The Year Long Interview

No one tells you that getting hired today can feel like a full time job with no salary and almost no human contact. You can have the track record, the case studies, the referrals, and the proof of impact. You can have built products, led teams, generated revenue, and shaped brands that still exist. Yet none of that guarantees a conversation. The first interaction you have is not with a hiring manager. It is with a filter.

In many industries, job searches now stretch close to a year. Not because talent has disappeared, but because hiring has transformed from a relationship into a system. Applicant tracking software scans for keywords. AI tools rewrite résumés to match job descriptions often written or optimized by other AI tools. Candidates tailor their applications to satisfy parsing logic rather than to express who they are. Bots optimize for compliance, and humans adjust themselves to survive the bots. Somewhere inside that loop, the human dimension fades.

You begin to edit yourself, nuance disappears. Achievements are flattened into bullet points that can be scored. Skills are emphasized not because they define you, but because the algorithm expects them. You become searchable instead of knowable. On the other side, companies rely on dashboards that generate shortlists automatically. Personality scores are derived from pattern matching. Video interviews are analyzed for tone and facial movement. Efficiency improves and risk appears to decrease. The system feels rational and scalable.

It also feels empty.

Hiring used to be a mutual evaluation between two people exploring whether they could build something together. Now it often feels like two AI agents negotiating on behalf of humans who may never meet. The system rarely rejects you directly. It simply never advances you. You become a data point that did not rank highly enough in a category you were never told existed.

The most damaging part is not the waiting. It is the slow erosion of confidence. When months stretch into a year, you begin to question not just your fit for a role, but your own worth. You assume you are invisible because you lack something essential. In reality, you may simply lack the right phrasing.

This is not a failure of capability. It is a design failure.

We have outsourced one of the most human processes to systems built for efficiency rather than understanding. The dashboards look clean and the metrics improve, but somewhere in the background two people who could have built something meaningful never get the chance to meet.

-Stanley Vaganov, Brutally Human