Adverts for roles that do not state the salary range.  If you are on £50K, you don't want to be applying for jobs at £30K.  If you don't know the salary range then you send you CV into the process.  The result is you get pulled into a recruitment process for a job you would not even take.  The employer gets way more CVs than they want, many of them excellent, only to find the top choices pull out when they hear the salary.

A job advert on LinkedIn described a role which was for a Programme Director.  Huge amounts of experience was required, but they also wanted fluency in Japanese and English.  Perhaps a tall order but the advert then also expressed a desire for the same Japanese/English speaking highly qualified Programme Director to also speak Dutch and or French.  Japanese, English Dutch.  This extreme example is an illustration of the high bar that the employers set.  Coupled with the impossible criteria, it is often no surprise that the salary is disappointing for the caliber of resource they seek.  The outcome is the employer does not get what they need.  Perfectly good candidates simply walk away from that process.

Ever had that suspicion that the role you are going through the process for is already filled, at least in principle.  Many organisations have to go through a fair recruitment process and it often happens that there is already a chosen candidate in the mix but they must be seen to undergo the process.  This means dragging candidates through a process with no real hope of being successful.

The number of CVs that employers get these days is tremendous.  It is sad, but we live in times where getting work is still hard and many people are desperate.  The result is that many candidates simply apply for everything, even roles they have no hope of getting.  One example of this in a previous client who was advertising for a Director role had a CV sent in whose only work experience was a dog walker.  That is not to belittle dog walkers in any way, but hardly a match for a Director in a technology role.   With literally hundreds of random CVs sent in, the only hope employers have to try and route out the complete mismatches is automation and even now, AI based assessments of CVs.  While this is good for routing out the real low hanging fruit, your CV can easily find itself on the wrong side of the line and 'computer says no'

With a move to ever more automation, you do not even get to speak to a human being prior to being exited from the process.  This is frustrating as the ability to write a good CV is a key skill.  So what employers end up with is a set of people who have the skill 'writes a good CV'.  There are others who may be weaker at writing CVs but are awesome with people.  This is a huge gap for employers and also a huge disappointment for candidates.

One of the worst reasons to bin someone from the process.  People have gaps in their CVs for all sorts of reason.  One prime one is that one is stuck in a loop of trying to find a new role which takes time.  The gap increases the longer you are looking and the longer you look, the harder it gets.  Gaps in CVs should not even need to be explained.  The result, gaps are artificially closed by candidates to avoid the questions.  The cycle of deceit and counter deceit then kicks off.

It is often reported that during the recruitment process the candidate is asked to show how they would go about solving the problem the employer has.  Can you design an architecture to do x,y,z?  Can you write some marketing prose for a new product?  How would you restructure the department to make it more efficient?  While these can be useful ways to test a candidate, candidates often walk away feeling cheated by the employer.

Finally, and somewhat concerningly, you find yourself being asked large amounts of personal questions and requests for personal data before you have even got to stage one of the process.  When you are rejected, you find that you have no idea what has happened to your data and you have to either go through each employers GDPR right to be forgotten or just walk away not knowing who has access to your personal data.  Why do they need to know the candidate's details before they have even got to interview stage?  The reason is often that the HR departments (People & Talent nowadays) like to know the range of people applying.  But its personal data!

Did you know that in most cases, when a supplier enters a government procurement competition, if they lose at the very least they get a detailed written feedback on why they lost and in most cases a debrief session with the buyers.  And yet, for candidates that do not get a role, it is often the case that one just receives an automated 'on this occasion you were unsuccessful' email.  At this point you have no idea where you went wrong, the strengths and weaknesses of your application or interview.  There is no improvement possible out of this process and your investment into the process was wasted.