Straight to trash

The truth: if you don’t fit the mold, they won’t read your resume.

I’ve been job searching for 500 days now—after rebuilding my life post-illness, post-divorce, and after leading high-performing marketing teams for decades. Like many professionals navigating midlife transitions, I’ve done all the right things: networking, applying, customizing, showing up. I’ve sent out tailored resumes, had conversations with hiring managers, followed up, followed through. And still, I’ve encountered something that’s hard to name but impossible to ignore: a system that doesn’t actually want to hear your story unless it’s neat.

What I’ve experienced is not unique. In fact, that’s the problem.

Every time I post about how hard the job market is—especially for those of us with nonlinear paths—I receive a flood of messages. Women who took time away to raise families. Survivors of illness or trauma trying to re-enter the workforce. People who changed careers out of necessity or purpose, only to find themselves shut out because their resumes don’t follow the expected arc. These are not people with poor judgment or weak skills. They are people with grit, perspective, and real-world experience—systematically erased by processes that prize sameness over substance.

The numbers support what I’m seeing firsthand. A joint study by Harvard Business School and Accenture found that more than 27 million people in the U.S. are considered “hidden workers.” These are qualified candidates routinely screened out of hiring pipelines due to rigid filters: resume gaps, lack of conventional credentials, or nontraditional experience. In a hiring environment increasingly driven by automation, keyword scanning, and overwhelmed recruiters, the easiest thing to do is to say no. And most systems are built to make that “no” happen fast.

But it’s not just technology that’s failing us. It’s a deeper cultural tendency within hiring to favor the familiar. I’ve seen self-proclaimed “disruptive” leaders post proudly about eschewing traditional hiring practices—eliminating job descriptions, requiring video applications, and hiring exclusively from within their networks. These approaches are often praised as bold or innovative. But the reality is that they simply reinforce existing access and exclude anyone who isn’t already in the room.

That’s not disruption. It’s gatekeeping. It’s creating a club with an unspoken code—and then pretending it’s meritocratic.

We tell job seekers to “own their story,” but what does that mean when no one is listening? In the past, you could talk to a recruiter or hiring manager and explain the context behind your career choices. You could shape your narrative in dialogue. Today, you’re more likely to be sorted by an algorithm before a human ever reads your name. And even when a human does see your materials, they may still be trained—explicitly or not—to look for conventional career patterns and clean upward trajectories.

This system does not reward reinvention. It does not account for resilience. It rarely pauses to ask why a candidate took time off, changed paths, or started over. And in doing so, it actively punishes the exact qualities we claim to value: adaptability, perspective, and perseverance.

We have to stop pretending this is working.

Yes, the volume of applicants is high. Yes, recruiters are overwhelmed. But none of that excuses lazy, exclusionary processes that reduce people to pattern matches and keyword hits. If we care about building teams that are thoughtful, resilient, and future-ready, we need to reconsider what we actually evaluate—and how.

That starts with leaders. It starts with being honest about whether our hiring practices are truly expanding our teams or simply reproducing ourselves. It means questioning gut instinct when it leads us to choose the same kinds of people over and over. And it means recognizing that the best candidate might not be the cleanest on paper—they might be the one with the messiest, most instructive, most human story.

This is not a plea for special treatment. It’s a call for clarity. For better questions, better systems, and better outcomes.

And if you’re a job seeker reading this—especially someone who feels invisible—I want you to know: the problem is not you. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are navigating a system that was not designed with your story in mind. That doesn’t mean your story has no value. It means we need more people brave enough to tell it—and more leaders willing to listen.

What’s your experience been in this system?

If you’ve felt overlooked, ghosted, or dismissed, I’d love to hear your story. And if you’re on the other side—recruiting, hiring, shaping policy—what do you think it will take to fix this?

Let’s talk. Because something has to change.

Source: Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent – Harvard Business School & Accenture (2021)