Here’s the irony of modern recruitment: job descriptions and candidate CVs are meant to be two sides of the same coin. Yet, more often than not, they fail to speak the same language.
Recruiters scroll through pages of applications that look promising on the surface but fall apart under scrutiny. Meanwhile, candidates with the right skills are overlooked simply because they did not use the “correct” words. This mismatch is one of the most frustrating inefficiencies in hiring today.
What Research Has Been Saying for Years
The problem is not new. Highhouse and colleagues (2007, Journal of Applied Psychology) found that recruiters often rejected candidates who appeared “overqualified,” even when they had the right skills for the role. Feldman and Klaas (2002, Academy of Management Executive) highlighted another flaw: the over-reliance on keyword scanning. Candidates who fail to mirror the exact terminology of the JD are passed over, even when their experience is directly relevant. These findings are a reminder that hiring is not always about competence, but about how well CVs mirror job descriptions.
A Broken Dialogue
Think of the JD as a script written in one dialect and the CV as a reply in another. Too often, they miss each other entirely. A JD may ask for “data visualisation expertise.” A candidate may write “created dashboards in Tableau.” A human recruiter in a hurry may never connect the dots. The cost of this broken dialogue is real: wasted recruiter time, disheartened candidates, and missed opportunities for organisations.
Why This Matters
Every mismatch in the hiring process carries consequences. For candidates, it means rejections that feel arbitrary and unfair. For recruiters, it means hours spent wading through piles of irrelevant CVs. For organisations, it means the right people often slip through the cracks, slowing down hiring and hurting competitiveness. The JD–CV mismatch is not a minor glitch. It is a systemic flaw that undermines efficiency and fairness in recruitment.
Fixing the Disconnect
The solution begins with recognising the problem. Job descriptions must be clearer, sharper, and more closely tied to role expectations. Recruiters must move beyond superficial keyword checks and look at context and meaning. Candidates, for their part, should not have to become experts in decoding jargon just to be noticed. A hiring process that bridges this gap is not just more efficient, it is also fairer to everyone involved.
