Is a Bot Deciding You're Not Qualified?

Originally published in my LinkedIn newsletter, Incurably Curious: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bot-deciding-youre-qualified-kate-mayeski-dtuoc

A few weeks ago, a woman told me I was the only real person who showed up.

She'd been looking for help with her job search, and every message in her inbox sounded the same. Same template, same stock photo, same "here's what I offer." She'd been deleting them for weeks. When we finally talked, she said something I haven't been able to shake: "If you can't talk to me like a person and show me that you've even noticed who I am, then no." Everybody else, in her words, was just "oh, here's my services." Mine was the one that sounded like a human had actually looked at her.

I've heard a version of this three times in the last month. It tells you everything about where hiring is right now.

We've automated the wrong part of this whole thing.

The view from the job seeker's chair

Let me tell you what this actually feels like from the inside.

One person I talked to had applied to 51 jobs in 60 days. Forty came back as a no. He described them the way most people do now, "thanks but no thanks," and a lot of them landed at 3 in the morning, which is how you know no human was anywhere near the decision. A bot read it, scored it, and moved on while he slept.

Another told me, flat out, that he figures his resume is "probably among the 80% that no human eyes ever even see." It's a brutal thing to believe about your own work, and he isn't wrong. You pour hours into an application knowing the most likely outcome is that no person ever reads a word of it.

And here's the one that really gets me. A woman I spoke with was a 100% match for a role, exactly what they asked for on paper, and she was rejected in under 24 hours. Her read: "It wasn't a qualification issue. It was something else going on." She was right. The system screened her out before it ever saw her.

That is not a "you" problem. But it sure starts to feel like one. You send the applications into the void, nothing comes back, and after a few weeks the silence stops feeling like bad luck and starts feeling like a verdict on you. It isn't. I promise you it isn't.

Here's the part I can't stop repeating, because a client said it to me on a call and it has stuck with me ever since:

"AI can only look backwards. It can only see what's already happened. You are responsible for what's coming up."

She's exactly right. These systems score you against what already happened. Your old titles. Last year's keywords. The previous version of the job. None of it can see where you're actually going: the role you're ready for now, the pivot that finally makes sense, the leader you've quietly become. The machine measures your past. Hiring is a bet on your future. And somehow we've handed that bet to software that has no way of making it.

A quick gut check

Not sure this is even your problem? Here's how to tell. If a few of these land a little too close to home, you're not getting screened in. You're getting screened out:

You're sending out applications and hearing almost nothing back, or the rejection shows up within hours.

You land interviews, but they stall out, and the feedback is vague or never comes.

You've been ghosted after a final round, sometimes after they hinted an offer was on the way.

Your resume reads like a list of job descriptions instead of a case for why you.

Your LinkedIn says where you've worked but not who you are or what you're great at.

Your career took a few turns and you've never landed on a clean way to explain them.

None of these mean you're unqualified. They mean your materials are doing the talking, and right now they're saying the wrong thing about you.

Now flip the table

It would be easy to make this candidates versus companies. But that's not what I'm seeing. The people doing the hiring are stuck in the same broken machine, just from the other side of the desk.

Picture the hiring manager. One open role can pull in several hundred applicants in a single day, and nobody can read several hundred of anything. So they lean on the filters to make the pile manageable, and the tool quietly tosses out strong people who didn't phrase things the exact way it expected. The candidate they needed was right there in the stack, and they never saw them.

Then the process drags. Decisions that took a week take a month. Roles sit open while the work piles onto whoever is left. And yes, people get ghosted after final rounds, but a lot of that isn't cruelty. It's a hiring manager who got pulled onto three other fires and let the process go quiet.

So both sides lose the same way. Good candidates can't get seen. Good employers can't find them. And almost everyone walks away quietly blaming themselves for a problem that was baked into the system from the start.

So how do we actually fix any of this?

Here's the good news. The fix is the same on both sides, and it's the one thing the software can't do. It's putting the human moment back in the middle.

If you're the one looking, three things move the needle more than another round of keyword tweaking.

First, lead with who you are and the value you bring, not a generic summary line. A busy person skims for about nine seconds before deciding to keep reading or move on. Hand them the headline up top so they don't have to dig for it.

Second, turn your duties into outcomes. A reader doesn't care what you were responsible for. They care what changed because you were there. Watch what happens to one line:

Before: Responsible for managing the department budget. After: Cut department spend by 18% in a year without losing a single vendor.

Same job. One of them makes a hiring manager lean in. Show the result, not the task list.

Third, make your LinkedIn match your resume and connect the dots of a winding path. If your career took a few turns, say why. Don't leave a stranger to guess at your throughline. Being good at a lot of things is a strength, but only when someone has tied it together for the reader.

And if you're the one hiring, the same principle works in your favor. Write the posting like a person, not a wish list of forty must-haves. Look past the exact title match, because the best hire is often the one whose background doesn't map cleanly but fits the work completely. And when someone reaches a real conversation, close the loop even when the answer is no. So few people bother that it alone will set you apart.

None of this is about gaming a system. It's about putting a human back at the center of a decision that was always meant to be human.

Who I do this for

Here's the part that still gets me. I work with people all over the country, at every level you can think of. New grads on their first hunt. Mid-career folks who feel stuck and can't say why. Executives who have run entire departments and somehow can't get a callback. People starting over after a layoff or a year that took a hard turn.

And most of them are carrying far more than a job search. A mortgage. A visa clock. A family watching. A quiet fear that they've aged out, or priced themselves out, or waited too long. One client told me she knows she has "too much to offer," and still couldn't get a foot in the door. That gap, between how much a person has to give and how little the system lets them show, is the thing about this work that breaks my heart and the thing that makes it worth doing.

Different titles. Different salaries. Different zip codes. Different industries entirely. And underneath all of it, the same problem every time. They know their value. They just can't get it to land with the person on the other side of the table. That doesn't change whether the job pays 50,000 or 450,000, whether you're in your first year or your thirtieth. The story is the work. It always has been.

Your turn

I want to hear from both sides on this one. If you're job hunting, where is the process breaking down for you? And if you're hiring, what's making it hard to find the right people?

The software is never going to say yes for you. Let's go make a human want to. Book a Clarity Call: https://www.maverickmaysolutions.com/booking-calendar/clarity-call