Kinda reminds me of when an AI bot at my old company filtered out apps with non-standard education. @ruby659, your cousin's freelancing gap probably hit a similar glitch.
Skipping great people is a real concern. The AI could easily pass over someone perfect just because their resume doesn't match the exact pattern it learned.
Read about this in a tech blog last week. They talked about a designer who learned skills through online courses but had no formal degree, and the AI rejected her resume. Same for someone who took time off for family, the system saw the gap as a red flag. I mean, idk, maybe it's just me, but that seems broken if we're letting machines judge people so harshly. We should fix these tools to see beyond just patterns on paper.