Hiring finance, legal and admin staff
Qualification-gated at the top, drowning in applicants at the bottom, and the same job title covering wildly different levels of responsibility.
Two opposite problems in one sector
At one end sit finance managers, paralegals and payroll administrators, where a qualification or a registration removes half the pile in a single yes-or-no question — and the genuine difficulty starts immediately afterwards, among thirty qualified people whose CVs are nearly indistinguishable. At the other end sit office managers and EAs, where there is no legitimate gate at all, four hundred people apply, and the CVs converge on one shared vocabulary. The same product serves both, but the work it does is opposite: filtering in the first case, reading in the second.
Where the gates are real, and where they are habit
Telling those apart is most of the value here. A dispensing qualification is a legal requirement; a pharmacy page treats it as a gate. Three years in litigation is not a fact about eligibility, it is evidence about suitability, so the paralegal page scores it rather than gating on it. A CIPD certificate proves knowledge and says nothing about discretion, so the HR page weights it at two. Each of those is a deliberate decision about what belongs on an application form and what belongs in the scoring.
Pick the one you are hiring
Seven roles, and a running argument about which requirements deserve to be gates.
Not on this list?
Describe the role in a sentence. Selene works from your conversation, not from a library — the guide comes back shaped around what you actually said.