Today, a lot of people are not rejected by a person, but by a system.
And maybe that is the first sign that the promise of efficiency in recruiting came with a cost that is not always discussed honestly: the candidate experience became colder, more opaque and far less human.
the starting point
In 2019, the market already had a funnel. Getting in was not simple, and that was never exactly different from today. There was already screening, demands and competition, but the demand was clearer and the process looked more like selection than blind filtering.
There was still the sense that somebody on the other side was trying to understand who you actually were. The CV mattered, of course, but the human reading still carried a lot of weight. The process was not light, it was just more legible.
The pandemic changed that rhythm abruptly. The urgency to hire increased, remote work became the standard, and a lot of barriers fell with it. In many cases, people moved ahead without necessarily being ready, because the market needed to accelerate.
It was a moment when many companies hired to survive the volume, not necessarily to build calmly. That opened doors for a lot of people, but it also blurred the bar for what counted as enough.
Today the movement is different. The funnel still exists, but now it comes with a thicker layer of automation, with more opaque criteria, and with the feeling that the candidate has to convince a system before convincing a person.
The result is a process that is more efficient at scale, perhaps, but also more distant for whoever is on this side trying to get in.
when the funnel started talking to itself
That distance did not happen all at once. First came the tools to deal with volume. Then came remote processes, asynchronous stages, and the need to filter a lot of people in very little time. AI came after that, occupying exactly the spaces where there used to be more human reading.
Today, going through a hiring process often means adapting your CV for an ATS, trying to guess which keywords will unlock the next stage, answering chatbot screening, dealing with automated WhatsApp messages, recording a video, doing a voice interview, or even being assessed by models that try to interpret behaviour, fluency and compatibility. On paper that looks like organisation. In practice, the candidate goes through a sequence of filters before talking to anyone real.
I do not blame recruiters and companies for that choice. Receiving hundreds or thousands of applications for a single position genuinely makes the process too heavy to be done manually from start to finish. The problem shows up when that need for scale pushes screening into increasingly opaque places. The question then stops being only about efficiency and becomes about who is being eliminated before ever having a real chance to be seen.
A CV can be well written and still be discarded for not matching a specific set of parameters. A candidate may have learned differently, come from a less obvious path, or simply not used exactly the same words as the job description, and still be the most suitable person for that team. When selection becomes a sequence of automatic cuts, the chance of error grows along with the volume.
In the end, the impression that remains is that the position gets filled by whoever fits the filter best, and not necessarily by whoever solves the problem best.
the human cost
The most visible effect of all this shows up in the experience of the person on the other side. The candidate applies, waits, answers, records, fills in forms, adapts, repeats, and often finishes the process without knowing exactly what happened. There is no context, no feedback, and none of that basic sense that somebody actually looked at your path with attention. When that happens, the process stops being merely selective and becomes exclusionary in a way that is hard to see.
And that is where the question really starts to sting: where are the human resources in all of this? Because at the end of the day the field is still called human resources, yet in many processes the human presence has been pushed further and further from the decision. The candidate talks to a system, answers a system, waits on a system, and only afterwards, if everything goes well, reaches a person.
I understand the pressure on the other side. Manual screening for hundreds of candidates is unfeasible, and nobody serious expects a recruiter to do that alone with no support. But when the need for scale turns into a dependence on opaque filters, selection starts losing precisely the part that mattered most: the ability to notice potential beyond what an algorithm can measure.
In the end, technology should help open space for a more human view. When the opposite happens, the process gets faster but also colder. And that is the point where the promise of efficiency starts charging too high a price.
a note to recruiters
Before closing, I also want to leave my apologies to the recruiters I did not reply to in the past, and to whom I am going to send this text. At some moments in my career I was on the other side of the table, taking part in recruitment and selection as technical support, and that made me see up close how much more complex this role is than it looks.
For that very reason, I am not writing this to attack people who work in recruiting. I am writing to provoke a reflection about the direction the field has been taking, and about how much of the human part we still need to preserve in these processes. If technology exists to help, then it needs to serve to open space for more context, more listening, and a more genuine reading of the people trying to get in.