Somewhere in Chichester right now, a genuinely brilliant candidate is being rejected by a computer before a single human opens their CV. Not because they’re unqualified. Because a piece of software decided, in roughly half a second, that they weren’t a “match”.
If your shortlists have been looking thinner than usual, AI screening is very likely the culprit. Not the local talent pool. We see it every week, and it’s why more Chichester employers are coming back to a recruiter who still reads CVs properly.
How AI Screening Is Filtering Out Your Best Candidates
Nearly every major job board and applicant tracking system (ATS) now runs CVs through automated filtering before a person sees them. It’s fast. It’s cheap. And it is nowhere near as clever as the software companies selling it would have you believe.
The Keyword Trap
Most ATS platforms scan for exact keywords lifted straight from the job advert. Get the phrasing wrong, and you lose the interview, even if you’ve been doing the job for a decade.
The data on this is genuinely eye-opening:
· Some studies suggest ATS software can screen out as many as 88% of otherwise well-qualified candidates purely on keyword mismatches.
· On average, over half the keywords in a typical job advert are missing from even a strong, relevant CV.
· The vast majority of rejected CVs contain the right experience. They simply describe it differently to the job ad.
Worth a note of caution too: some of the scarier ATS statistics doing the rounds online trace back to old marketing claims with no real research behind them. But strip those out, and the independent studies still agree on one thing. Keyword-only screening quietly punishes good candidates for using their own words.
The Location Guessing Game
Some systems auto-reject candidates based on postcode, estimated commute time, or a “remote” tag ticked by accident on a job board. A candidate living five minutes from Chichester city centre can be filtered out for looking “too far away” on paper, simply because a form field was set up badly.
When Criteria Becomes a Blunt Instrument
Rigid filters, exact job titles, precise years of experience, specific software named word for word, reject people who would be genuinely excellent in the role but happen to phrase things slightly differently on their CV. AI doesn’t do nuance. It does yes or no. Most great hires live somewhere in the grey area in between.
If You’re the One Applying
It’s worth flipping this round, because candidates can work with it too. Before you fire off another application into the void, ask yourself a few honest questions:
· Are you actually suitable for this specific role, or just broadly qualified?
· Is the location realistic, commute included, not just theoretically possible?
· Does the criteria genuinely fit what you want from your next move, or are you applying out of habit?
· Do you have the core skills the role needs, described in the same language the advert uses?
Answer honestly, and mirror the advert’s own wording where you can. It won’t guarantee an interview. But it takes you out of the pile the software throws away automatically, which is more than most applicants manage.
Why the Best People Get Missed, and What Chichester Recruitment Does Differently
At Chichester Recruitment, we think hiring should be about people, not pattern matching. Every CV that lands with us gets read by a human being, not just scanned by a bot looking for magic words. Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
Are They Actually Suitable, or Just Keyword-Matched?
We look past the buzzwords to the substance underneath. A candidate might write “led the finance function” instead of “financial management”, and software would miss the connection entirely. We wouldn’t. Real suitability is about judgement and fit, not vocabulary.
Right Skills, Wrong Postcode?
We know Chichester and the surrounding villages properly, not as a set of postcode boundaries on a filter. We know which candidates are genuinely local, which are happy to commute in from Bognor, Midhurst, or Petworth, and which “remote” applicants would relocate for the right professional services role. An algorithm doesn’t know any of that. We do, because we’re based here too.
Does the Criteria Really Fit What the Role Needs?
Sometimes a job spec asks for five years’ experience when the role actually needs judgement, reliability, and the ability to get stuck in from day one. We push back gently on criteria that exists purely out of habit, and we help clients focus on what genuinely matters for the job, not what looks tidy on a spec sheet.
Skills on Paper vs Skills That Matter
A CV is a summary, not the whole story. We speak to every candidate before we ever put them forward, so we know whether their skills genuinely translate to your business, not just whether their CV happens to tick the right boxes for a bot.
Why Chichester Businesses Keep Choosing Us
For permanent roles in professional services across Chichester, that human touch is exactly why local employers come back to us time and again. We’re not a job board running silently in the background. We’re recruiters who actually know this city, this market, and the people in it, and we think that still counts for something.
Talk to Chichester’s Recruitment Experts
If AI screening is quietly filtering out your best candidates, the fix isn’t a cleverer CV template or another round of keyword stuffing. It’s working with a recruiter who actually reads the CV.
Talk to Chichester Recruitment, and let’s find the people the robots missed.
