I think it’s less purposeful than direct discrimination, the application should have no sign I’ve ticked the box for the disability scheme, but I think that their screening process is just really poor.

I reckon they’re either using AI to batch shortlist and don’t really care about when it makes mistakes, or their shortlisters are having to wade through so many applications they’re not giving enough attention to each one and incorrectly scoring them. This then has the downstream effect of being indirectly discriminating, because they actually have to justify what essential criteria I have missed to deny me an interview, but for anyone else accidentally missed during shortlisting they can just lie and say they didn’t make the cut because there were so many strong candidates.

Having chatted with people recruiting in this area before, they’re getting like 500-1000 applicants for each role so their shortlisting has had to speed up to keep the process to a sane timeline. This has pushed them to make far more mistakes than I’ve ever had to deal with during the shortlisting phase. I used to get an interview almost every single time I applied for a role, and would perform well enough to be in the top 2 or 3 candidates if I failed to get the role. Now I’m just being screened out at the application phase.