Three quarters, no human in the loop
Kitty Giraudel looked for work for five months, three of them actively. Behind her: fifteen years in software development, and spells as tech lead, engineering manager and VP of engineering.
When it was over she did the thing almost nobody does. She counted.
Sixty companies. Thirty-three screened her out before anyone met her. Thirteen turned her down after at least one interview. Fourteen never answered at all.
She worked that out afterwards, from her own records, because nothing in any of those sixty processes had told her. What the count came to: Three quarters of all applications were rejected without any human in the loop.
Thirty-three of those sixty applications never reached a conversation. By the author’s own reckoning, three quarters of them were closed with no person involved at any stage. That is the number to sit with — not the rejections, which every search produces, but the count of outcomes reached with nobody on the other end of them.
Her own reading of the mechanism is I think a main reason is that most recruitment systems now automate the screening stage with AI (or some form of an automation layer based on keywords). No vendor is named there and none is named here. What is on the record is the arithmetic.
And the arithmetic had to be assembled by the person it was done to. The count exists because she kept her own books, which is the only way anyone finds out what a recruitment process did to them.