Work, Reconsidered: The Job Market Isn’t a Meritocracy

Maybe we should stop pretending it is...

Empowered in a vibrant cityscape, a confident professional dons a superhero cape, symbolizing a bold reimagining of work-life balance in "Work, Reconsidered."

We talk about getting hired as though it is the predictable result of doing all the right things. Build the right resume. Network. Tailor your application. Prepare for the interview. Research the company. Follow up. Be confident, but not arrogant. Be enthusiastic, but not desperate. Make sure they know you want the job, but don't look like you need the job. And apparently, according to one piece of viral job-search advice making the rounds recently, don't show up holding an iced coffee. Follow enough of the rules and eventually you will get hired. Except that isn't really how hiring works.

Qualifications matter. Experience matters. Preparation and effort matter. I have spent more than a decade in recruiting, and I would never tell someone that what they do during a job search doesn't affect their chances. Of course it does. There are things candidates can learn, improve, and approach differently. But you can influence your chances without controlling the outcome. Hiring involves qualifications, access, money, networks, timing, opportunity, interview performance, subjective preferences, bias, and yes, sometimes "luck". When we pretend it is purely a meritocracy, it becomes very easy to look at the person who got the job and assume they did everything right, then look at the person who didn't and start searching for what they did wrong.

I see this most clearly in the way we talk about unemployment. Candidates who have been out of work for more than a few months are still asked to explain why. Employment gaps are still treated as something potentially suspicious. And in 2026, I genuinely do not understand how we can look at a gap somewhere between 2020 and today and automatically decide it tells us something negative about the person who has it. We lived through a global pandemic, mass layoffs, business closures, caregiving disruptions, illness, industry contractions, hiring booms followed by layoffs, and major changes in where and how people work. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics documented just how extraordinary the disruption to employment was during the pandemic. Yet somehow, "Why haven't you been working?" is still treated like a perfectly reasonable way to assess someone's value as a candidate.

This isn't only something frustrated job seekers think is happening. Research has found that the circumstances and length of employment breaks can influence how recruiters evaluate candidates, and field research involving thousands of applications has found that the way employment gaps appear on a resume can affect callbacks. That creates a pretty awful cycle. Someone loses their job, spends months and months trying to find another one, and eventually the amount of time they have spent looking becomes another reason someone hesitates to hire them or even screen them. At some point, the question quietly shifts from "Can this person do the job?" to "Why hasn't someone else hired them yet?" I think we need to be much more willing to challenge that question.

A woman stands at the edge of a vast chasm with a briefcase, gazing towards a distant city skyline bathed in the dramatic hues of sunset. She appears poised to navigate the daunting path ahead, symbolizing courage and determination in the face of challenges.

There are a lot of reasons a talented person can remain unemployed. They can repeatedly make it to the final round and not be selected. Their industry can contract. Their network may not open the same doors someone else's does. A role can disappear halfway through the interview process. An internal candidate can emerge. Budgets change. Hiring freezes happen. Someone else may simply interview better. And sometimes there isn't a satisfying explanation. Sometimes things just don't work out. That doesn't mean we need to manufacture a deficiency in the candidate to explain the outcome.

We also don't talk nearly enough about "luck", probably because people hear the word and assume it takes something away from the person who got the job. If you ask me... it doesn't. Two things can be true. You can be incredibly qualified, work hard, prepare for every interview, and still benefit from being in the right place at the right time. Maybe someone in your network knew the hiring manager. Maybe your previous employer carried weight with the person reviewing your resume. Maybe you happened to apply when the company desperately needed exactly what you do. Maybe you and the interviewer connected immediately. None of that means you didn't earn the opportunity. It also does mean the person who didn't get the interview or job wasn't necessarily less deserving.

Then there is privilege, which affects a job search in ways we don't always see when we look at someone's resume. Take two equally qualified people. One has six months of savings and health insurance through a spouse. The other has enough money to cover a few more weeks of rent and needs a job for health insurance. Those people are not conducting the same job search. One may be able to walk away from an employer offering too little money, decline hours of unpaid interview work, wait through a three-month hiring process, pay for professional resume help, attend conferences, take another certification, or simply say no when something doesn't feel right. The other person may need to take the first viable offer.

Five years later, we can look at their resumes and praise one person's "strategic career decisions" while questioning why the other person changed jobs so often. What we don't see on either resume is how many choices each person could actually afford to make.

Money isn't the only thing that changes the experience. Networks matter. Caregiving responsibilities matter. Disability, age, race, gender, education, and geography can matter. The names of previous employers can influence how someone's experience is perceived before they ever speak to a recruiter. So can the school listed near the bottom of their resume. One person gets introduced directly to the hiring manager while another applies alongside hundreds of people. None of this makes qualifications irrelevant. It means qualifications aren't operating in a vacuum.

This is also why I struggle with the phrase "the most qualified candidate." How exactly do we know we hired them? We know who applied. We know who survived the screening criteria we created. We know who recruiters chose to advance, who hiring managers decided to interview, and who performed well in the interview process we designed. Eventually we know who we selected. What we don't know is whether that person was objectively better at the actual job than every other person who could have done it. More often, we selected the person our particular hiring process allowed us to recognize as the strongest candidate.

That difference matters because being great at your job and being great at interviewing are not the same skill.

Someone can be exceptional at the work and struggle to package years of experience into a polished two-minute answer on command. Someone else may be fantastic at interviewing. They know how to structure an answer, create rapport, read the room, and figure out what the interviewer wants to hear. I'm not saying those abilities have no value. I'm saying we should stop automatically confusing them with ability to perform the job. If our process heavily rewards confidence, interviewing skill, familiarity with unwritten corporate norms, or simply making the interviewer feel comfortable, then we need to be honest about what we are actually measuring. We found the candidate who performed best within the system we built. That is not automatically the same as finding the person who would have been best at the job.

A confident woman with curly hair and glasses walks past her coworkers, holding a cup of bubble tea, while they look on with curiosity and surprise.

Which brings me back to the iced coffee. A recruiter recently received a lot of attention online after advising candidates not to bring iced coffee into an interview. Her concern was that it could be perceived as too casual, almost as though the interview was another stop in the day for the candidate while running errands. Making the assumption the candidate didn't take the interview or job search seriously. She also explained that she recruits primarily in more traditional corporate environments and was sharing what she sees from the hiring teams she works with. I strongly disagree with her approach, but I think the conversation accidentally highlighted something much bigger than whether someone should walk into an interview carrying a latte.

If a recruiter knows their hiring managers are going to judge someone negatively because they walked into an interview with an iced coffee, there are actually two pieces of information there. Yes, the candidate might benefit from knowing that expectation exists. I'm not going to pretend biases disappear just because I disagree with them. But the recruiter has also just learned something about the hiring team's evaluation process that should probably be challenged or at the least mentioned to the candidate during interview prep. Why does carrying a drink make someone less serious about an interview? What does it tell us about whether they can do the job? What exactly are we evaluating at that point? Why hasn't the recruiter pushed back on the hiring managers? Or has she? Either way, regardless of her years of experience, this recruiter has lost her way. Her intentions were good. But ultimately, the fact that she posted the "quick tip" for job seekers (if that was truly what it was meantt to be) throws up red flag for her. I share quick tips for job seekers occassionally on LinkedIn. These quick tips when related to interviewing are also shared with candidates ahead of interviewing. Why hasn't this recruiter added to her interview prep materials or conversations that ice coffees or beverages are a bad idea? Or does she also buy into the idea that it's telling and more of a test the candidates have no idea they need to be prepared for?

I will say this again. It is a recruiter's job check bias. We aren't there only to learn every hiring manager preference and coach candidates into performing around it. We are supposed to advise hiring teams, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and help managers separate relevant evaluation criteria from personal preferences. If I'm telling candidates to change a completely unrelated behavior because I know my hiring managers will judge them for it, at some point I also need to ask why I'm allowing that judgment to keep influencing hiring decisions. In the wise words of Jackye Clayton, recruiting when done well, turns recruiters into advisors, not deli counter atttendants. We are hiring not making sandwhiches to order.

There is a difference between warning a candidate that they may encounter a particular bias and presenting that bias as a rule everyone should follow. That difference matters, especially now that job seekers are surrounded by an endless supply of "advice". They are told exactly how long a resume should be, when to apply, whether to message the recruiter, whether to contact the hiring manager, what words never to use, what to wear, what to say, how quickly to send a thank-you note, and now apparently what beverage they should or shouldn't be carrying into an interview.

I say this as someone who gives job-search advice myself, we have a responsibility to be careful about what we present as fact. Before changing your behavior because someone on TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, television, or anywhere else told you that you are doing your job search wrong, look at the source. What experience do they actually have? Are they describing something supported by research? Are they telling you what they consistently see across employers? Are they explaining a preference specific to one industry or company? Are they warning you about a bias that exists? Or are they sharing their own opinion and presenting it as though the rest of us agreed to the rule while you weren't looking? A post getting millions of views tells you that millions of people saw it. It does not tell you that the advice was good. And to be clear, the reviews on whether the iced coffee advice was, "good advice" are mixed.

A job candidate faces a panel of interviewers, as one interviewer appears enthusiastic and supportive while sharing their feedback.

Employers and recruiting teams need to apply the same scrutiny to our own assumptions. Someone being unemployed for eight months doesn't tell you whether they can do the job you're hiring for. A candidate changing jobs several times doesn't tell you why they made those decisions. Calling someone "overqualified" can become a convenient way to make assumptions about what they will want six months from now instead of listening to what they are telling you they want today. And let's not forget age discrimination. And when feedback starts sounding like "not polished enough," "not excited enough," or "I just didn't feel a connection," we should be asking what those things actually mean before using them to eliminate someone. As a recruiter, you can count on me to ask hiring team members how to measure feelings every single time. Sometimes there is a legitimate, job-related concern underneath the language. Sometimes there isn't. Part of good recruiting is knowing the difference and being willing to challenge it.

This doesn't mean everyone who gets rejected was treated unfairly. Sometimes another candidate really does have experience that is more relevant. Sometimes someone isn't qualified. Sometimes an interview exposes a legitimate concern. Candidates make mistakes too, and there are absolutely things people can improve about how they approach a job search. But acknowledging all of that doesn't require pretending hiring outcomes are a clean measurement of merit. There are simply too many variables between being good at what you do and receiving an offer.

For employers, I think that should make us more curious about what our hiring processes are actually measuring. Are we identifying people who can do the work, or are we mostly rewarding the people who have learned how to perform the way we expect them to? For job seekers, I think it requires a different kind of perspective. Improve your resume. Practice interviewing. Network. Learn how hiring works. And don't forget, it's not the same company to company nor industry to industry. Be thoughtful about where you spend your time. Take useful feedback when you get it. You likely won't get that kind of feedback. And the things that increase your chances. Just don't turn every rejection into evidence that you failed to optimize yourself correctly.

A rejection tells you what happened in one hiring process. Being unemployed for six months, nine months, or longer tells you how long you have been unemployed. Neither one can tell you what you are worth. I think one of the most damaging things we've done to job seekers is sell them the idea that there is a formula they can eventually perfect, because when someone follows all of the advice and the offer still doesn't come, they start looking at themselves for the explanation.

You can do everything right and still not get hired. That doesn't mean you stop trying. It means you stop using hiring outcomes as a measurement of your worth. And remember, the job market isn't a meritocracy.