Round Four, Question Six

The rejection email arrived at 11:47. I'd submitted at 11:46. I know a lot of people have a story like this now but at the time I hadn't heard any of them, so I sat there in my kitchen in Leeds with a cold coffee thinking there had to be a mistake. A person couldn't have read it that fast. Which, yes. "After careful consideration," it said. Careful. Sixty seconds of careful. I'd been out of work for four months at that point. Warehouse ops, fifteen years, then the site closed. I'm forty-eight. The CV had gaps and no degree and a lot of words like "supervised" and "coordinated" that a careers adviser told me to use. I'd applied for a logistics coordinator job at a place that, as far as I could tell, did roughly what I'd been doing, only with more software. Anyway. I got another job in the end, a smaller firm, a human interviewed me, it's fine. This isn't really about the job. It's about the Thursday in June when my mate Dev rang up short for the quiz at the Cross Keys and I went along to make up numbers, and there was a woman on our team called Hannah who'd moved up from London for work and didn't know anyone, and she was brilliant at the science round and useless at the sport round and somewhere around question six of round four, the picture round, we got talking about what she did. "Machine learning," she said. "Boring stuff. Recruitment tech." I said, "Oh yeah?" and she named the company. I'd like to say I handled it gracefully. I think I just sort of looked at her for a bit, and then I said, "You lot rejected me in a minute flat," and she went a colour I don't have a word for. "When?" I told her. The role, the month. She actually got her phone out, and then put it away again, and said, "I can't look that up, obviously. But. Yeah. That would've been the screener." "The screener." "It's a model. It scores CVs against the job spec before a human sees them. Top thirty percent go through." She was talking fast. "It's supposed to save the recruiters time. It does save them time. I built most of it."

Round four, question seven. A picture of a bridge. Nobody on our team knew the bridge. "Can I ask you something," she said, "and you can tell me to get lost." "Go on." "What was on it? Your CV. Roughly." So I told her. Fifteen years, one employer, no degree, the gap after the closure. She listened with her head on one side like a bird, and then she said, very quietly, "Single long tenure with no progression title change. It'll have read that as stagnation. And the gap. And no degree is a hard minus on that spec because the hiring manager put 'degree preferred' and preferred gets treated as a weight, not a filter." "So it never saw that I ran a team of forty." "It saw it. It just didn't weigh it against the other stuff." "Right." "I'm sorry," she said. "That's not a company line. I'm actually sorry. That's a bad outcome and it's the sort of thing we're meant to catch and we didn't." We came third in the quiz. Dev was furious about the bridge. Hannah and I walked to the bus stop together and she said, "Would you do something for me? Would you let me use your CV, anonymised, as a test case? If the screener can't get past yours it needs to know it can't." I said yes. I don't know if anything came of it. She texts me sometimes with quiz questions she thinks I'd know, and I'm usually wrong, and she's usually kind about it. The thing I keep coming back to is the sixty seconds. Not that it was quick. That someone, somewhere, had decided that quick was the point.