I applied to my own job posting and was rejected in under 10 minutes

"I have a story to share.

I lead a team of 8 and we’ve desperately needed another in-house Sitecore developer since February this year. We have 10+ websites in multiple languages and a custom CMS.

Do you know how many people I’ve interviewed? Zero.

Every two weeks our internal recruitment told me we’d had no applications pass screening and that this was clearly a very niche role to recruit for.

Last week I finally lost it and set up a new email address, ChatGPT’d a perfect CV and employment history and made an application myself.

Guess what happened? I got a rejection email in under 10 minutes.

The automatic screening (not sure if it’s classed as AI) was not recognising the term Sitecore. It was set, really rigidly, with no fuzzy logic, to only recognise Site Core.

7 months wasted playing the game of using, and trusting, our internal recruitment team.

Hundreds of appropriate applicants have been missed. My team have been overworked. I have been overworked. Because of this rookie error.

The icing on the cake? The CFO has marked it as a role to be cut as we have survived so long without it. We now have to resubmit the business case.

The glass half full message I want to share is this:

1. If you’ve been on the receiving end of rejections landing in your inbox within seconds of making applications, this is the sort of thing that is happening.

2. If you have active job requisitions that aren’t going anywhere, test your own application process!"

Flummoxed, Surrey, UK

FFS.

Rich