The needs of man drive him forward, passion, even more so. Here is one such tale, the account of how I went about to try and pursue my occupational better half.

I’m a music lover who’s convinced that music makes people’s life better, and like most regular guys I have a dream job and I’m very particular about the company I fervently want to work for and the role I want to play. Being qualified enough, what’s stopping me from getting this dream job? The answer lies in competition.

For a company of 1200+ people with a 5.4 ratio of followers of @Spotifyjobs / Spotify’s workforce and 107 openings at the time written (8% increase of the payroll) is easy to understand that the company is facing a huge growth pain and that I’m just one over thousands of applicants for these openings. We’ve all been here; hence we know that to get a job this colossal, my application needs to stand out from the rest. And with my adrenaline triggered, I chose to do exactly that.

In order to excel, all I have to do is overcome the “recruiting intelligence system”. These systems are used with the intention of making the process easier for the companies and for the job seekers as well, and it sounds awesome, the problem is that with all this automation and uniformity comes… standardization of the candidates and the difficulty to shine beyond the lines of a resume displayed on a computer screen. Being on the job hunt after an MBA, this is a concern some of my colleagues and I have faced lately.

This Harvard Business Review article by Peter Capelli addressed one of the ways the mentioned system could go wrong with the following:

“One bad way has been to screw down the requirements on the existing applicant tracking system to screen out all but a few candidates. It’s almost impossible to do that with any precision, and a likely consequence is overreliance on credentials or experience that are not all that relevant to the job.”

This error is especially likely to happen in results driven roles that involve a great amount of soft skills like Marketing or Business Creation where rare capabilities like creativity might be better perceived through face to face interaction, so I would compute in this loss not only the cost of bad hiring but unquantifiable cost of the missed unusual but ideal talent. Vile system, I’m onto you.