A programme manager in Bengaluru was out of work for eleven months after her father’s illness. She had run three large IT programmes, handled vendors in two countries, and held the certifications the role still listed. Her application never reached a recruiter. The screen wanted continuous employment. A gap of six months was enough.
This is what “unhireable” often means now. Not that the person cannot do the job—that a filter has already decided not to show them.
Hiring teams did not design this on purpose. Volume forced their hand. A mid-level technology role can draw several hundred applications.
Ashby’s review of its own platform this year put the figure at more than 300 applications per hire—about three times the 2021 level. Nobody reads all of them. Ladders’s eye-tracking work on recruiters found that the first look at a resume lasts roughly seven seconds.
Software was brought in to sort the pile. It often sorts out the person.
The line that three-quarters of resumes are thrown out by an applicant tracking system before a human sees them is shakier than it sounds. It comes from old marketing copy, not a published study.
The better evidence is narrower, and more awkward for employers.
Harvard Business School and Accenture’s Hidden Workers research found that millions of people who can work and want to work are screened out before anyone reads the file. In that study, 88 per cent of employers said they were losing qualified candidates because the application did not mirror the job description.
“Client relations” on the posting and “account management” on the resume can be the same ten years of work. The software does not know that.
Some of the damage is a setting a person switched on.
Among companies that configure their filters, a gap of six months or more is one of the most common reasons an application is dropped. Career returnees fail that test before skill is discussed: caregivers, people who nursed a parent, professionals who left in a restructuring.
In India, the complaint in the boardroom is still that talent cannot be found. Outside it, returnees with current skills are being told to start over. Over-qualification is a second trap. Graduates and engineers apply for attendant posts because better-matched roles never call back.
A Supreme Court ruling this year then held that a higher qualification cannot be used to claim a job written for a lower one. The market asks people to take whatever is open, then marks them down for having done it.
Job titles do similar work. A delivery lead who spent five years inside a product team may never appear in a search for 'scrum master'. A specialist who kept a bank’s core system running is invisible to a posting that lists only cloud tools. None of this says whether the person can do Monday morning’s work.
The bill shows up on both sides. Roles stay open while the shortlist looks thin, and the hiring manager concludes the market is empty. The candidate concludes they have become unhireable and stops applying to jobs they could fill. Both are reading the filter.
The correction is dull, which is why it gets skipped.
Write the must-have skills as skills, not as a biography the software can't recognise. Once a quarter, look at gap rules and title rules and count how many rejections they cause. Have someone read a sample of the rejected pile, not only the names at the top.
Candidates, for their part, have to translate the work into the language of the posting, and keep a short note on any gap that a person can read.
Capable people are not getting rarer. The doorway is narrower than the job. Until those filters are checked against who they keep out, firms will keep saying they cannot find people who have been in the queue the whole time.
The author is the Founder & CEO, TalentiFi-X.
