Grab a coffee or your favourite brew. HR, well, what is left of it after AI comes through like a dozer on nitrous, this one is for you.
OK so here is the situation. Somewhere between 1482 and this morning, humanity collectively agreed to keep playing a game that everyone knows is broken.
The game goes like this. You take everything you have ever done, everything you have learned, every skill you have built, and you compress it into a document. You send that document to a stranger. The stranger either calls you or they do not. That is it. Five hundred years of civilisational progress and the best we came up with for connecting talent to opportunity is: attach your life as a PDF and pray.
Sit with that for a second.
Now sit with this. The person who invented this format was Leonardo da Vinci. And before anyone gets misty about genius, let us be precise about what Leonardo actually had going for him in 1482.
The man came from money.
His father was a Florentine notary. Well connected. Well funded. Leonardo grew up in rooms where educated people talked to other educated people and the idea of holding a quill was not a luxury, it was Tuesday. He got apprenticed to one of the most prestigious studios in Florence because his father knew people and had the means to make introductions happen. When Leonardo sat down to write his pitch to the Duke of Milan, listing his war machines and his bridges and his offer of a statue if the Duke fancied one, he did so in a world where most of the people around him had never touched ink in their entire lives.
Literacy rates in fifteenth century Italy were somewhere between shocking and criminal depending on which side of the wealth line you stood on. The common people, the actual workers, the ones hauling stone and mixing mortar and doing the labour that made Florence look the way it looked, they did not write letters to dukes. They did not write anything. The pen was not their instrument. The pen was for men like Leonardo’s father. People with access. People with money. People who already had a door that could be knocked on.
So the first CV was not a meritocracy moment. It was a wealth moment wearing a genius costume. A man with connections, education, and a funded upbringing wrote a polished letter to a powerful man, and we have been replicating that transaction ever since. The format that filters your entire workforce today was designed by and for people who already had everything.
Five hundred years later the same invisible barrier is still running. Just better dressed.
A polished CV does not mean a capable person. It means a person who had access to the conditions that produce polished CVs. Good schools. Time. People nearby who knew the rules. And the rules are never written down anywhere. You absorb them if you are lucky enough to grow up in the rooms where they are absorbed. If you were not in those rooms? You hand in something honest and get filtered out for not sounding the part.
That is the whole system. Start to finish.
Now let us talk about what a CV actually is once you strip the ceremony away. It is a document that proves you know how to write a document. That is the test. Not whether you can do the job. Whether you can perform the ritual of describing the job in the correct language with the correct layout and the correct selection of adjectives that everyone already knows mean absolutely nothing.
Every CV chants the same chorus:
Motivated. Dynamic. Results-driven. Passionate. Hardworking. Reliable. Detail-oriented. Team player. Fast learner. Natural leader. Excellent communicator. Proactive self-starter.
A proactive self-starter. On a document someone else helped them write. Claiming to be a fast learner in a format copied from a template. Listing detail-oriented in a file where the margins are slightly off.
Nobody questions this. This is just what you do. You write the magic words. You submit. The system accepts them because it was built to accept them. Not to evaluate them. Not to verify them. Just to receive them and sort accordingly.
Real capability is what someone does at 4pm on a Thursday when the project is falling apart and nobody is watching. You cannot “passionate and hardworking” your way through a real moment. But you can absolutely write it, paste it, send it, and land the job over someone who actually was those things but did not know the formatting game existed.
And then something happened. Or something completely deranged happened. Depending on your perspective.
AI arrived.
“Hey, write me a stunning CV.” Sure. Here you go. You are apparently a visionary results-driven leader with a track record of transforming cross-functional teams and delivering stakeholder-aligned outcomes at scale.
Ten million people did this simultaneously.
“Hey, read me these CVs.” Sure. Oh. Interesting. They all appear to be visionary results-driven leaders with a track record of transforming cross-functional teams and delivering stakeholder-aligned outcomes at scale.
Congratulations. You have built a machine that interviews itself.
An AI trained on the internet, which includes Reddit, LinkedIn, and several other corners of the web we will draw a polite curtain over, is now writing professional profiles that another AI then evaluates. The human is somewhere in the middle, entirely ceremonial, wondering why they are not getting callbacks while their AI authored superhero origin story bounces off a recruitment algorithm that was trained on the exact same data.
Every candidate now sounds like they were bitten by a radioactive spreadsheet. Formerly mild-mannered delivery driver. Now:
Strategic Last-Mile Logistics Transformation Specialist with Demonstrated Excellence in Dynamic Route Optimisation and Stakeholder Delight.
The recruiter’s AI reads five hundred of these. Shortlists ten by keyword density. Forwards them to a human who reads three before the meeting starts, picks the cleanest formatting, and schedules an interview.
This is the pipeline. This is what evolution produced.
Now ghosting. Let us do this properly because most articles about ghosting in recruitment are written by people who have never felt it from the receiving end and that shows every single time.
You apply for a job. You put real time into it. You rewrite the covering letter twice. You check the attachment before sending. You hit send.
Nothing.
Follow-up. Nothing. You check the listing. Still live. Another week. Still nothing.
And your brain starts filling the silence with its own answers.
Maybe the email bounced. Maybe the attachment failed. Maybe the letter came across desperate. Maybe you misjudged yourself completely and this quiet nothing is the universe confirming what you quietly suspected.
That last thought is the one that does the damage. Not rejection. Silence. Because silence carries no information. It just sits there and lets your brain run the worst version of the answer on repeat, every morning, until that version starts to feel like the truth about who you are.
Let us name what that actually is. Not a slight. Not a minor inconvenience. Repeated, sustained psychological erosion. The job search is already one of the most stressful experiences a person goes through. Studies on unemployment and rejection document clear links to depression, anxiety, disrupted sleep, and collapsing sense of worth. We know this. The data has been there for decades. And embedded right in the centre of the process, normalised, treated as standard practice, is a behaviour that makes all of that measurably worse.
Ghosting does not just leave someone without an answer. It leaves them without any signal at all. And the human mind, left without signal, does not stay neutral. It fills the gap with fear. Every silence is another small deposit into an account that eventually reads: I am not worth responding to.
Do that to someone fifty times across a six month job search and then tell me it is just admin overhead.
Here is the part nobody writes about. The part everyone in HR and recruitment knows and nobody says in a professional context.
Sometimes the silence is a power trip.
Not always. Not consciously sadistic. But sometimes. That inbox is a queue of people who need something from you, and choosing not to respond is a small moment of control in a role that is mostly reactive administration. A desk level hit. The delete without reply has a completely different energy to the one you simply have not got round to yet. Anyone who has worked in recruitment for more than six months knows exactly what that energy feels like and exactly where it comes from.
“We get thousands of emails a day” is the defence that always arrives here. Fine. And if that volume is genuinely unmanageable, then the system is broken and needs to be replaced. Those are the two options. Either the silence is a choice or the workload is proof that the entire structure has failed. Neither of those options ends with “so it is acceptable to run a slow psychological operation on people who were brave enough to apply.”
Then there is the experience paradox. And the entry level position scam. And the age filter that nobody will say out loud. These three things are the same con running in sequence and it is time someone strung them together.
School leaver applies for entry level position. Job requires two years of experience. The school leaver is seventeen. Where exactly was this experience meant to come from? Secondary school? The two week work placement where they filed things, made tea, and the company claimed it back on a government scheme?
And speaking of government schemes. A significant number of these entry level positions are subsidised. Kickstart. Apprenticeship levy. Various programmes designed to open doors for young people entering the labour market. The company takes the funding. Posts the role with a junior title and junior pay. Quietly lists three to five years experience in the requirements. Filters out the people the funding was designed for. Hires someone who already has the experience and costs half what a proper salary would. Nobody audits this hard enough to care. The actual school leaver is still on the pavement outside wondering what they did wrong.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, something equally absurd.
The same system that demands experience also quietly decides that too much of it is a problem. People over a certain age find that the callbacks stop. Not officially. Nothing in writing. Just: not quite the right fit for our culture. Culture fit. The most legally untouchable phrase in professional HR vocabulary. It means almost anything and can be proved to mean almost nothing. What it often means, though nobody says it directly, is: you are older than we imagined, your salary expectations are higher, your questions are more difficult, and we want someone whose inexperience we can shape.
So. Too young: not enough experience. Too old: too much experience. Somewhere in the middle there is a narrow, unwritten band that the system approves of, and everyone outside it can apply into the void indefinitely.
Here is where we land. And it is not comfortable.
We need to find another way. A completely different way. Because what currently exists is not a hiring system with rough edges. It is a machine that was built to serve the people who already had access, that now runs on AI generating content for AI to evaluate, that ghosts the people it decides are not worth acknowledging, that traps young people in a circular logic loop before they have even started, that filters out older workers through language polished enough to avoid legal challenge, and that calls all of this professionalism.
It is a joke. It is genuinely, structurally, a joke.
And anyone who says the mental damage is exaggerated, that people are overreacting, that they should toughen up and take the silence as feedback and move on?
Oh, you are too sensitive.
Right. Sure.
Knock knock.
Who is there?
An AI trained on seventeen billion web pages including Reddit, four separate anime forums, and a concerning volume of LinkedIn content.
An AI trained on seventeen billion web pages including Reddit, four separate anime forums, and a concerning volume of LinkedIn content who?
I am pleased to inform you that based on your impressive profile and your results-driven approach to synergistic outcomes, you have been shortlisted as a motivated self-starter with exceptional attention to detail. Could you please tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership in a cross-functional environment under pressure?
I literally just knocked on the door.
Excellent. That shows initiative. We will be in touch.
[silence]
Stop teaching people how to write CVs.
Because the CV is F****** Dead, the system that runs it is broken beyond comedy, and the first person who builds something honest to replace it will not just change recruitment.
They will give an entire generation permission to stop feeling like the silence was their fault.
