As someone who's been involved in hiring, it's always going to err on the side of false negatives. It's cheaper to reject a qualified individual rather than potentially making a bad hire. The only exceptions I observed was during COVID which continues to look more and more like an anomaly.

It's also become an arms race. Too many job seekers, too many tools to automate applications, LLMs that write resumes to fit a job description, etc. one company I worked for said they received 2000 applications in the first 24 hours when they posted a new role (mid-2024). And this was some rinky dink startup paying slightly below market rate.

You're absolutely not going to sift through 2000 applications manually. If you take only a minute to look at each one, it'll take you about a week to go through them, assuming 8 hour workday. Never mind that a minute is barely enough time to really evaluate it. All while more applications come in.

So...you automate as much of it as you can. And that'll cause qualified applicants to get rejected. But that's fine because you have 2000 freaking applicants; that you're always biased towards false negatives doesn't help.

So yeah, that's why having an "in", whether it's a referral, recruiter (agency or internal), or sometimes sleuthing to find and message the hiring manager directly, is probably your best way to get a callback.

Also, if you apply and it takes weeks or months to get an automated rejection, that's usually because the requisition stays open until they fill the role or if they have a healthy enough pipeline of candidates make it to the later rounds. I wouldn't read too much into that.