Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions

Episode 32 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo dives into the science behind pre-employment assessments. Lucas and Luna examine a 2025 meta-analysis of 250 studies showing that well-designed work sample tests predict job performance three times better than unstructured interviews. They break down why typical hiring tests fail—like personality inventories that explain less than 5% of variance—and what...

When a top employee resigns, many managers rush to offer a counteroffer — more money, a better title, flexibility. But research shows that nearly 80 percent of employees who accept a counteroffer leave within 12 months anyway. In this episode, Lucas and Luna break down why counteroffers fail, using data from a 2025 study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity and a real example from a mid-siz...

Episode 30 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna dig into the hidden bias in AI-powered resume screening tools. Lucas breaks down a 2025 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that found algorithmic screening can penalize candidates from non-traditional backgrounds — even when the AI is explicitly trained to be 'blind' to gender and race. They discuss the case of a mid-sized...

Episode 29 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo explores why more employers are dropping degree requirements and shifting to skills-based assessments. Lucas and Luna examine the data behind this trend—including a 2024 Harvard Business School study showing that skills-based hires are 40% more likely to stay past two years—and discuss real-world examples from companies like IBM and Google. They break dow...

Employee referral programs are often hailed as the gold standard for hiring—faster, cheaper, higher retention. But new data from a 2025 study of 1,200 tech hires shows that referred candidates actually underperform in their first year compared to sourced candidates, especially in engineering roles. Lucas and Luna break down why the referral halo is misleading, how it creates a diversity bottleneck...

Lucas and Luna dig into a 2024 study from the Society for Human Resource Management that found the average job description contains more than 80 requirements — but the most effective ones have fewer than 10. They break down why the laundry-list approach backfires, citing data from a 2025 Greenhouse Hiring Benchmark Report showing that reducing requirements from 15 to 6 increased applicant volume b...

Lucas and Luna dive into the hidden costs of hiring for remote roles — specifically the overlooked expenses tied to asynchronous onboarding, home office stipends, and cross-time-zone management. Citing a mid-2025 study from Gartner showing that companies spend an average of $3,200 per remote hire on unplanned logistical and coordination costs, they break down why most employers fail to account for...

Episode 25 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo unpacks the overlooked downside of hiring for culture fit. Lucas and Luna examine a 2025 study of 500 tech companies that found teams hired for culture fit were 18% less innovative over three years. They discuss how culture fit can morph into clone hiring, suppress cognitive diversity, and mask a lack of skills. The hosts explore alternative frameworks li...

Episode 24 of Hiring & Firing tackles a counterintuitive strategy: rehiring former employees who were let go for performance issues. Lucas and Luna examine a 2026 study from the Society for Human Resource Management showing that boomerang hires who were previously fired outperform new external hires by 17% in retention and 12% in productivity over two years. They drill into the case of a mid-size...

Lucas and Luna examine how companies like Siemens, IBM, and Salesforce are shifting from traditional college-degree requirements to apprenticeship programs for technical roles like software engineering and data analytics. With labor market data from the Department of Labor and a case study of Zurich Insurance’s multichannel apprenticeship initiative, they break down the financial and cultural logi...

In this episode of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dive into a hiring trend that's quietly blowing up budgets and offer letters: relocation packages. As of May 2026, more companies are forcing return-to-office mandates, but their relocation offers haven't kept up with the realities of dual-income households, mortgage rates above 6%, and the emotional cost of uprooting a family. Lucas...

In this episode of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna tackle a costly hiring blind spot: candidate ghosting. Drawing on a 2025 survey by the talent platform Greenhouse, they reveal that 76% of job seekers say being ghosted after an interview makes them less likely to buy from that company again. Lucas breaks down how a single ignored follow-up email can erode years of brand building, cit...

In this episode of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how salary history bans are fundamentally changing the dynamics of compensation negotiation. They unpack a real case from a mid-sized tech firm in Austin that saw its offer acceptance rate jump from 68% to 89% after banning salary history questions. The hosts discuss the unintended consequences — like how the policy can compre...

Episode 19 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo explores the overlooked power of boomerang employees — former staff who return to a company. Lucas presents compelling data from a 2025 LinkedIn study showing that boomerangs reach full productivity 40% faster than external hires and have a 30% higher two-year retention rate. He digs into why companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Starbucks have formal...

In this episode of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore the emerging trend of 'quiet hiring' — where companies fill skill gaps by redeploying existing employees rather than posting new roles. They discuss how Microsoft and Adobe have used internal talent marketplaces to move people into high-need areas, the data behind retention rates of internally hired employees versus external h...

In episode 17 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna dig into one of the most persistent friction points in talent acquisition: the broken handoff between recruiters and hiring managers. They unpack a case study from a mid-size tech company that saw its time-to-hire balloon to 120 days because the recruiter and the hiring manager had never aligned on what 'qualified' actually meant. Lucas...

Lucas and Luna dig into the multi-million dollar personality testing industry used by 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies. They examine a 2024 meta-analysis from the University of Minnesota that found personality tests predict only 6 percent of on-the-job performance variance. They discuss the Barnum Effect, the rise of faking, and why a startup called BrightHire abandoned personality screens enti...

Episode 15 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo explores how salary transparency laws across U.S. states and Europe are changing recruitment. Lucas and Luna dig into the data from Colorado, New York, and the EU Pay Transparency Directive. They discuss why many companies still post wide ranges like $80,000 to $180,000, how this affects equity for women and minorities, and what happens when enforcement r...

Episode 14 of Hiring & Firing with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna dissect a 2024 forensic analysis by the corporate-training firm Braintrust that tracked 68 failed executive hires across 40 companies. The average cost per failed VP-level hire: $1.4 million in direct costs — severance, recruiter fees, productivity losses. But the real shocker is that 70 percent of those failures could have been caught bef...

When the job market slows, most companies freeze hiring. Lucas and Luna explore a counterintuitive pattern: recessions and hiring slowdowns often produce better hires because the self-correction mechanism of the market works faster. They look at data from the 2008 and 2020 downturns, plus a 2024 case study from a mid-sized tech firm that hired aggressively during a sector slowdown and saw a 40% hi...

Lucas and Luna explore the growing competitive edge that bilingual and multilingual candidates hold in the modern labor market. Drawing on a 2025 LinkedIn analysis showing 38% faster hiring for multilingual job seekers, they examine why language skills translate to higher offer rates, faster promotions, and 12% higher starting salaries in roles like account management, customer support, and engine...

By late May 2026, a growing number of companies are demanding employees return to the office five days a week — and the data is showing it may be hurting more than helping. Lucas and Luna dig into a specific case: a mid-size tech firm in Austin that issued a full return mandate in January and has since lost 18% of its engineering staff, many to fully remote competitors. They examine the attrition...

Lucas walks through the case of a 50-person SaaS startup that made one bad senior hire and lost $2 million in six months — not just in salary, but in destroyed team velocity, missed product deadlines, and two subsequent departures. Luna pushes back on whether the CEO should have caught the red flags during the interview process. Lucas explains why traditional interviewing is terrible at predicting...

Most companies treat onboarding as a single day of HR paperwork and a tour of the break room. Lucas and Luna unpack why the first 90 days are actually a high-stakes performance ramp, using data from a 2025 Gallup study that found only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a good job of onboarding. They walk through a real case: how the professional-services firm BDO doubled new-h...

Most companies treat hiring like an external scavenger hunt, ignoring one of their best talent pools: their own employees. This episode zeroes in on internal mobility — specifically, why companies like Costco and Procter & Gamble promote from within at rates above 80 percent, while the average Fortune 500 company fills fewer than a third of roles internally. Lucas walks through the data on retenti...