Employers talk a very polished game about hiring. They hire for skills, not CV gloss. They look for potential, not pedigree. They care deeply about diversity and inclusion. They recruit for culture add, not culture fit. At least, that is the story I hear on panels and careers sites everywhere I go.
However, at the same time, the recruitment market has never felt so utterly broken. Candidates are ghosted by automated systems with the same old templated let downs (if they’re lucky). Layoffs and restructures have flipped from bug to feature. And you can’t open LinkedIn without seeing swathes of people talk about sending hundreds of applications into what might as well be a black hole.
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For someone like me, who works in employer branding, the casualties are not abstract. Ethics and trust go first and brands are damaged. Then, left in the wake of all the recruitment market carnage is a growing cohort of perfectly capable people who cannot get hired through any real fault of their own.
Why? They are not unqualified. They are simply in the wrong categories: recently laid off, a visible gap on the CV, the “wrong” university, the “wrong” employer logos, “too old” or “too young” for the story in the hiring manager’s head, or guilty of having once started their own business.
On paper, employers are desperate for talent. BUT, in reality, many are turning away skilled, available and often more affordable people purely because of hang ups and assumptions that would not survive five minutes of scrutiny. Outdated ideas about what a “good” career looks like. False beliefs about what gaps, age or self-employment say about someone’s competence. Comfortable myths that keep any CV with rough edges at arm’s length.
I even tested this at a panel I was recently on in Kuala Lumpur and the audience unanimously agreed – they ignore applications from anybody out of work and go after (or send their head-hunters after) those currently employed in preferred and approved rival companies.
The result is a strange stalemate. Employers insist there is a talent shortage – when in most fields and industries there isn’t, not even close. And candidates insist there is a bias problem – and they appear to have a strong case. Both sides might be right, but on one side it’s totally self-inflicted.
What bothers me most is the growing gap between what employers say and what they actually do, and what this means for both candidates and for people working in employer brand and talent attraction who are asked to somehow tell a modern, inclusive story while the process behaves like it is still 1998.
The story employers like to tell
If all you did was read corporate careers sites and listen to Heads of People talk, you’d think we were all living in some kind of ultra-inclusive recruitment nirvana.
Job descriptions talk about growth mindsets, curiosity and learning. EVP decks celebrate non-linear careers and “bringing your whole self to work”. Diversity statements insist that gaps are fine, age is just a number, and entrepreneurship is “exactly the kind of spirit we value here”.
The modern script all the big employer read from is clear:
- Skills over credentials.
- Potential over pedigree.
- Inclusion over bias.
Nobody is going to stand on stage and say, “We mostly hire people from three universities, between 28 and 38, who have never had a proper setback.” I mean, that would be the honest thing to do... but also kinda awkward.
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So publicly, it is all skills, inclusivity, values and potential. Privately, a different set of rules overwhelmingly decide who gets in the door.
The reality: unofficial rules of getting hired
Based on the research I have seen and the stories candidates tell me, the labour market still runs on some very out-dated settings. Here are a few of the big ones.
1. Being unemployed makes you look incompetent
One of the more depressing findings in the recent literature is how much employers read into employment status.
A PLOS ONE study, “Inferring incompetence from employment status,” created pairs of equivalent CVs that differed only on whether the person was currently employed. Unemployed applicants were rated as less competent and less hireable, and people said they would be less happy to work with them, despite them having identical skills and experience.
In other words, someone can do exactly the same job, but if they happen to be between employers, people quietly assume they are worse at it. The logic is simple and lazy: if they were any good, someone else would have snapped them up by now, or they wouldn’t have been cut in the first place.
It might be fashionable to talk about resilience and learning from setbacks. It is less fashionable to hire the people who have actually had to demonstrate it, and who probably learnt a thing or two from it. Sad, infuriating, but totally pervasive.
2. Pedigree is still doing a lot of the work
When I listen to senior leaders, I hear a lot about “hiring the best” and “raising the talent bar”. When I look at who actually gets hired into elite firms, a very specific pattern appears.
Lauren Rivera’s book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, and her earlier articles on “hiring as cultural matching” take readers behind the closed doors of top banks, consultancies and law firms. She shows, in detail, how a narrow set of elite universities and familiar employer brands end up acting as shorthand for “merit”.
It is not just the name of the university. It is the whole package: the right internships, the right extracurriculars, the right sports. Candidates who tick these boxes are read as smart, driven and “one of us”. Those who do not, even with strong evidence of performance, are treated as a risk.
Officially, the firm is hiring on potential. Unofficially, it is hiring on biography. We all know it. The research proves it. We all keep quiet.
3. There is a very narrow comfort zone on age
In employer branding work, I see plenty of diversity imagery: a smiling mix of ages and backgrounds, all apparently thriving together. The data on how older applicants are treated at the point of hiring is less cheerful.
A field experiment in Sweden sent more than 6,000 fictitious CVs, with ages randomly assigned between 35 and 70, to employers advertising low and medium skilled roles. The callback rate began to fall sharply in the early forties and was “very low” near retirement age, with a steeper decline for women.
Other work, including an NBER paper on age discrimination in US hiring, finds similar patterns. Older applicants, even with relevant experience, receive significantly fewer callbacks than those in their early thirties.
So, while the official language is about valuing experience, the reality often looks more like “we will happily celebrate long careers in the internal newsletter, but we are not rushing to interview someone who is older than the hiring manager.”
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At a recent event in Singapore, I was told that a survey done by the government found the only thing more likely to count against you in the selection process than being too old, was a criminal record. Things like smoking and a patchy employment history were far less of a problem.
4. Starting your own business can count against you
One of my favourite contradictions is the way companies talk about wanting “entrepreneurial mindsets” while avoiding actual entrepreneurs like the plague.
A Rutgers led study, summarised here, created fictitious CVs with nearly identical qualifications. The only difference was that some candidates had founded a business. Corporate recruiters, across industries, were less likely to recommend hiring the former business owners, even when the venture was successful.
The concerns are predictable: will they respect the hierarchy, will they leave after a year, are they secretly judging everyone for not moving fast enough. None of this is necessarily supported by evidence, but it is enough to make people nervous.
So, we end up with the strange position where someone who has built something from scratch, dealt with risk and learned about cash flow the hard way is considered “riskier” than someone who has never had to sign their own name on anything more consequential than an expense claim.
5. Gaps are still treated as red flags
You would hope that, after a decade of economic crises, a pandemic and a global conversation about caregiving, employers might have relaxed about career breaks. The evidence I see suggests that gaps still trigger a lot of concern.
Experiments on how hiring managers read CVs show that breaks, especially for caregiving or health, lower perceived commitment and competence compared with continuous employment, even when the person’s qualifications are unchanged.
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Put that together with the unemployment bias and the reality is simple: the people who have had to step out of the workforce for reasons entirely beyond their control are often treated as if they have done something horribly wrong.
From an ethical standpoint, that is ugly. From a talent strategy standpoint, it is wasteful and self-sabotaging.
What the research tells us
I am not suggesting every hiring manager is secretly a villain. Most people think they are being fair. And I’m not saying career gaps and reasons for absence shouldn’t be investigated and discussed. The problem is what happens when very ordinary bias gets baked into systems, policies and “how we do things round here” (and then trains AI models).
Across the studies above, a few patterns repeat:
- Employment status and gaps are used as crude signals of competence and motivation, even when the CV says otherwise.
- Educational and employer pedigree still trumps careful assessment of skills, especially in high status sectors (tech, banking, professional services).
- Age is used, consciously or not, as an early filter, which gives younger candidates a structural advantage.
- Former founders and small business owners are treated as undesirable and higher risk, regardless of whether their businesses succeeded.
Each of these on its own might not feel catastrophic. But apply them together, at scale, across thousands of applications, and we end up with exactly what people describe on the ground: a lot of very competent, available people who cannot get seen, and employers who insist that “nobody good is applying”.
This is both an ethical problem and a societal stain. Not to forget, a commercial issue for employers who still believe the right people are too hard to come by and cost too much.
The self-inflicted talent shortage
Strip away the branding and the market looks something like this.
On one side, employers complain they cannot find enough skilled people. They raise salaries, offer sign on bonuses, and compete for a narrow band of “ideal” candidates who all have eerily similar CVs.
On the other side, there is a large group of people who could absolutely do the work, often at lower starting salaries, but who are screened out because of the unofficial rules I have just walked through.
When companies genuinely move to skills-based hiring, the picture changes. The Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School looked at more than 11,000 roles and found that dropping degree requirements from job ads was common language, but changing who actually got hired was rare. For every 100 postings where the degree requirement disappeared, fewer than four additional non degree candidates were hired. It’s negligible. Where firms did redesign roles and assessments around skills, they saw wider talent pools and better retention, particularly among workers without degrees.
In parallel, there is growing evidence that so called “risky” hires are often very safe bets. The SHRM backed Getting Talent Back to Work initiative reports that most HR and business leaders who have hired people with criminal records say these employees perform as well as or better than others, and are as or more dependable.
Retailer Timpson in the UK, for example, has hired thousands of people directly from prison and has spoken publicly about seeing higher loyalty and lower turnover in that group compared with the rest of the workforce.
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If employers take skills seriously and stop panicking about imperfect CVs, they get access to people their competitors are ignoring. In a tight market, that ought to be irresistible. Yet, still, many organisations stick to the comfort zone and create the very shortages they complain about.
What this means if you work in employer brand or talent attraction
If you look after employer brand or TA, you sit right in the middle of this contradiction. You are asked to sell an inclusive, progressive story to candidates, and then turn around and help run a process that quietly filters out anyone who does not look “standard”.
The temptation is to shrug and say, “Well, hiring managers will be hiring managers.” From where I sit, this is exactly where EB and TA teams can create the most value, if they are willing to have some awkward conversations.
Here are some places I would start.
1. Make the comfort filters visible
Start by naming what is really going on, in a calm, practical way. Questions like:
- Which of our screening criteria are genuinely predictive of success in this role, and which are just things we are used to looking for.
- What is the actual evidence that this degree, this employer or this continuous timeline leads to better performance.
- If we ran one hiring process without this filter, what would happen to time to hire, diversity and performance six or twelve months later.
You are not accusing anyone of being biased. You are asking for proof that a preference is useful. The research helps here. It is easier to challenge “we never hire people who have been out of work for a year” when there is a study on the table showing that unemployment status skews perceptions of competence, not actual ability.
2. Change who you put on the pedestal
Employer brand is not just about making the careers site look nice. It is about deciding whose stories get told.
If every “success story” is a straight line from a brand name university to a brand name employer, that tells candidates and hiring managers what “good” looks like. If, instead, you spotlight:
- Someone who joined after a redundancy and is now leading a high performing team
- A returner who took time out for caregiving
- A former founder who has found a long-term home in your organisation
- A hire without a degree who is now in a critical role. Jack Ma springs to mind here?
then you are quietly widening the definition of acceptable. You are also building a brand that feels more honest to the people you say you want to include.
3. Run small experiments, not grand revolutions
You do not need to redesign the entire hiring system on day one. You can start small and collect your own data.
For example:
1 - Take one role and remove degree and prestige requirements from the advert. Keep a structured skills assessment in place. Track who applies, who is shortlisted and who you hire.
2 - For an agreed pilot, hide university names and graduation years at the initial CV screen and see if the shortlist looks different.
3 - Partner with a second chance or returner programme in one business unit. Compare performance, attendance and retention with your standard hires.
4 - Once the results are in, the conversation with hiring managers becomes less philosophical and more “this is what happened when we tried it”.
4. Stop letting the brand get ahead of the reality
There is also a reputational point. Candidates notice when the messaging and the process do not match.
If the careers site waxes lyrically about welcoming returners, but the ATS is configured to reject anyone with a gap longer than six months, that gap is going to find its way onto Glassdoor. If you run a campaign about valuing skills not degrees, then keep a degree requirement in the small print of every job ad, people will clock that too.
Part of the mission here is restraint. Talk about the pilots you are actually running. Be open about the fact that you are moving from pedigree obsession to skills focus, rather than pretending you have already arrived. Candidates do not expect perfection. They do, increasingly, expect honesty.
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Why this matters
None of this is about being nice for the sake of it. It is about whether an organisation can afford to keep operating a hiring system that wastes talent it says it cannot find.
When employers filter out anyone who is unemployed, anyone with a gap, anyone over a certain age, anyone without a particular kind of logo on their CV and anyone who has ever worked for themselves, it's not just about being unfair. At the end of the day, employers can decide who they do and don’t employ. However, they are making their own lives harder, and for what good reason? In the most part, employers are the ones who are lengthening time to hire, inflating salary costs and shrinking the range of ideas and experiences in the room.
If you work in employer brand or talent attraction, you have more influence over this than you might think. You choose what good looks like in your storytelling. You help set the filters and the questions. You are often the one person in the room who is paid to think about how the process feels from the candidate’s side as well as the hiring managers’.
The market is not short of good people, not even close. But it is short of processes that recognise them. The sooner we stop pretending otherwise, the sooner we can get on with using the talent that is sitting right in front of us.
Takeaways
The “talent shortage” is often self-inflicted
Employers say they cannot find good people, but routinely screen out capable candidates because of unemployment, gaps, age, “wrong” logos, or non-linear careers. The shortage is less about supply, more about comfort zones and bias.
Public hiring story vs private hiring rules
Careers sites talk about skills, potential, inclusion and “culture add”. In practice, unofficial filters still dominate: continuous employment, elite universities, familiar brands, specific age bands, and “safe” linear careers.
Unemployment is treated as incompetence
Studies show identical candidates are rated less competent and less hireable if they are unemployed. Being between roles quietly becomes a proxy for “not good enough”, even when skills and experience are unchanged.
Pedigree still beats skills in many sectors
Elite firms in banking, consulting, law and tech still use university prestige, internships, extracurriculars and employer logos as shorthand for merit. Officially it is about potential, unofficially it is about biography and cultural matching.
Age bias creates a narrow hiring comfort zone
Experimental data shows callback rates drop sharply from the early forties and are very low near retirement age, especially for women. Employers celebrate experience in internal comms, but often avoid older applicants at the point of hiring.
Entrepreneurs are punished despite the rhetoric
Companies praise “entrepreneurial mindset”, yet research finds former founders are less likely to be recommended for corporate roles. Fears about hierarchy, flight risk and “fit” outweigh evidence of resilience and broad skills.
Career gaps are still treated as red flags
Breaks for caregiving, health or life events continue to lower perceived commitment and competence. The people who have had to step out of the workforce, often for reasons beyond their control, are treated as if they are risky hires.
Skills-based hiring is mostly slogan, not practice
Removing degree requirements from job ads rarely changes who gets hired. Only when companies redesign roles and assessments around skills do they tap wider talent pools and see benefits, particularly for non-degree candidates.
“Risky” hires are often very strong performers
Evidence from second-chance hiring, including ex-offender programmes, shows equal or better performance and dependability compared to “standard” hires. Employers are ignoring groups that could actually reduce turnover and increase loyalty.
EB and TA teams sit in the middle of the contradiction
Employer brand and talent attraction professionals are asked to sell inclusive narratives while operating processes that quietly exclude non-standard candidates. Their leverage lies in naming hidden filters, changing who gets spotlighted, running small experiments, and keeping the brand promise aligned with the actual hiring experience.
Sources
- Okoroji, C., Gleibs, I. H., & Howard, S. (2023). Inferring incompetence from employment status: An audit-like experiment. PLOS ONE.
- Rivera, L. A. (2016). Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton University Press.
- Rivera, L. A. (2012). Hiring as cultural matching: The case of elite professional service firms. American Sociological Review.
- Carlsson, M., & Eriksson, S. (2019). Age discrimination in hiring decisions: Evidence from a field experiment in the labour market. Labour Economics.
- Neumark, D., Burn, I., Button, P., & Chehras, N. (2019). Do state laws protecting older workers from discrimination reduce age discrimination in hiring? Evidence from a field experiment. Journal of Law and Economics.
- Rutgers University. (2024). Can “Former Business Owner” Be a Problem on Your Resume?
- Sigelman, M., Fuller, J., & Martin, A. (2022). Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. Burning Glass Institute & Harvard Business School.
- SHRM Foundation. (2018). Getting Talent Back to Work (Toolkit and report).
- Timpson Group. Timpson Foundation overview.
- Ministry of Manpower, Singapore. (2024). Fair Employment Practices Report 2023.
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