Hiring Filters Are Screening Out the People You Actually Want
Most hiring filters exist to save time. Set a minimum number of years, flag anything that looks like a gap, skim the pile for the right job titles, and the stack of resumes gets smaller fast.
The trouble is what ends up on the floor. Some of the most capable people never make it past the first pass, and nobody ever asks them a single question.
Here are a few filters worth a second look, and what to look at instead.
“5+ years of experience required”
“5+ years of experience required” is one of the laziest filters in hiring. It sounds reasonable, but it measures the wrong thing.
Picture two candidates. One has three years in the role. She learned the systems in a month, fixed the process everyone complained about, and is the person the team goes to when something breaks. The other has eight years. He has done the same year eight times and still needs someone to walk him through the new software.
On paper, he passes the filter and she doesn’t. The system throws out the one you’d actually want.
Years tell you how long someone has been somewhere. They don’t tell you what they did, how fast they learn, or whether they’d be good at this job. Counting years is easy. Asking what they’ve actually done takes more effort, and it finds people the filter misses.
Treating a resume gap like a warning sign
A gap on a resume tells you almost nothing about how good someone is at their job.
People step away from work for all kinds of ordinary reasons. They were laid off and the market was slow. They looked after a parent who was sick. They had a baby. They burned out and needed a few months to recover. They moved countries and had to start over. None of that says anything about whether they can do the work.
Yet plenty of screening still treats a six month gap like a warning sign. The resume gets set aside before anyone asks a single question, and the person who spent a year caring for their mother loses out to someone who stayed in a job they were coasting through.
If a gap worries you, ask about it. Most people will tell you in one sentence, and then you can get on with talking about what matters: what they’ve done and what they can do for you.
Skimming resumes to save time
When the pile is big, it’s tempting to scan for a familiar job title or company name and move on. Some teams go further and strip details out of resumes, hoping that seeing less will make the process fairer.
But you don’t remove bias by knowing less. You just end up judging on first impressions instead of on what the person has actually done.
And if there’s no time to read the resume, there probably isn’t time to make a good decision either. Reading about someone’s work properly takes a few minutes. Passing over the person who would have been your best hire costs a lot more.
Look at what people have actually done
Each of these filters swaps a real question for a shortcut. How long was this person somewhere? Is there a gap? Does the job title look right? Those things are easy to check, and they say very little about whether someone can do the job.
The better questions take a little longer. What have they built, fixed or improved? How quickly did they pick up something new? What does their team rely on them for? Could they do the work this role actually needs?
Those answers are usually right there in the resume, or one conversation away. They’re worth the extra effort, because they point you to people a quick filter would have thrown out.
How Labourly approaches it
At Labourly, candidates never apply to jobs. Labourly automatically shortlists them to the jobs they qualify for, and employers decide whether to reach out. The starting point is whether someone qualifies for the work, and the choice of who to talk to stays with you.
If you’d like to see how that works for your next role, book a demo and we’ll walk you through it.
Before your next round of hiring, it’s worth asking: which filter in your process might be screening out the person you’d actually want to hire?
