There is a condition in cyber hiring called EXPERIENCE ROT.

There is a condition in cyber hiring called EXPERIENCE ROT. Onset is 43. There is no cure. There is also no evidence for it. It is nevertheless treated as scientific fact and is currently costing this industry four million people.

The rot is measurable. A candidate emits roughly 0.6 microlegacies of staleness per year served. At thirty years you are radiating so hard the ATS has to be kept in a lead-lined annexe in Slough.

Meanwhile the actual data: entrants aged 39 to 49 went from 18% to 35% in two years. The pipeline is not the problem.

The door is the problem.

Nobody says "too old." That's illegal, and worse, it's legible.

They say OVERQUALIFIED. They say UNLIKELY TO STAY. They say CULTURAL FIT, a phrase that has never once in recorded history preceded good news.

LinkedIn Recruiter lets you filter on graduation year. Not skill. Not outcome. The year a person sat in a hall and was handed a tube.

I want to be clear which parts of this post are invented. That one isn't.

Niko does the first pass. Niko does the mouth, not the thinking, and nobody has told Niko this.

Niko was trained on everyone who got hired before and has therefore learned, with tremendous precision and zero malice, exactly how old they were.

Niko is not biased. Niko is CORRECT ABOUT THE PAST. This is much worse.

Four hundred CVs in. Eleven out. Nobody asks about the other 389, because that is not a metric, and if it is not a metric it did not occur.

Martin scores 94. No gaps. Recent graduation.

Martin has a flawless audit trail and has never worked anywhere. Martin has been hired eleven times this year. Martin is the only candidate the system fully trusts, because Martin is the only candidate the system built itself.

Maureen has audited the pipeline for bias. There is no field marked AGE anywhere in the system. A date is not a characteristic. A date is ADMIN.

Maureen marks it green. Maureen goes to lunch. Maureen will be at lunch for the remainder of the decade.

09:14. A woman who has personally watched three ransomware crews form, get arrested and reform under new names applies for a job.

09:16. Rejected.

Nobody read it. Nobody rejected her. There was no HER at any point in the process. There was a shape. The shape had 1994 in it. The shape was destroyed for the safety of the shape.

We tell people to work until sixty-eight. To reskill continuously, forever, at their own cost, into whatever we got excited about in March.

Gen X did that. Arrived before the internet. Still standing after the LLMs. That was the entire job.

Then we built the filter on the assumption they hadn't.

You cannot demand a forty-five-year career and run a screen with a fifteen-year memory.

CORRECTION: an earlier version of this post described the hiring process as broken. It is not broken. It is working perfectly, at enormous speed, with full logging, and a dashboard that is green.

Dave got through. Dave clicked something on Thursday.

The Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine