Bounced

While we're on the topic of job searches, I was scrolling through LinkedIn today, and came across a post from someone who said that they were "85% to 90% qualified for." They'd tailored their résumé for the position, and "had a decent feeling that [they] would be called back for an interview."

They weren't. Instead "Not even 24 hours later, [they] received an email that basically said that [their] qualifications were impressive, but [the company] decided to go with a different candidate." The poster claimed to be "baffled" by this, and concluded: "The ATS screening likely didn’t see direct industry language and automatically rejected me, even though I do the job they described, just in a different industry."

Or, someone (or more likely, multiple someones) who was (were) 90%+ qualified and had same industry experience applied, and interview queue was filled before anyone got to their résumé. While I'm not a betting man, if I had to put money on it, one way or the other, I suspect I know which one I would go for. Because the unemployment rate in the industries that are most represented on LinkedIn is fairly high. It's not rocket science; if companies can receive 200+ résumés in 24 hours for an open position, their chances of finding someone who's more or less a 100% match is fairly good, unless they've been thoughtless about their qualifications or job descriptions. (Companies looking for 5+ years of experience on technologies that are not yet 5 years old still abound.)

Applicant Tracking Systems, especially those that have generative automation baked into them, are common bogeymen in today's employment market. It's easy to point to examples of people receiving rejection letters on very short turnaround and complain that no actual human beings ever look at most résumés. But in an environment where a company can be flooded with applications in short order, of course most résumés will never be reviewed by a human being... no-one's in the business of hiring armies of people just to read résumés.