Every screening tool handles some kinds of career badly. Here are the six you will meet, and what to do about each.
1. Gaps in employment
Gaps usually mean caring for someone, illness, moving country, studying, or a redundancy round. They tell you very little about how someone will perform, and quite a lot about their personal circumstances. That makes them one of the worst things to screen on — and one of the easiest, because a gap is trivially easy to calculate from two dates.
What to do: leave gap length out of your rules completely. If how recent someone's skills are genuinely matters, score that directly instead. It is not the same thing, and only one of the two is about the job.
2. Career changers
Their relevant experience is in the wrong place — a project, a course, volunteer work, a side business — while their job history points somewhere else. Any rule that weights experience will bury them.
What to do: after screening, search the rejected pile for your two or three most important skills, searching the full text rather than the fields. Career changers appear immediately, and they are often the best value in the pile, because nobody else is looking at them either.
3. Contractors and agency workers
Lots of short jobs looks like job-hopping to any rule about staying put. Worse, two contracts running at the same time often get read as duplicate jobs — sometimes producing twenty years of experience inside a ten-year career.
What to do: before accepting a low score for anyone with more than four jobs in five years, look at their extracted work history by hand. It is usually a reading fault, not a judgement.
4. Internal candidates and referrals
They often send a thin CV, because they assume everyone knows the context. The software does not.
What to do: screen them outside the automated pile entirely. Do not let a two-page formality decide against someone whose work your team has already seen.
5. People from other countries
Employer names the tool has never seen carry no signal. Qualifications do not match anything. Dates are written differently. Names written in another script sometimes break the extraction completely.
Every one of those is a mechanical disadvantage that has nothing to do with ability, and they stack up.
What to do: never give points for well-known employers or universities — that is mostly a measure of geography. And check reading quality specifically on this group. It is one of the most common places where a technical fault becomes an unfair outcome.
6. Very senior people
Twenty-year careers overflow. Tools cut them short, and what survives is often the recent management summary rather than the hands-on detail underneath.
What to do: for senior jobs, stop rewarding total years, and read the top band by hand. At that level you should be reading everyone anyway.
What all six have in common
Every one is a career that does not fit the shape the software expects: one country, one straight line, no breaks. The disadvantage is mechanical rather than a judgement about the person — and it does not fall evenly across people. That is why this lesson belongs as much to Module 11 as it does here.
Build in one extra search
Every time you screen, search the rejected pile for your top two skills. Five minutes. It is the single most effective protection against over-filtering in this whole course.