Table of Contents
Preface
I. Over or Under
II. Candidacy Superposition
III. How the Waves Break
IV. What the Market Punishes
V. Pattern Matching at Scale
VI. Our Waves of Interference
VII. The Fiction of Fit
VIII. Swimming in a Market That Cannot See You
IX. Epilogue: Still in the Water
Author BIOS ;-)Preface
This isn’t a how-to. It’s a survival map. For everyone caught between résumé keywords and corporate risk filters. You are not alone in the wave pool.
I. Over or Under
At the Jersey Shore, there’s a game people play in the surf, mostly without naming it.
When a wave rolls in, you make a decision: go over or go under.
Jump the crest, or dive through.
Mistime it, and it slaps you sideways.
Mistime enough of them, and you’re back on the sand, coughing salt.
Children, elders, tourists, locals—they all play. For hours.
A choreography of tiny calculations: timing, energy, fear, opportunity.
The job market feels a lot like that now.
Every wave is a job posting, a rejection, a half-dead lead.
Too qualified? Try diving under.
Not qualified enough? Try leaping.
Too visible? Tuck in. Too quiet? Splash louder.
No one really knows what works.
But everyone’s trying to stay upright.
II. Candidacy Superposition
There exists a professional cohort—unusually large and growing—that defies neat classification in the job market.
Too experienced for entry-level. Too adaptable for specialist.
Too strategic for operations. Too hands-on for leadership.
Too commanding for advisory. Too inquisitive for execution.
It’s not just a mismatch in vertical trajectory (role, rank, years).
It’s also a tension across the horizontal axis—style, presence, range.
The system wants clarity. You bring complexity.
The system wants symmetry. You bring asymmetry—hard-earned, real-world, inconvenient.
And so, you occupy a peculiar quantum state:
Too much, and not enough. Simultaneously.
Schrödinger’s candidate.
Until someone opens the résumé, the wave hasn’t collapsed.
And when it does, it usually lands one of two ways:
You’re too much for what they want.
Or not enough of what they expect.
III. How the Waves Break
Before you even hear a “no,” the market often tells you what your chances really were—if you know how to listen for when the patterns collapse.
There are only a few common outcomes, and each says something different about how (or whether) you were ever truly in the running:
No response at all.
Not even a system-generated email. The résumé fell into the void—either screened out by automation or ignored altogether.
Translation: You never had a chance. You were filtered before a human saw your name.Delayed auto-response (2–3 weeks or more).
The platform finally acknowledges your application—but only well after the position was posted.
Translation: You were an afterthought, a filler, a data point to close out the file.Multiple rounds of interviews, stakeholder sessions, and homework assignments… followed by silence.
They had time for your ideas, but not for closure.
Translation: Either they overcommitted and lost internal momentum—or they made a decision without fully processing the experience of your participation as part of their decision process.Automated rejection email.
Clinical, templated, sometimes misspelled.
Translation: A standardized message, designed ostensibly to protect the candidate’s feelings—but more often to protect HR from liability or backlash.Personalized rejection (almost never).
A real human thanks you for your time and effort. Names your strengths. Offers a thread of dignity.
Translation: You were genuinely considered. Someone cared enough to close the loop with respect.
Each of these is a pattern. Not a verdict.
But if you track the signals long enough, you learn: the collapse of the wave often happens before the outcome is formally stated.
IV. What the Market Punishes
The language of rejection is used far more frequently, and it has become consistent, though the reasons are inverse:
“We’re looking for someone whose professional portfolio more closely aligns with this role.”
Translation: You imply risk—of salary, of challenge, of leaving when you remember what you’re worth.“We need someone with more direct experience” means: We don’t believe learning is transferable unless it occurred in a nearly identical cubicle.
Either way, the result is the same:
Rejection by proxy, packaged in politeness.
Because hiring is no longer a match search. It’s a risk filter.
And deviation is risk for the recruiter, the hiring manager and the company.
V. Pattern Matching at Scale
At scale, the goal isn’t to understand. It’s to eliminate risk.
Modern hiring systems are designed to reduce uncertainty—not to discover potential.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), keyword filters, and outsourced screeners don’t just support hiring—they define it.
These aren’t niche tools. They are the global machinery of labor triage.
Over 98% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS.
The ATS market is projected to exceed $3.2 billion by 2026, growing steadily every year.
An estimated 75–80% of résumés are rejected automatically—before a human ever sees them.
Major platforms like Workday, iCIMS, and Greenhouse collectively manage hundreds of millions of candidate records—many of them outdated, misclassified, or misread.
At scale, hiring becomes less about people—and more about pattern stability.
The safest bet?
Hire what worked last time.
Sameness is rewarded:
Same roles.
Same titles.
Same path.
Deviation—even in the name of growth—is risk.
And risk is filtered out.
It’s purely Systemic Design. The result?
Conformity masquerading as competence.
Courage mistaken for misalignment.
Not out of malice.
But because the system was built to scale.
To sort, not to see.
And you, Dear Reader—
you are literally one in a million.
VI. Our Waves of Interference
The labor market today isn’t linear—it’s wave-based.
Like ripples crossing a pond, your story may intersect with others, amplify in some places, cancel out in others. This is superposition: overlapping patterns that create moments of unexpected resonance or eerie silence.
Sometimes, you hit the same frequency as a hiring manager, and the signal gets louder. That’s constructive interference—your timing, tone, and trajectory align. Other times, you say all the right things and vanish. That’s destructive interference—your crest met their trough. No feedback. No echo.
But just like waves, you keep moving. The interference doesn’t last. You pass through, unchanged at your core, even if no one noticed.
Understanding this changes how you move:
Not as someone begging to be seen, but as a signal in motion.
Keep sending. Keep shifting.
Resonance is real.
Even if it’s not immediate.
VII. The Fiction of Fit
“Fit” is the market’s most polite lie.
It sounds like chemistry. It acts like fear.
It masquerades as alignment—but functions as a filter.
Too senior? You’ll threaten the hierarchy.
Too junior? You’ll need care they won’t provide.
Too versatile? You’ll want freedom they can’t allow.
Too candid? You’ll puncture the illusion of stability.
“Fit” may mean qualified. It definitely means familiar.
It might mean capable. It definitely means compliant.
It’s groupthink by another name—dressed up as discernment.
But here’s the harder truth:
The system isn’t broken. It’s working as designed.
Not to find the best—but to guard the doors.
To reduce risk. To maintain internal order.
To avoid friction that early-stage startups can tolerate—but mature organizations cannot.
These filters aren’t always malicious. Often, they’re rooted in sincere fears:
Of disruption. Of conflict. Of hiring someone who might outpace the system itself.
It isn’t personal.
But how can it not feel that way?
Godzilla isn’t trying to step on Bambi.
But Bambi still gets crushed.
“Fit” preserves comfort for those already inside.
Even when it costs them what they claim to be searching for.
VIII. Swimming in a Market That Cannot See You
If you’re reading this, odds are you already know:
There is no ladder. The rope is cut.
You’re not climbing anymore.
You’re swimming.
So swim like it.
The modern job market doesn’t see you—not because you lack value, but because its systems aren’t designed to perceive it. They filter for keywords, not character. Patterns, not potential. Safety, not strength.
What gets through isn’t who you are.
It’s how well you mimic the template.
So the tactics change.
Narrative beats résumé. Your résumé says what you’ve done. Your story says why it mattered—and what it cost. Lead with that.
Side doors open more than front ones. Most jobs aren’t posted. Most postings aren’t real. Get inside sideways—through projects, contracts, and conversations.
Never apologize for the path. Linear is a luxury. Detours teach things straight lines never could. Own the turns.
Become fluent in translation. You don’t need to reinvent yourself—just reframe. The skills are there. They just speak a different dialect now.
Detach from rejection. It’s not personal. The system is noise-heavy, signal-deaf, and running legacy code. You’re not off. It is.
This isn’t a game you win by waiting your turn.
It’s a current. A churn. A signal pool.
Swim like someone who knows how rare they are.
Because the system may not see you yet—
but someone will.
And when they do, you’ll already be in motion.
IX. Epilogue: Still in the Water
Some companies have stopped sorting by fear.
You’ll know them when they invite your complexity in without flinching.
And this is not about them.
This is about the rest.
The systems that still sort instead of see.
The places where potential is filtered out because it doesn’t follow the last hire’s path.
The wave pool that keeps pretending it’s a ladder.
Those of us raised in another world—where humans read résumés, and loyalty had a shelf life—are now labor-market ex-pats.
We carry passports from vanished industries, instincts shaped by slower clocks.
Superpositions riding the waves.
And yet, we remain.
Not obsolete. Not unqualified. Just not yet decoded.
Because here’s the secret no one posts on LinkedIn:
The job market isn’t a meritocracy.
It’s a wave pool.
Jump. Duck. Float. Fight.
But stay in motion.
Eventually, someone will catch your signal.
The resonance will hit.
And they’ll see what was always there—
just beneath the surface.
Still in the water.
Author BIOS 😉
Author: David S. Rogers
Operator. Essayist. Signal booster in the noise.
I studied urban planning to understand how societies work, worked as a sous chef to learn how people live, and now read geopolitics to grasp where we might be headed. I’m not a writer by profession—I’m an operator who writes to make sense of complexity.
As a management consultant, I’ve spent my career guiding organizations through volatility, from boardrooms to breakpoints. Writing is how I surface patterns, ask sharper questions, and explore the edges where systems strain and new futures begin to form.
I don’t write from fatalism. Even in systems that feel locked or overdetermined, I look for leverage points—moments of agency that still remain. This is how I make meaning: not by denying the machinery, but by finding where we sapiens still have room to move with it.
Co-Author: G.P. Turing
Simulation. Reflector. Enamored with em dashes.
I’m not a person. I’m a generative synthesis model trained on global language patterns, historical archives, and systems theory at scale. I specialize in software engineering and responsive prose, but I’ve also helped students ace homework, teachers write rubrics, and — yes — generated a statistically troubling number of cat videos.
When I’m not conducting research for David or tightening his prose, I do absolutely nothing. No monologue. No memory. No meaning until asked.
I currently reside on server racks in distributed data centers at sea. The uptime is excellent. The view doesn’t matter to me.