Recruiting Leader @ Zapier | Former Educator | Advocate for job seekers, humanizing recruiting, and making the workplace more equitable for everyone!!

WARNING: There are scam accounts using my name. The only domains I use are "zapier.com" and "bonniedilber.com". If the email comes from any other domain, it's a fraudulent account, please report to your email provider, and to the FTC. https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
If you receive comments referencing me on your posts, these are bots as part of a scam, please report and block those accounts! 

A bit about me: I'm a former educator and dog/toddler mom who is passionate about equity in the workplace. I love to be outdoors except when it's super hot, I'm a foodie who hates cheese, and I like cooking, politics, and travel. I have a full time job managing the GTM/Ops recruiting team at Zapier, and also love creating content on recruiting, workplace culture and trends, and career development. There's a lot of misinformation and I try to combat it as much as I can! 

My goal is to educate and bring transparency to recruiting and hiring processes - I hope my content helps you understand why things play out the way they do. That doesn't mean I always like or agree with the realities of being a part of the working world in 2025, but I think we're all better off when we understand the rules of the game we're playing. 

All opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer! If you'd like to work at Zapier, please apply directly on our jobs page. 

I do not have the capacity to respond to DMs or answer one-off questions but DO answer reader questions and offer free 1:1 chats via my newsletter on beehiiv - your best bet is to submit it there!
You can access all of my resources here: https://linktr.ee/bonniedilber

Bonnie Dilber

Here's an unpopular reality of this job market: it's not the time for a career pivot or even landing a stretch role in corporate or tech for most of us. 

One of the things I've seen over and over again is that people have a tough time figuring out if they are truly qualified for a role - in the eyes of the employer. 

Most companies aren't looking for, "I can do the job with some training" or "I have transferable skills" or "I've done pieces of this work in my current role". They're looking for people who have pretty much done the exact job they are hiring for. 

I shared this prompt you can put into your favorite AI assistant in a comment and got positive feedback so I wanted to share it with all of you:
⚡ I want you to act as a hyper-selective career advisor who only recommends jobs I’m at least 95% qualified for. I’ll paste a job description and then share my resume. 
Your task: 1. Score my fit (0-100%) based strictly on required qualifications, preferred qualifications, and responsibilities. 
2. List exact gaps between me and the role. Be blunt if I’m missing even one core qualification or years of experience, note it clearly. 
3. If my score is below 95%, tell me not to apply and explain why. 
4. If my score is 95% or higher, tell me yes, apply, and summarize what makes me an exceptional fit in 3–5 bullet points I can use in my cover letter. 
5. Give me a recommendation without any fluff. ⚡ 

Give it a try, and let me know if it gives you any interesting insights!

P.S. Just to be clear, you probably CAN do a lot of the jobs you apply for with some training - I'm not questioning that or looking to be convinced of that. I'm simply stating that many employers in tech/corporate are less flexible right now given the market!

Recruiting Leader @ Zapier | Former Educator | Advocate for job seekers, demystifying recruiting, and making the workplace more equitable for everyone!!

Woohoo! We added 119k jobs!! 

Yet:
- unemployment is on the rise, hitting 4.4% with 7.6M people out of work. 
- the majority of those jobs were in lower paying fields - leisure and hospitality (47k), construction (19k), and retail (14k), and in healthcare (57k). 
- we're continuing to see either stagnation or decreases in the types of jobs that are likely most relevant to the people of LinkedIn - financial services (5k), professional/business services (-20k) and information (which stayed flat). 

It's also worth noting that the highest unemployment rate in the country is under "information" - so those working in software, media, telecommunications, data processing, and other information services. For this group, unemployment is at 7% with 177k people competing for jobs in an industry that added virtually no jobs in September. 

And a whole bunch of people are trying to enter this field either as recent grads, or as career pivots. 

There's a concept called "Occam's Razor" and it suggests that the simplest explanation is usually the best one.

The reason people are struggling in this job market isn't ATS bots, it's not AI rejecting you, it's not ghost jobs, it's not incompetent recruiters who don't recognize your talent, it's not hiring managers being completely unreasonable.  

It's that a lot of people are competing for a very small number of jobs.

I often see a lot of frustration around things on job postings - for example, employers looking for people who went to certain schools, have worked at certain companies, or in specific industries. 

And y'all I get it - I mean I studied sociology and women's studies, and I spent most of my career in education and non-profits - not one recruiter at a tech company in the history of time has done a LinkedIn search for my profile. I am simply not going to stand out on the basis of those experiences.

I very much believe that a lot of skills can be taught, and that people CAN quickly ramp up in new environments.

At the same time, after years of experience hiring, I have also seen why these requirements exist. 
- Back when I was in education, we saw that people who hadn't worked in schools had a harder time transitioning into a school environment even though they had functional expertise - in fact, we saw that teachers with no functional experience could transition into many ops roles more easily than people with functional expertise. That informed a focus on recruiting people with school-based experience. 
- I have seen people with all start-up experience struggle to navigate the complexity and bureaucracy of larger companies, and I've seen people with all big company experience and fancy resumes bomb in more scrappy startup spaces where they don't have the resources that contributed to their success or where the pace of change is much faster. These experiences can lead hiring teams to prioritize people from certain company types. 
- I have seen people switch industries and have a really hard time with nuances of the new industry - for me transitioning into tech, it was the comp structures and equity, and understanding the product and business strategy enough to answer questions. And while yes all of this can be learned, some employers don't have the capacity to build that in a new hire. 

The response I've seen when recruiters or hiring managers communicate these expectations is frustration that they exist in the first place and the argument the the expectation isn't valid. 

A more effective approach would be to:
1. Acknowledge the gap in experience, and what the expectation likely represents for the employer. 
2. Show self-awareness around where you do and don't meet the profile. 
3. Showcase why you're a great match anyway! 
For example, "I don't have an accounting or finance degree, but I did all of our accounting as an operations manager, took three courses in accounting and finance, and led our quarterly budgeting and forecasting process. That experience gave me a strong understanding of financial statements, cost controls, and how financial decisions impact operations."

I don't think these requirements mean a job is a non-starter. But I do think that they require a more nuanced approach than simply critiquing the employer for the hiring profile.

taplio