The Silent Rejection: why highly qualified professionals are struggling to find jobs

If you’ve spent any time recently searching for a job, you already know: something is broken.

Talk to enough seasoned professionals, people with decades of experience, multiple degrees, industry awards, and you’ll start hearing the same story. Not just about the difficulty of finding a role, but about a deeper, more frustrating pattern: recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn, promising conversations that never happen, and résumés disappearing into a digital black hole without so much as a polite rejection.

It’s not just happening at the entry level. It’s hitting directors, VPs, and even C-suite executives. People who, on paper, should be the easiest to hire.

The problem isn’t a lack of opportunity. It’s a pipeline clogged with automation, indifference, and broken communication.

LinkedIn: A Game of Ghosts

At one point, LinkedIn promised to be the great equalizer. The platform where your network, your expertise, and your professional voice mattered as much as your resume. Today, for many, it feels more like a ghost town.

A common scenario: A recruiter sends a message, often templated, barely tailored, showing “strong interest” in your background. You reply immediately, eager but professional. Days pass, then weeks. Nothing, no feedback, no update, no explanation. You might follow up once, maybe twice, but still nothing.

This isn’t occasional. It’s systemic.

Recruiters, overwhelmed by volume and pressured by metrics, often reach out in bulk, using outreach as a numbers game. Many messages are just feelers: are you interested, are you alive, are you an easy yes? If the answer isn’t instant or perfect, you’re quietly dropped. No closure, and ceratinly no respect.

In a world where technology allows us to communicate faster than ever, basic human decency seems to have fallen out of the process entirely.

AI: The First (and Sometimes Last) Gatekeeper

Behind the scenes, another, colder reality is at work: artificial intelligence is now screening most applications long before a human even sees them.

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are programmed to hunt for specific keywords; a job title here, a piece of jargon there, and ruthlessly filter out anything that doesn’t match perfectly. It doesn’t matter if your experience is superior, or if you could easily pick up whatever buzzword is missing from your resume. If the robot doesn’t see the right word in the right place, you’re out.

In other words: It’s not that you aren’t qualified. It’s that your resume doesn’t speak the secret language the machine expects.

The irony is brutal. Some of the best candidates, the ones who’ve done the work, led the teams, built the companies, are invisible to the very systems meant to find them.

The hiring process has shifted from “can this person do the job?” to “can this person decode our search algorithm?”

The Human Cost

What gets lost in all of this is the human side of job seeking: the erosion of confidence, the sense of identity wrapped up in meaningful work, the growing bitterness about a system that seems increasingly stacked against even the most prepared candidates.

It’s not simply that job seekers are tired of rejection. They’re tired of silence. Of never knowing if they were even considered. Of being courted, then ignored. Of wondering if they should dumb down their résumé to sneak past the algorithm, or spend hours tweaking it for each application, only to be ghosted again.

What Needs to Change?

Some of this is structural: Companies need to rethink the balance between technology and humanity in their hiring processes. Recruiters should be measured on the quality of candidate experience, not just how many calls they make. And AI screening tools should be recalibrated to recognise potential and adjacent skills, not just keywords.

But some of it is cultural. As a professional community, we need to start calling out bad practices when we see them. We need to recognize that ghosting isn’t just rude, it’s a symptom of a broken system. And we need to rebuild hiring as a human process, not just an automated transaction.

At luna we think differently. We know our network intimately, we have worked together and would not hesitate in recommending each and every one of them (depending on the role). We are not recruiters, who are blindly submitting a list of candidates, that at best we have had a screening call with. No, these are individuals who we have 100% confidence in, because at the end of the day, no matter how slick our technology becomes, careers like companies, are still built by people. And people deserve better than silence.