Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Got rejected from a job I applied for in a field I’ve worked in for years, asked for feedback and was told I missed a piece of essential criteria which I had definitely covered twice in my application.
Immediately responded with the excerpts and am awaiting their excuses about why the two examples I gave were not good enough evidence.
The kicker is this is a gov adjacent role in the UK and we have the “Disability Confident” scheme that lets disabled candidates get a guaranteed interview when you hit all the essential criteria. I opted in for that as a disabled person and conveniently (and this happens a lot!! At least 3 other times to me) I apparently don’t hit the essential criteria for a role I’ve done for like 7 years at a higher level than what I’m applying for, with examples that have gotten me jobs for roles at a higher level than the ones I’m applying for.
I love this period of economic stagnancy it’s great fun 🫠
Seems more like economic free fall.
But also, my sympathies, that is rough.
It definitely sounds like those companies are discriminating against disabled people. I wonder if you’d have better luck not telling them?
I think it’s less purposeful than direct discrimination, the application should have no sign I’ve ticked the box for the disability scheme, but I think that their screening process is just really poor.
I reckon they’re either using AI to batch shortlist and don’t really care about when it makes mistakes, or their shortlisters are having to wade through so many applications they’re not giving enough attention to each one and incorrectly scoring them. This then has the downstream effect of being indirectly discriminating, because they actually have to justify what essential criteria I have missed to deny me an interview, but for anyone else accidentally missed during shortlisting they can just lie and say they didn’t make the cut because there were so many strong candidates.
Having chatted with people recruiting in this area before, they’re getting like 500-1000 applicants for each role so their shortlisting has had to speed up to keep the process to a sane timeline. This has pushed them to make far more mistakes than I’ve ever had to deal with during the shortlisting phase. I used to get an interview almost every single time I applied for a role, and would perform well enough to be in the top 2 or 3 candidates if I failed to get the role. Now I’m just being screened out at the application phase.
Gotcha. So with the extreme application volume, they’re certainly not reviewing even most of them thoroughly. I haven’t done it often, but apparently feeding your CV/resume and the job description to AI can help if they’re using an HRIS, in case you haven’t tried that already. Best of luck, comrade!