Text scanning gone MAD! This Q&A sums up almost everything that is wrong with recruitment. It’s by Jonathan Rivett, a career adviser who writes for the SMH. The use of algorithms and text scanning devices are shunting resumes from well qualified and experienced job applicants to the reject pile. SHOCKER.
Question. I found a job online that made me very excited. Just about everything about it made me think I’d enjoy it and would be a great fit. I’ve been searching for a new job for a while and always put in significant effort with my applications, but with this one I took extra care. I spent multiple hours over several days making sure everything about my submission was perfect.
I pressed send and hoped that I might hear back in a week. Maybe a fortnight. Literally 10 minutes later I received an email. It was a template rejection. At first, I thought I’d made some kind of mistake – I was reading the rejection letter for an application I’d made to another organisation. But, no … it was from the company I had just applied to.
I was crushed. But now my dejection has turned to … I guess you would call it angry curiosity. How can an organisation reject someone without even reading their application?
Answer. There are numerous things that might have led to an instant “thanks but no thanks” reply after you submitted your application. I’m going to assume a couple of the more obvious ones – that you didn’t have the right qualification or working rights, for example – don’t apply.
I’m also going to assume that the recruiter didn’t manage to peruse your application within a few minutes and reject you based on some obvious error or professional shortcoming.
What I think is much more likely is that you’ve been rejected by an automated system. People in charge of recruitment use them to turn what is often an impossible task – manually sorting and categorising hundreds of applications – into something more manageable. And these systems take all different forms.
Your angry curiosity seems completely justified to me.
If we suppose this is true, it’s tempting to say you’ve been rejected by a robot. And in some ways you have. I spoke with an HR professional (who preferred to remain anonymous) and they told me that one piece of software they were familiar with applied an AI-generated job match score for each candidate and sent it to a human hiring professional.
These scores, they told me, were hopelessly inaccurate, and it would be poor practice to use them, but many recruiters did.
Your application has gone straight to an automated system. That system, whether by default, or because of some kind of human intervention, has one or more parameters that turn its functions into the dullest of blunt instruments.
It could be as simple as failing to find a keyword in your application. Or it could be something more complex. Whatever it is, this criterion has turned the automated application reading system from what it’s supposed to be – a kind of HR triage nurse – into a cheap, poorly designed sieve clogged with dried food.
In summary, I think the company you applied to has made a big mistake. When you instantly reject a serious, qualified and enthusiastic applicant, something has gone seriously wrong somewhere along the line.
You got rejected mere moments after sending your application not by a robot, but by the short-sightedness (or plain ineptitude) of its operator.
I have no idea if you were the perfect person for this role, but I can say for certain that you deserved better than to be digitally waved away as if your excitement, effort and expertise counted for nothing.