When a position sits empty for months on end, can it be that there are truly no qualified candidates out there? Or are other factors at play keeping skilled applicants from landing the open jobs in their fields?
Those are the questions that brought one manager to the subreddit r/RecruitingHell, where users are invited to post about their worst experiences on either side of the hiring process. The manager who had waited months for a role on their team to be filled, with the human resources department telling them that “the pipeline was thin” and no applicants were passing their screening.
“Last month I made a new email, changed my name, tweaked the dates, and applied to my own req with essentially my own CV,” they explained. But even with “the CV of the person who wrote the job description,” the poster said they were “auto-rejected in six minutes.”
Why would such a clearly capable candidate be rejected? According to the user, it came down to a stylistic choice. The role required experience with the software React.js, which many refer to simply as “React”—but the screening process was filtering out any applicant whose résumé didn’t include “React.js” verbatim.
“We have been rejecting every qualified applicant since April over punctuation, while I sat in weekly meetings being told the market was tough,” the poster wrote. “If you’ve been getting instant rejections from places you’re clearly qualified for, it is very possibly not you.”
A talent shortage or a hiring problem?
The original post is no longer live (the author’s Reddit account is apparently suspended), but it’s making the rounds on other social platforms. On X, a screenshot of the post has amassed 5.6 million views.
Many commenters said the situation exemplifies what’s wrong with the job market today. One user argued, “America doesn’t have a talent shortage. It has a hiring problem.”
“If Steve Jobs came back to life he wouldn’t pass Apple’s hiring process without the entire board of directors and the CEO personally overruling,” another commenter wrote. “It’s like this everywhere.”
A third said that their company asks HR for a rundown on why every applicant is rejected. “It leads to infuriating conversations when we realize how disconnected they are from daily activities,” they wrote.
The state of job screening
One commenter said that the example proves “why automatic systems for recruitment are stupid.” But how common are applicant tracking systems (ATS) in modern job markets, and how do they choose which candidates to reject?
According to data compiled by CoverSentry, the vast majority of employers use ATS for hiring, with 97.8% of Fortune 500 companies and 90% of companies with more than 1,000 employees using ATS.
These systems are notorious for their lack of nuance: 66% of ATS can’t understand synonyms, meaning extremely similar qualifications may get written off as irrelevant simply because of their word choice. On the flip side, candidates are 10.6 times more likely to score an interview if a title on their résumé exactly matches the job title they’re applying for.
A résumé’s format can also trigger an ATS rejection, with formatting issues causing 12% of ATS rejections. Parsing issues, in which an ATS can’t read a résumé due to problems like embedded fonts or tables, account for another 23% of rejections.
However, auto-rejection isn’t as common as job seekers may believe. Most ATS don’t outright reject candidates, instead ranking them for human review, with only 8% of ATS rejecting résumés based on content. But with hundreds of applicants for any given job, and human recruiters starting their review at the top of an ATS-sorted list, being ranked at the bottom of the pool may still be functionally the same as getting rejected by a robot.
