It’s rather fascinating, and very informative, to compare the response of HR professionals to this YouTuber’s expose of how HR departments are auto-rejecting tens of thousands of resumes from people attempting to apply for jobs to the way in which professional scientists responded to Probability Zero.
I found hundreds of examples of ATS companies, HR news outlets, and recruiter influencers across LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube all sharing this story – oftentimes using it as evidence to sell their own resume-writing products or AI-driven hiring software.
You can read my original article if you’re interested in the details, but LONG story short:
- I argued that the Enhancv survey was too small and heavily biased.
- I argued that their definition of “auto-rejection” was too narrow, as it did not include situations where “knockout” questions, fit scores, and other criteria forced ATS to auto-reject resumes.
- I found evidence from government testimonies, university research, employment lawyers, and journalists proving that ATS do, in fact, auto-reject candidates for pointless, and often illegal, reasons.
- And I argued that some companies and HR personnel might knowingly be using these broken hiring tools as a legal scapegoat to avoid getting sued for employment crimes.
The initial response to my video was modest and predictable…
But then… everything changed when the LinkedIn recruiter influencers attacked…
A week later, I started to receive dozens, and then eventually hundreds, of notifications from HR professionals, LinkedIn “Top Voices,” and recruiter influencers responding to my video/article about ATS auto-rejection.
However, virtually none of them were making substantive or evidence-based arguments against my video.
Instead, they were resorting to name-calling, personal attacks, and demonstrably untrue (and likely defamatory) accusations of me being a fraud or a scammer.
I had become the victim of a social media dogpile.
This is always what the so-called “professionals” do when they can’t hide behind their credentials and the entire basis of their field is factually called into question. It makes no difference if the field is science, business, sports, technology, or entertainment; the first and foremost priority is to contain and then attempt to disqualify the perceived threat.
None of the HR professionals even watched the video, just as the vast majority of the PhDs, grad students, biology majors, and lesser evolutionists haven’t read Probability Zero or read any of my science papers. That’s not a complaint, just to be clear and preempt any more false accusations, that’s very predictable behavior on the part of the professionals.
They’re “too busy.”. It’s “not even worth it.” They “can’t be bothered.” You don’t even need to know what the subject is to know exactly what they’re going to say and what their excuses will be, even as they dedicated dozens of hours to making videos, hunting down potentially disqualifying information, and preparing “debunkings” that don’t even begin to address the very thing to which they are supposedly responding.
Which is why you can always be confident that you’re on the right track when the professionals in any field retreat from substantive dialectic and rely instead upon irrelevant rhetorical attempts to disqualify both the argument and the people presenting it.