Somewhere along the way, my resume started bouncing. No rejection, no reply — just silence. I'd apply somewhere I was overqualified for, on paper, and hear nothing back. And when I did hear back, I got checked on basic questions that didn't make sense. It happened enough times that I stopped calling it a fluke.
I didn't understand it at first, and if I'm honest, I still don't fully agree with how it works even now that I understand it.
Here's what's actually happening, as far as I can tell: a recruiter, or sometimes the hiring manager directly, gets a pile of applications for one role. Instead of reading them, they drop the whole batch into an AI along with the job description and ask it to rank the candidates. Then they talk to whoever comes out on top. Three people, maybe. Rarely more.
I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to do. If I were on the other side of that stack, buried under forty applications for one opening, I'd probably want the same shortcut. It's a real optimization for a real problem. Nobody has time to read forty CVs closely, and pretending they do just means all forty get skimmed badly instead of read well.
What I have a harder time accepting is what it does to me from this side of the process. I'm not getting worse candidates beating me to those three slots. I'm getting invisible to whatever's doing the ranking, filtered out before a human ever weighs in, for reasons I can't see and can't argue with, because there's no one on the other end of that decision yet.
That's the part that doesn't sit right. Not that the system exists. That I have no way to know what it's actually looking for, and no way to show it what I actually have.
The CV I'd built, the one that had worked for years, was made to be read by a tired human who'd fill in the gaps I left out. It assumed a reader who already understood the job, who'd nod along at a title and know roughly what it meant, and wouldn't need every detail spelled out because they brought context of their own.
An AI doing bulk ranking doesn't bring context. It only has what's on the page. And what was on my page was a page and a half of things I'd deliberately left unsaid — because leaving them unsaid used to be the whole point.
I don't mind the new tools. But I do need to match them with my own.
Gert Schepens