Sophie opens LinkedIn Recruiter. It’s Monday morning. She’s looking for a Java developer for her IT department. Boolean search: “Java developer” + “Spring Boot” + “Amsterdam”. 487 profiles.
She scrolls. First candidate: “Senior Java Developer at TechFlow Solutions”. Sounds good. But what does TechFlow Solutions do? She doesn’t know the company. She opens a new tab. Google. “TechFlow Solutions Netherlands”. Click. Scan the website. Turns out to be a consultancy that outsources developers. Not relevant. Back to LinkedIn.
Second candidate: “Java Engineer at Syntrix”. What does Syntrix do? New Google tab. SaaS company, enterprise clients. That’s a better fit. Back to LinkedIn.
It’s 9:47 AM. She’s looked at 8 profiles. She has 479 to go.
Wednesday, Sophie is looking for a financial controller. Friday, an enterprise sales manager. For every vacancy, the same ritual. Hundreds of profiles. Dozens of unknown employers. Hours of googling.
This is Context Blindness. And it’s the biggest invisible problem in modern recruitment.
What is Context Blindness?
Context Blindness is the absence of employer context when evaluating candidates.
LinkedIn shows you a job title and a company name. “Account Manager at Innov8 Solutions BV”. That tells you nothing if you don’t know Innov8. And in a search of 600 profiles, you don’t know 90% of the companies.
Without context, you can’t assess whether work experience is relevant. A “Sales Manager” at a transactional SME is something completely different from a “Sales Manager” at a consultative enterprise SaaS scale-up. Both have the same title. Both 5 years of experience. But one fits your vacancy perfectly and the other doesn’t fit at all.
You don’t filter because you want to. You filter because you lack context.
Context Blindness isn’t in your system or process. It’s in the scale of the market. The Netherlands has over 1 million registered companies. Every week dozens of startups and scale-ups are added. Even the most experienced recruiter can’t know all relevant employers.
And so matching becomes guesswork.
Why this is only now becoming a problem
Context Blindness isn’t new. But it manifests itself more strongly now than ever.
In the past, you recruited within your own sector. An agency recruiter in IT knew 200-300 relevant employers in the tech sector after 5 years. A finance recruiter knew the major players in financial services. You built domain expertise and that expertise carried you through every search.
Now recruiters have become ultra-generalists. Especially corporate recruiters. Monday a Java developer. Wednesday a controller. Friday a sales manager. Next week a risk manager, an operations manager, and an HR business partner.
For every vacancy a different domain. For every domain hundreds of employers. You can’t be an expert for all of them.
And so for every search you know 10-20% of the employers. For the remaining 80-90% you’re guessing.
The labor market has also fundamentally changed. Twenty years ago you had corporate Netherlands and a handful of large employers per sector. Now you have ecosystems of startups, scale-ups, SMEs, and corporates. Each with their own culture, sales model, product, customer segment.
You can’t see that nuance in a job title. It’s in the employer.
How Context Blindness manifests: Four scenarios
Scenario 1: The corporate recruiter
Sophie is a corporate recruiter at a SaaS scale-up of 400 employees. She has 12 open vacancies, spread across 6 departments.
Her reality:
- She recruits for IT, finance, sales, operations, marketing, and legal
- Every hiring manager expects her to understand their field
- She knows maybe 5-10% of the employers per domain
Last week she searched for an Enterprise Account Manager. LinkedIn Recruiter gave 643 profiles. She knew maybe 40 companies. For the remaining 600 she had to figure out per employer: Is this B2B? Enterprise sales? SaaS or on-premise? Consultative or transactional?
Per profile that costs 2-5 minutes of googling. With 600 profiles that’s literally impossible.
So she switches to guessing. Job title + location + years of experience. The shortlist goes to the hiring manager. Who calls 8 candidates and says: “Of these 8, 2 are truly relevant. The rest work in a completely different type of sales.”
Sophie spent 4 hours on this search. Quality was 25%. The hiring manager is frustrated.
Scenario 2: The junior agency recruiter
Mark has been working as a recruiter at a sales recruitment agency for 8 months. He specializes in B2B sales. His senior colleague Anna has been there for 7 years.
The difference:
- Anna knows 250-300 relevant employers in their niche
- Mark knows maybe 40
- For the remaining companies he lacks the context
He calls a candidate: “Account Manager at CloudBase, 3 years of experience, quota achieved.” Sounds strong. He presents the candidate to the client.
Anna looks at the profile and says: “CloudBase is inside sales with short cycles and small deal sizes. Our client is looking for enterprise field sales with long cycles. This doesn’t fit.”
Mark understands the difference on paper. But he didn’t know CloudBase does inside sales. He didn’t know the company.
Anna’s knowledge sits in her head. After 7 years she’s built an internal frame of reference. Mark has to build that himself. That takes years.
Scenario 3: The interim recruiter
Lisa is an interim recruiter. She works on assignments of 3-6 months at different organizations. Every new assignment is a new market.
Previous assignment: Tech scale-up, recruiting software developers. She knew the tech market well.
Current assignment: Insurance company, recruiting risk managers and compliance officers. Completely new sector.
Weeks 1-2 go to market orientation. Which companies are relevant? What type of experience counts? What does “Risk Manager at [company X]” mean in this context?
She googles. She asks the hiring manager. She reads industry reports. By week 3 she’s built up some context. But the expectation was: deliver from day 1.
With every new assignment the clock resets. Lisa can’t bring 10 years of experience to every new sector. The context is missing.
Scenario 4: The independent recruiter
Jeroen works as an independent recruiter. He has 3 regular clients in the logistics sector. He knows that market inside out.
New client calls: “We’re looking for a Growth Marketing Manager for our SaaS product.” Jeroen says yes. He needs the revenue.
LinkedIn search: 521 profiles. He knows maybe 30 companies from general name recognition. For the remaining 490 he lacks the context: Is this product marketing or growth marketing? B2B SaaS or B2C? Enterprise or SMB?
He has nobody to ask. He works alone. So he guesses. The shortlist is mediocre. The client ultimately goes with another agency that specializes in marketing recruitment.
Jeroen could have won the assignment with the right context.
The cost of Context Blindness
Context Blindness is invisible. Nobody measures it. But the impact is enormous.
1. Time: 3-5 hours per search on guessing and googling
A typical search:
- 500-800 profiles in LinkedIn Recruiter
- You know 10-20% of the employers
- For the remaining 80-90% you need to build context
Per unknown company:
- Google, scan website, LinkedIn company page, understand sector/product
- 2-5 minutes per company
With 100 unknown companies that’s 200-500 minutes. That’s 3-8 hours of pure research.
Time you can’t spend on:
- Approaching candidates
- Having conversations
- Building relationships with hiring managers
2. Quality: 40-60% of your shortlist turns out not relevant
Without employer context you filter on:
- Job title (superficial)
- Location (relevant)
- Years of experience (can be misleading)
What you miss:
- Organization type (startup, scale-up, corporate, SME)
- Product/market fit (B2B/B2C, enterprise/SMB)
- Sales model (consultative, transactional, field, inside)
- Complexity (deal size, sales cycle, multi-stakeholder)
Two candidates can have the same title but have worked in completely different contexts. One fits perfectly. The other doesn’t fit at all.
Result: You present 10 candidates. The hiring manager sees 4 relevant ones. The other 6 are “looked good on paper but doesn’t actually fit.”
Your hit rate is 40%. That means 60% of your work was wasted effort.
3. Missed candidates: The best match you didn’t recognize
Context Blindness works both ways.
You filter out candidates who ARE relevant because you don’t recognize their employer. A developer at an unknown fintech startup with cutting-edge tech gets overlooked because you don’t know the employer.
And you keep candidates who are NOT relevant because the job title sounds good. A “Senior Sales Manager” at a consultancy that outsources to projects has zero experience building their own sales pipeline. But the title checks out.
You miss gold. You keep gravel.
4. Hiring manager frustration
Hiring managers notice the difference between shortlists with context and shortlists without context.
Shortlist with context:
- 8 candidates, 7 are worth interviewing
- Hiring manager: “These are exactly the profiles I was looking for”
Shortlist without context:
- 10 candidates, 3 are worth interviewing
- Hiring manager: “Did you even understand the vacancy?”
If this happens too often:
- Hiring manager loses trust in the recruiter
- They start sourcing themselves
- Or they bring in an external agency
Context Blindness undermines your credibility as a recruitment professional.
The difference between segments: Not everyone is equally context-blind
Context Blindness doesn’t affect everyone equally.
Corporate recruiters: The most context-blind group
A corporate recruiter recruits for 8-15 different roles simultaneously. Every role is a different domain. It’s literally impossible to know the market for every domain.
Their context gap is 90-95%.
They depend on the hiring manager for domain knowledge. “Do you know company X? Is that comparable to us?” If the hiring manager doesn’t know either, it ends in guessing.
Agency recruiters: The junior-senior gap
Senior recruiters (5+ years in the same niche):
- Know 200-400 employers in their sector
- Context gap: 30-50%
- Can quickly recognize patterns
Junior recruiters (0-2 years):
- Know 20-50 employers
- Context gap: 80-90%
- Have to constantly ask seniors
The difference between junior and senior largely sits in employer context. Not in LinkedIn skills or Boolean search techniques. In market knowledge.
That knowledge can’t be transferred in 3 months of training. It’s experience-based knowledge.
Independent/interim recruiters: Context varies per assignment
In their own niche:
- Context gap: 30-40%
- They know the market well after years
On new assignments (especially interim):
- Context gap: 85-95%
- Starting from zero, no colleagues to ask
The problem with freelance/interim recruiters is inconsistency. One assignment goes smoothly because they know the market. The next is a struggle because everything is new.
Recruitment agencies: Indirect victims
Recruitment agencies experience Context Blindness through the output of their team.
Their problem:
- Senior delivers perfect shortlists (has the context)
- Junior delivers inconsistent quality (lacks the context)
- Clients notice the difference
- Training has limited effect — you can’t teach market knowledge
The agency sees it in the numbers: conversion from shortlist to intake, from intake to placement. For juniors that conversion is 40-60% lower than for seniors.
How do you solve Context Blindness?
Solving Context Blindness requires a fundamental shift: from individual market knowledge to structured employer context.
Old approach: Market knowledge sits in heads
Traditionally, recruiters built market knowledge through experience:
- Working in the same sector for years
- Remembering companies
- Recognizing patterns
Problems with this approach:
- It takes years — juniors don’t have that time
- It doesn’t scale — every new recruiter has to start over
- It’s limited — even seniors only know a fraction of the market
- It disappears — when a recruiter leaves, the knowledge leaves with them
New approach: Employer-context analysis
The solution is to automatically build and apply employer context for every candidate.
How it works:
- You run a LinkedIn search (500 profiles)
- Each profile is enriched: the last 8 employers are analyzed across 18 dimensions
- Per employer you get context: sector, organization type, customer segment, sales model, deal complexity, growth stage, etc.
- This context is matched against your selection criteria
- Result: you see not just a job title, but the complete employer context
What you get:
- “Account Manager at TechFlow Solutions” becomes “Inside sales, B2B SMB, transactional, short cycles, EUR 5-20K deals”
- “Sales Manager at Syntrix” becomes “Enterprise SaaS, multi-stakeholder selling, 9-18 month cycles, EUR 100K+ deals”
Now you can see in 8 seconds what would otherwise take 5 minutes to google.
From guessing to knowing.
The effect: 70-80% less screening work
With employer context something fundamental happens:
- You no longer need to evaluate 800 profiles
- You immediately see which 80-100 candidates are relevant
- From 3 hours of screening to 45 minutes
Example: Sophie is looking for an enterprise sales manager. LinkedIn gives 643 profiles. With employer-context analysis she immediately sees:
- 89 candidates with enterprise B2B experience
- 34 with consultative sales and long cycles
- 12 with SaaS + enterprise + multi-stakeholder experience
Those 12 are her shortlist. She doesn’t even need to open the other 631 profiles.
Time saved: 2 hours and 45 minutes.
Quality: 10 of the 12 are relevant. Hit rate 83%.
Context Blindness is solvable
Context Blindness is the biggest invisible problem in modern recruitment. It costs recruiters hours per week. It reduces the quality of shortlists. It undermines credibility with hiring managers.
But it’s not inevitable.
The shift that’s needed:
- From individual market knowledge to structured employer context
- From building experience over years to direct access to employer context
- From guessing to knowing
Corporate recruiters can become specialists for every vacancy. Junior recruiters can deliver at senior level. Interim recruiters can produce from day 1 in a new sector. Recruitment agencies get consistent quality across their entire team.
Employer context is the missing layer. The context LinkedIn doesn’t show. The information that makes the difference between a good and a bad match.
And that context exists. You just need to make it visible.
See how many employers you truly know in your next search. Try SourceLens free for 14 days at sourcelens.ai.
About the author: Arthur Balabrega has 20 years of experience in recruitment and has run thousands of searches. He built SourceLens because he saw recruiters wasting hours googling company names — time they could better spend actually recruiting talent.