When a position sits empty for months on end, can it be that there are truly no qualified candidates out there? Or are other factors at play keeping skilled applicants from landing the open jobs in their fields?

Those are the questions that brought one manager to the subreddit r/RecruitingHell, where users are invited to post about their worst experiences on either side of the hiring process. The manager who had waited months for a role on their team to be filled, with the human resources department telling them that “the pipeline was thin” and no applicants were passing their screening.

“Last month I made a new email, changed my name, tweaked the dates, and applied to my own req with essentially my own CV,” they explained. But even with “the CV of the person who wrote the job description,” the poster said they were “auto-rejected in six minutes.”

Why would such a clearly capable candidate be rejected? According to the user, it came down to a stylistic choice. The role required experience with the software React.js, which many refer to simply as “React”—but the screening process was filtering out any applicant whose résumé didn’t include “React.js” verbatim.

“We have been rejecting every qualified applicant since April over punctuation, while I sat in weekly meetings being told the market was tough,” the poster wrote. “If you’ve been getting instant rejections from places you’re clearly qualified for, it is very possibly not you.”

The original post is no longer live (the author’s Reddit account is apparently suspended), but it’s making the rounds on other social platforms.

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