Every developer knows the feeling: you’ve finally shipped a flawless build.
The automation fires perfectly in staging, the test coverage is airtight, and every workflow behaves exactly as designed. Then — within a day of going live — a recruiter manages to break it.
Not because the system failed, but because people don’t work in straight lines.
Recruiters are multitasking champions. They’ll start logging a call, jump to check a compliance artefact, reply to a WhatsApp message, then circle back three tabs later halfway through the original task. What looks like chaos from a technical standpoint is actually just how high-velocity recruitment operates. Systems that assume perfect sequences or tidy workflows simply don’t stand a chance.
That’s why recruitment technology can’t just be technically flawless — it has to be human-tolerant. At JSBC Labs, we’ve learned to design for detours. A recruiter might skip a step, override a warning, or enter data in a way that “just makes sense at the time.” And that’s okay. Our job isn’t to discipline the user; it’s to understand their rhythm and code around it.
We often say internally that you can’t unit-test emotions. Recruiters work under immense pressure — chasing compliance documents, meeting client expectations, juggling multiple placements. When a button is clicked too early or a field is overridden, it’s not poor user behaviour — it’s urgency, empathy, and survival. So instead of error messages that bark back, we build systems that recover gracefully and guide the user back on track.
Some of our best innovations come from these moments of friction.
When a recruiter says, “I clicked that because it made sense at the time,” that’s not a complaint — that’s insight. It tells us where logic and human instinct diverge. And that intersection is where we do our best work. The real debugging happens not in the code editor, but in the conversation between developers and recruiters, translating human shortcuts into system logic.
Ultimately, building recruitment technology isn’t about creating perfect systems.
It’s about creating forgiving ones — systems that bend with people instead of breaking against them.
Because perfection in code is easy.
Understanding people? That’s the real craft.
