They Are Not Looking for a Reason to Say Yes: Job Search Strategy 2026

I was consulting for a company that had a role open for seven months. Good company. Not villains. And in every leadership meeting, somebody would say the sentence.

"There's just nobody good out there."

So I asked to see the pipeline.

Four hundred and ten applicants.

Four hundred and ten people for one job, and I started reading, and y'all, they were good. I found at least a dozen I'd have hired on the spot.

So I asked about one of them. Why'd this one get cut?

The hiring manager glanced at it and said, "Oh, she doesn't have SaaS experience."

It was an operations coordinator role. Scheduling, vendor management, reporting. The word "SaaS" appeared in that job description exactly once, in the boilerplate paragraph at the top that HR pastes into every single req.

She got rejected for not matching a sentence that wasn't about the job.

And when I pushed, he said the thing I have never been able to shake:

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