Screened out. You tailored your CV to the job description, you made the best application you could, and still – screened out. Is this a familiar story to you?
For those of us with web analytics, LinkedIn profile-viewing figures, and a tendency to ask inconvenient questions, it’s possible to gain some quite illuminating (although seldom very elevating) insights into the recruitment and screening processes prevailing at many well-known companies.
And for whatever reason, I can’t help wondering if there’s something wrong with their whole approach.
Do recruiters sift through to find interesting applications or do they try to toss as many as possible out and see what remains? The way recruiters talk, would seem to indicate the latter.
What’s the difference, you might ask? (Glad you did.) It’s the difference between the baby and the bathwater: the recruitment process has become so fixated with throwing out the bathwater, it’s forgotten to look after the baby.
I collect examples of copywriting howlers (or if not howlers, then, at least, sloppy work, simple punctuation mistakes, things that fall outside reasonable matters of taste and judgement), things that have been published, and widely (often by companies “with a cast of thousands”). The results are not edifying.
Sometimes I have to wonder, if recruiters themselves are “screening out” – because from the look of things, many of them are just not paying attention.
How is it that candidates with highly sought-after transferrable skills get routinely ignored for jobs for which they are well qualified? Not “not offered the job” or “not interviewed by the hiring manager”, but “not even making it past the initial screening”.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the cat (who has nine lives, after all) seems to have done for Curiosity. Is this a reflection on companies’ recruiting processes? Or is it a reflection on recruiters?
Has recruitment come to this, that the old cliché ‘You’re not paid to think!’, has become a commonplace?
On one level, you can sort of understand it, on another it’s completely baffling.
Yes, it can make sense to semi-automate some processes, especially, say, if you’re overwhelmed with applicants and you need some method of sifting the most-qualified for more-detailed consideration.
But surely if a candidate has skills and abilities that are high-level and uncommon, and in short supply, the presumption should be, let’s see who else is interested before discounting them.
Maybe this reflects a deeper trend, one of failing to see, or be interested in, the extraordinary potential gains that come from treating individuals as human beings, rather than as mere replaceable (and disposable) widgets in a machine they’ve lost the drawings for.
That’s a challenge in the meantime for those who find their lives short-circuited or put on hold by the caprices of a flawed process. Not because of any misguided feelings of entitlement on their part, but because they just want an honest chance, and with the process as it stands, they don’t often get one.