Still Qualified, Suddenly Invisible?

Not long ago, an expat like me shared a post on social media about their recent struggles in the job market. Two decades in corporate marketing. A senior, established career — the kind that's supposed to buy you a certain amount of security.

Then a difficult period, a reset, a return to corporate work as a consultant. A contract that ended, as contracts do. And then: eight months of searching, dozens of applications, only two interviews.

Rent and two children don't pause for the right offer to appear. So they started delivering food on an e-bike between job applications — not as a story of failure, but as a story of doing what needed to be done while they kept looking.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard something like this. And it won't be the last, I imagine, because I keep hearing versions of the same story — not from people who are new to a market and still calibrating, but from people who've already done the hard part. International professionals who built the career, made the transition, proved themselves once. People who assumed that having already earned their place meant they'd keep it.

And then there's the second layer, which is arguably harder: what our minds do with the silence in between. A job search involves a lot of 'waiting', and very little feedback.

Into that gap, most of us don't insert a neutral "I don't know why this is happening" — we insert the worst available explanation. "I've lost my edge". "I'm not good enough anymore". "This is who I am now, and I won't make it anymore".

There's a well-documented, heavily replicated tendency in human psychology for negative information and negative interpretations to weigh more heavily than positive ones, especially under uncertainty — psychologists call it the negativity bias, and it shows up consistently across memory, attention, and decision-making (1).

It's not a character flaw. It's closer to a design feature of how our minds try to protect us — by assuming the worst so we're not caught off guard (it used to save our lives when it was all about surviving lions and snakes). But in a job search, that same instinct can talk us into a story about ourselves that isn't true.

No surprise we hesitate to talk about it openly…

If you've been in this market for a while, you've probably had a quieter version of this experience: an application that used to be a formality now goes nowhere. A skill set that opened doors two years ago barely gets you a first call today.

And the hardest part isn't the rejection — it's not knowing why, because nobody tells you clearly. You're left constructing your own explanation, usually the least kind one: maybe I've become less employable than I thought.

Here's a reframe worth sitting with: it's rarely just about you standing still. It's often the market moving — sometimes in ways that are visible if you know where to look, and sometimes in ways that are genuinely hard to see from the inside of a job search, because you're too close to it.

One shift several international professionals have mentioned to me is language. Not as a new barrier for newcomers — most people already expect that conversation early on — but as a rising bar for people who'd already cleared it once. Roles that used to be comfortably filled in English are increasingly listed with Dutch-language expectations, sometimes for functions where it's hard to see why day-to-day fluency would matter.

This isn't a hard statistic backed by official national data — I haven't found a clean dataset tracking it over time — but it lines up with what several recent reports on the Dutch job market describe: employers becoming more selective as the extreme post-pandemic shortage eases, with language proficiency mentioned more often as a differentiator between similarly qualified candidates.

Language is one visible shift. A few others are quieter, and I think they matter just as much.

'Qualified' now reaches well beyond hard skills. Once you're past junior level, technical competence is often assumed rather than what sets you apart — it's the entry ticket, not the differentiator.

What increasingly decides who gets the call is harder to put on a CV: how you lead under ambiguity, how you influence people who don't report to you, how you handle a room that disagrees with you.

US labour-market research has traced a long-running shift in this direction: jobs requiring strong social and interpersonal skills grew steadily as a share of the workforce between 1980 and 2012, with the strongest wage growth going to roles combining technical and social skill (2). It's US data specifically, so I'd stop short of calling it a universal law — but it's a credible signal of a broader direction and it aligns with what I've been seeing too.

If your CV is still built primarily around technical deliverables from a decade ago, it may be technically accurate and yet still not be telling the story that gets you shortlisted.

There's a third shift, and it's harder to say out loud than the others: age.

This one isn't just a feeling. A large Swedish field experiment sent over 6,000 near-identical fictitious applications to real job vacancies, varying only the applicant's age. Callback rates began dropping substantially starting in the early forties, and kept falling from there — even after accounting for the extra experience older candidates bring (3). The employers' own explanations, gathered separately in the same research, centred on assumptions about adaptability, willingness to learn new things, and ambition — not, notably, about actual ability.

Here's a piece I'd add myself, without claiming the research above proves it: more senior candidates usually carry higher salary expectations. For a company watching its budget closely, a fifteen-year track record can end up read as a cost line as easily as an asset — even when the value on offer is genuinely far higher. Again, that's my inference, not a measured finding, but it tracks with what recruiters often describe informally.

None of this proves what happened in any individual search — including the story I opened with. We don't actually know why their search stalled. But it's a well-documented, real pattern, not a private fear you're imagining alone.

What actually happens is less dramatic, and in its own way kinder: postings attract enormous numbers of applicants, sometimes hundreds within days, and recruiters are triaging at speed rather than reading closely. Software is mostly used for basic eligibility questions — work authorisation, location — not for silently judging your career story.

This doesn't mean formatting and keywords don't matter; they do, because a scannable CV competes better under time pressure. But it does mean the silence you're receiving is rarely a verdict on your worth. More often, it's a (long) queue.

This is where I think the standard job-hunting advice quietly fails people. Most of it — CV structure, interview prep, networking scripts — assumes you're trying to get in. It has very little to say about what happens when you're trying to stay current in a market that keeps redefining what 'qualified' means, often without announcing it.

Staying relevant isn't a one-time achievement. As I said above, it's more like fitness than a diploma — something that needs tending, not something you earn once and keep. And most of us don't tend to it, simply because nothing forces us to, until the market suddenly asks a question we haven't prepared an answer for.

Here are a few questions worth sitting with — not to solve today, just to notice where you stand:

• When was the last time a rejection actually told you something? Most rejections are vague by design. But sometimes, if you look at a run of them together rather than one at a time, a pattern emerges — a stage you keep stalling at, a phrase that keeps recurring, a skill that keeps getting asked about that you don't currently have a strong answer for.

• What would you need to be true about your profile today that wasn't true three years ago? Not because you did anything wrong — because the market moved and you may not have moved with it, simply because nothing forced the question until now.

• Where does your CV still talk mostly about tasks, when the role is really asking about leadership? If you're past junior level, it's worth reading your own CV as a stranger would and asking: does this show how I think, decide, and influence — or only what I delivered?

• Are you writing for the filter as well as the person? Before assuming a silence is about you, it's worth checking whether your application was ever built to get past the software stage at all — the right keywords, a format that parses cleanly, language that mirrors the posting.

• Is there a signal you've been quietly dismissing? An interview that always stalls at round two. A comment from a recruiter you brushed off because it stung. A pattern you noticed and then talked yourself out of noticing.

None of these questions are about panic or overhaul. They're about paying attention before the market forces you to — which is a very different, much calmer place to think from than mid-crisis.

I don't think the person in that post did anything wrong. I think they trusted that what had worked before would keep working — which is a completely reasonable thing to trust, right up until, quietly, it stops being true, and nobody sends a memo to tell you so.

Stability was never really the fortress it looked like. It's closer to a garden — something that needs tending precisely because it's alive, not because it's failing.

So here's my question for you this time: if you looked honestly at the signals you've received over the last year — not the big dramatic ones, the small quiet ones — what might they actually be telling you, once you take your own worst-case story out of the way?

I'd love to hear what comes up, if you feel like commenting/hitting reply.