Hiring Has Lost Its Depth: The Invisible Cost of Lost Opportunities

You know what disappoints me so much about hiring right now? The complete lack of depth to it. I recently submitted an application to a company and completed their asynchronous interview process. On paper, I'm a near-complete match. Internally I lit up over this role. I wanted this one. It was EXACTLY what I was looking for. Even the team dynamics felt like a perfect fit. I could see where my longevity of experience could have helped the organization become a more cohesive team.

As part of the process, I completed a five-minute asynchronous video interview. If you’re unfamiliar, someone on their side records questions in advance, then you watch a video of each question. You don’t know the questions in advance. Then you’re given 90 seconds to respond. I know my background well, so I wasn’t too worried about being able to answer the questions, but I was worried about the timed portion. That time constraint is absolutely brutal.

I cannot think of a worse way to understand what I could actually bring to an organization. Do you actually think I can explain to you in five minutes what I've done for most of my life?! It is objectively AND subjectively the absolute WORST way in the world to try and understand my capabilities.

Five minutes.

No one could hear an unexpected answer and ask me to tell them more. I couldn't learn something about their problem and connect it to an experience they hadn't thought to ask about. There was no mutual exploration. No discovery. No human connection. The questions were decided before anyone even knew what questions to actually ask.

But here's the thing: curiosity is an information-acquisition mechanism. It's how you learn what you need to learn to solve a problem in the first place. Without it, you’re trying to solve a problem you don’t even understand yet.

I received an automated rejection four days later. I was entirely unsurprised. I had actually predicted it five minutes after I finished the video. I told my boyfriend that if that's all the opportunity I have to tell someone about myself, it's utterly impossible. And if I’m asked to do one again, I’ll just decline.

They don't know what they rejected.

Not because I hid it.

Because their process never went deep enough to discover it. And to be clear, I’m not heartbroken at being rejected. I’m an author with thirty years of experience in publishing. I get rejected about 100 times a year from that alone. What’s heartbreaking is that no one ever had a chance to find out. Had someone gotten on a call with me and spent even fifteen minutes exploring my background, I could have helped them connect the dots in real time. With warmth and charm and probably some laughter because that's part of who I am.

An asynchronous video cannot capture any of that. ATS cannot capture it. AI cannot even come close to fully capturing the dynamics of a human; that requires human judgment. We have flattened human beings into résumés, keywords, video, and AI-assisted decision making. What’s worse, AI cannot recover information that your hiring process never bothered to acquire.

That's the problem.

We've become so focused on making hiring faster, more automated and more scalable that we've forgotten what hiring is actually trying to accomplish: Understand another human being well enough to determine what might happen if you put them inside your organization.

My career doesn't fit neatly into a keyword search because the value I bring isn't simply a collection of skills. It's in how those experiences interact. How I think. How I connect information. How I respond when something goes wrong. How I work with people. How quickly I learn. How I see systems. How I solve problems nobody has named yet.

Those things become obvious when you work with me.

They become pretty damn apparent when you talk to me.

But you have to talk to me first. I’m not saying talk to everyone. But when you have a viable candidate, don’t confuse processing someone with understanding them.

That company lost the opportunity to meaningfully evaluate a candidate with thirty years of experience because no one took the time for a fifteen-minute conversation.

An over-reliance on technology without human connection is going to doom us all to keep repeating the same obvious and preventable human mistakes. We cannot be in so much of a hurry to solve a problem that we solve it inadequately. My heavens, I am sick of seeing and experiencing these situations. It is literally breaking my heart EVERY DAY.

Between my writing career and job applications, I’ve had nearly 1,000 rejections this year alone, with 600 from job applications in the last 60 days (because yes, I track them), and I’m just done with that madness. Don’t even get me started on the bigger picture cost to humanity as a whole.

If you want me, you’re gonna have to come find me. I have other things to do, interesting people to meet and help, and this hiring cost is simply too high.