing, and the best ones move on.

Communication is one of the simplest ways to stand out. Be transparent about timelines, next steps, and decision ownership. Even a short check-in builds trust and keeps candidates engaged when the process takes time.

Measure the Right Metrics

You can’t close hiring gaps if you’re only tracking volume.  When you change the focus from activity to outcomes, you get a clearer picture of retention, performance, and perhaps most importantly, progression. Fast hires don’t matter if your retention rate is through the floor, particularly when a bad hire can cost around three times the annual wage of the candidate.

At Trust in SODA, we track ratios like CVs to interviews, interviews to placements, and the candidate satisfaction score to identify which parts of the process yield the strongest results.

Combine this with qualitative feedback from both sides of the table, and you can make your data work harder for you.

See the Wider Picture

Every hiring decision sits inside a much wider operational picture. From people and process to potential, the gaps appear when these pieces aren’t connected.

Better hiring begins when these gaps are closed, giving the clarity and confidence to make more informed choices.

The right talent partner helps you see the whole picture. They bring data that clarifies, networks that broaden perspective, and processes that make decisions fairer and faster. That’s what a good partnership looks like.

If you’re rethinking how you hire, we’re here to talk. oliver@trustinsoda.com.