Applying for a job used to feel relatively straightforward. You found an opening, submitted a resume and application, interviewed with someone from the company, and completed background and reference checks. Then you waited to hear whether you got the job.
That process still exists, but increasingly, there may be quite a bit happening between Apply and You’re hired.
Depending on the employer and the position, today’s hiring process may include:
- automated application screening
- skills assessments
- cognitive tests
- personality or behavioral assessments
- recorded video interviews
- structured interviews
- work samples
- multiple rounds of evaluation
If you have not applied for a job recently, some of these steps can be surprising. For someone entering the workforce for the first time, they can be downright confusing.
The important thing to understand is that encountering one of these hiring practices does not necessarily mean something has gone wrong. Employers are trying to answer different questions at different stages of the process.
Knowing what those questions are can make the entire experience considerably less mysterious.
1. Your Application Enters an Applicant Tracking System
When you submit an application online, there is a good chance it will enter an Applicant Tracking System, usually called an ATS.
An ATS helps employers collect applications, organize candidates, communicate with applicants, schedule interviews, record feedback, and manage the hiring process.
You may have heard that an ATS is essentially an automated system that reads your resume and automatically rejects you if you do not include exactly the right keywords. The reality is more complicated.
Employers can configure their hiring systems in different ways. Some use screening questions or automated tools to help sort large applicant pools. Recruiters or hiring managers may also search applications using skills, job titles, experience, location, credentials, or other information.
This is one reason your resume should clearly describe the experience and skills that are relevant to the job.
It does not mean you should stuff your resume with every keyword from the job posting or attempt to trick the system. Especially if you lack the experience associated with them.
Your resume still needs to make sense when an actual person reads it.
Where You Might Encounter This in Pink Collar Hiring
Applicant tracking systems are common across many types of employers, particularly larger organizations.
- hospitals and healthcare systems
- schools and universities
- hotel and hospitality companies
- nonprofit organizations
- large retailers
- corporate administrative departments
- customer service organizations
- national childcare or elder-care providers
For example, someone applying for a medical receptionist position with a large hospital system may encounter a considerably more automated application process than someone applying for the same type of position at a small independent medical practice.
2. You May Be Asked to Complete an Assessment
Submitting your resume may only be the beginning. Employers use a variety of assessment tools designed to measure things that may be difficult to determine from a resume alone.
Depending on the job, you could encounter:
- Skills assessments, which test your ability to perform something related to the work.
- Cognitive or aptitude assessments, which may evaluate areas such as problem solving, verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning, attention, or learning ability.
- Situational judgment assessments, which present workplace situations and ask how you would respond.
- Personality or behavioral assessments, which attempt to identify workplace preferences, communication styles, behavioral tendencies, or other characteristics.
Not every assessment is appropriate for every job, and different assessment tools vary considerably in quality. The important thing for an applicant is to understand what kind of assessment you are taking before you begin.
Read the instructions. Find out whether it is timed. Make sure you have the necessary technology. If possible, choose a quiet environment where you can concentrate.
And unless the employer specifically allows outside assistance, assume the assessment is intended to measure your ability, not your ability to find someone or something else to provide the answers.
Where You Might Encounter This in Pink Collar Hiring
Different assessments make sense for different types of work.
- An employer hiring an administrative or operations coordinator might use an assessment involving organization, reasoning, written communication, or attention to detail.
- A customer service or hospitality employer might use situational questions to see how applicants respond to an unhappy customer.
- A healthcare employer might present situations involving patients, confidentiality, priorities, or professional judgment.
- Someone applying for a writing, marketing, design, or social media position may instead be asked to demonstrate a specific skill.
The assessment should have some reasonable relationship to what the employer needs to know about the person who will perform the job.
3. Your First Interview Might Not Be With a Person
One of the stranger experiences for applicants encountering modern hiring for the first time is the asynchronous video interview.
Instead of scheduling a conversation with a recruiter or manager, the employer sends you questions and asks you to record your answers. You may have a limited amount of preparation time, a limited response time, or only a certain number of attempts.
Yes, talking to your computer instead of another person can feel awkward initially.
The employer may be using recorded interviews to evaluate communication, compare applicants using the same questions, accommodate scheduling across different locations, or reduce the amount of time required for initial screening.
Treat the recording like an interview, but do not become so concerned with producing a perfect performance that you stop sounding like yourself.
Read the instructions carefully. Test your microphone and camera. Find a reasonably quiet location. Think about the question before answering. Take your time. Then answer the question.
You do not need to become a television presenter or a content creator. Answer honestly and be thorough.
Where You Might Encounter This in Pink Collar Hiring
- customer service
- hospitality and guest services
- retail management
- administrative roles
- recruiting and HR coordination
- remote support positions
- training and education roles
- management-track positions
Jobs involving substantial communication with customers, patients, clients, employees, or the public may be particularly likely to include some form of communication screening.
4. You May Encounter a More Structured Interview
You may notice that some modern interviews feel more standardized than interviews you have experienced in the past. There is a reason. In a structured interview, candidates are asked the same or substantially similar questions and evaluated using predetermined criteria.
Instead of one interviewer deciding that a candidate simply “seemed great,” the organization may identify the skills or competencies required for the position and build questions specifically designed to evaluate them.
That can include behavioral questions such as:
“Tell me about a time you had to deal with an upset customer.”
“Describe a situation where you had several competing priorities. How did you decide what to do first?”
These questions are not necessarily looking for one magical correct answer.
The interviewer may be evaluating how you communicate, how you approach problems, what role you actually played in the situation, what judgment you demonstrated, and what happened as a result.
Specific examples are usually more useful than broad claims.
- Instead of saying, “I’m very organized,” tell them about something you organized.
- Instead of saying, “I’m good with difficult customers,” tell them about a difficult customer you actually helped.
Evidence is stronger than adjectives.
Where You Might Encounter This in Pink Collar Hiring
Structured and behavioral interviews can appear almost anywhere, but they are especially relevant to work involving substantial interaction with other people.
That includes healthcare support, education, childcare, customer service, hospitality, administration, community services, recruiting, retail, and management.
In people-centered work, employers are often evaluating not only whether you can perform a task, but how you behave while performing it around other people.
5. You May Be Asked to Show What You Can Do
Another part of modern hiring you may encounter is the work sample, case exercise, test project, or job simulation. Instead of asking whether you can do something, the employer asks you to demonstrate it.
- A social media applicant might be asked to draft several sample posts.
- An administrative candidate might be given a scheduling exercise.
- A customer service applicant might respond to a fictional customer complaint.
- An event coordinator might be asked how they would organize a hypothetical event.
- A graphic designer may be asked to provide a portfolio or complete a limited design exercise.
For applicants without extensive professional experience, this can actually create an opportunity.
A resume mostly shows what you have already been hired to do.
A good work sample can show what you are capable of doing now.
But there should be reasonable limits.
A short exercise designed to evaluate a skill is very different from asking applicants to complete hours of unpaid work that the company could actually use.
If an employer asks you to produce substantial work before you are hired, it is reasonable to ask what the exercise involves, how long it is expected to take, how it will be evaluated, and whether the work will be used by the company.
6. Employers Are Trying to Verify What Is Real
Artificial intelligence has made it remarkably easy to improve a résumé, draft a cover letter, polish an application response, prepare for an interview, or research a company. Used appropriately, those tools can be helpful.
But, they have also created a new problem for employers. A polished application no longer necessarily demonstrates that the applicant personally possesses the writing ability, knowledge, or judgment represented by the application.
Recent employer research suggests confidence in resumes as a stand-alone signal is weakening as application volume rises and AI-generated or AI-polished content becomes more common.
That is one reason employers may look for additional evidence through assessments, interviews, work samples, references, and skills demonstrations.
For applicants, the safest principle is simple:
Use technology to help present your real abilities.
Do not use it to manufacture abilities you do not have.
There is a significant difference between asking an AI tool to help identify unclear language in your resume and asking it to complete an assessment that an employer is using to evaluate your reasoning ability.
There is also a practical reason for that distinction…because eventually, somebody may ask you to do the job.
The Technology Has Changed. The Basic Question Hasn’t.
Modern hiring can involve considerably more technology than it once did.
You may encounter an ATS before a recruiter sees your application. You may take an assessment before speaking with a hiring manager. Your first interview may happen through a camera without another person on the other side. You may be asked to demonstrate a skill instead of simply claiming that you have it.
But underneath all of those systems, employers are still trying to answer some very old questions:
Can this person do the work?
Can we rely on them?
Can they learn what they don’t already know?
Can they communicate and work effectively with other people?
Do they understand what this job requires?
And ultimately:
Do we want this person working here?
Applicants should be evaluating the employer too.
A hiring process can tell you something about how an organization operates. Clear communication, reasonable expectations, relevant assessments, respect for your time, and transparency about the process are useful signals.
Confusing instructions, excessive unpaid assignments, endless interview rounds, unexplained assessments, repeated scheduling problems, or requests that seem unrelated to the job may deserve more scrutiny.
You do not need to be afraid of a modern hiring process.
You do need to understand it.
Because the more you know about what is happening after you click Apply, the better prepared you are to show an employer what you can actually bring to the job.
Coming Next From Pink Collar Jobs
This guide is the beginning of our Modern Hiring series. Next, we’ll take a closer look at:
- Why Employers Are Giving You Tests: A Guide to Pre-Employment Assessments
- AI Is Changing Hiring: What Job Applicants Actually Need to Know
- How to Prove Your Skills When You Don’t Have Much Experience
- Video Interviews, Work Samples and Other Modern Hiring Hurdles
- When the Hiring Process Itself Is a Red Flag
The goal is not to teach you how to game the hiring process.
It is to make sure you understand the process you’re being asked to participate in.
Sources & Further Reading
- U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Employment Tests and Selection Procedures.” Guidance on cognitive tests, personality tests, work samples, other selection procedures, job relatedness, validation, and federal anti-discrimination requirements.
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management. “Structured Interviews.” Guidance explaining standardized questions, consistent rating criteria, behavioral interviewing, and the reliability and validity advantages associated with greater interview structure.
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management. “Work Samples and Simulations.” Guidance on using job-relevant tasks to assess applicants, including an administrative assistant example.
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management, USA Hire. “Developing Your Assessment Strategy.” Overview of cognitive assessments, situational judgment tests, work samples, structured interviews, writing assessments, and other candidate-selection methods.
- SHRM. “Why Recruiters Are Becoming Over Dependent on Algorithmic Hiring Judgments,” June 2026. Discussion of current use of algorithms and AI for resume screening, candidate ranking, fit scoring, assessments, and interview analysis.
- Criteria Corp. “Async Video Interviewing.” Explanation of one-way recorded interviews in which applicants respond to predetermined questions and hiring teams review the responses later. Criteria is an assessment vendor, so this source is used primarily to explain how this type of tool operates.
- Lighthouse Research & Advisory / Criteria Corp. “Employer Confidence in Resumes Falls: Insights from 900+ Employers on What Comes Next,” 2026. Survey of 998 employers reporting declining confidence in resumes and greater trust in assessments, structured interviews, and work samples. This research was produced in partnership with assessment vendor Criteria Corp.