For months, job seekers have suspected that technology is why they’re not getting interviews. Every rejection seems like it got fed into a machine, scored by some algorithm and deleted before an actual human even saw their name. It has become a comforting narrative — that a robot made the call, rather than an actual human being determining that you were not the right fit. But the awkward truth is that, with few exceptions, it’s not AI that’s tossing out your résumé. That’s a human being making a decision in seconds.
You talk to recruiters, and you hear the same story again and again. Yes, filtering, sorting, organizing and helping with workflow is what companies are using AI for. But the actual rejection? The “no thanks”? When does your résumé get trashed? That is something that is typically done by a recruiter staring at a screen, reviewing hundreds of résumés over the course of one morning and making decisions much more quickly than most people believe. If anything, AI is the tool that’s helping them to keep pace — not supplanting them entirely.
In truth, hiring right now is way, way crazier than you think it is. Recruiters are slammed with applications. Some jobs receive hundreds of them within the hour. The others would get to 1,000 by the end of the day. And when that occurs, somebody has to make hard choices quickly. They skim. They react. They make instinctive calls. If your résumé is obtuse, too long, too generic or just doesn’t line up with whatever they’re scanning for at the time, it could vanish in under ten seconds. No AI needed.
People don’t like hearing that. They wish there were a system to beat, a filter to outsmart, a trick to game the algorithm. It’s more convenient to blame technology than acknowledge that an actual human being didn’t select you. But, recruiters say, there’s still the wild card of humans — their biases and preferences and whether a hiring manager “really wants X or Y,” which in turn could be influenced by something as fickle as their mood that day or how overworked they feel. AI isn’t deciding your future. A person is. And people are unpredictable.
What’s even more interesting is that most recruiters don’t have enough trust in AI to completely give up control. They’ll use it to categorize résumés or signal strengths, but when it comes to actually rejecting someone, their hands stay on the wheel. They don’t want to be blamed when a machine omits a worthy candidate. They’d rather not rely on an algorithm that could misinterpret a nonlinear career history or be written in anything less than perfect corporate-speak.
In other words, AI is the aide. The human is still the judge.
The truth is, with so much riding on the process and such a small margin for error, many applicants simply need to think that some unknowable force beyond their control is keeping them from finding work. They’re less personal when rejected by a robot. Less painful. But to know that a human skimmed their résumé and decided “no” in seconds? That stings. And it also helps to explain why the AI-blame story line continues to proliferate online — it softens the blow of rejection.
The kicker: Even when the calls are still made by humans, the system has begun to feel automated because even recruiters are feeling overwhelmed. Each app isn’t getting a long, considerate once-over from them. They skim for signals. They search for the perfect phrases. They are searching for neat formatting, evident skills and speedy alignment. If your résumé doesn’t instantly tell its story, it might as well not tell it at all.
And that’s why there are so many candidates who feel invisible. Not because A.I. is censoring it, but because the humans charged with filtering it just can’t keep up and are working at machine speed themselves.
The pendulum may soon swing more toward deeper AI involvement. Automated screening. Skills assessments. Predictive scoring. But it won’t even then be the case that the human fades away. Even as AI has advanced, hiring is still about having trust and a gut feeling and finding someone who will fit into our company culture — the things that AI can’t spit out.
So if your résumé just won’t cut it, don’t self-diagnose that one of those algorithms pushed you into the big pile. But in all likelihood, a recruiter saw it — briefly — and moved on. That’s not reassuring, but it’s the truth. And when you know the reality, then you can respond: clearer formatting, crisper storytelling, tighter alignment with the job and more focused applications.
AI isn’t the enemy here. The real question is how to make yourself matter to a human with fifteen seconds to decide your fate.
