Why Companies Need to Rethink Their Approach to Entry-Level Hiring | Amneet Kaur Sahdra | Director | Outsized

Most companies are lying in their job postings, and they don’t even realize it. They write “entry-level,” then list requirements that would disqualify half their own leadership team from applying twenty years ago. According to Amneet Kaur Sahdra, Founder of Catalyze, HR Leader, and Advocate for Women in Leadership, this disconnect stems from hiring practices that have failed to evolve alongside the changing nature of talent and work. Then they wonder, publicly, on LinkedIn, why “today’s freshers just aren’t ready.”

They are ready. The hiring process just wasn’t built to see it.

The Method Is the Problem, Not the Talent

Traditional fresher hiring asks one lazy question: has this person already done something similar before? For a candidate with zero professional experience, that question is unanswerable, so recruiters end up rewarding whoever had the internship, the connections, or the coaching, not whoever is actually sharp. It’s a filter that selects for privilege and calls it merit.

The companies actually solving this problem asked a different question: how fast does someone learn, and how do they behave when they don’t know the answer? A few have quietly rebuilt their entire hiring machinery around that question, and the results should embarrass everyone still running resume keyword searches in 2026.

Unilever replaced its CV screen with neuroscience-based games and saw a 90 percent reduction in time-to-hire. They stopped asking “what has this candidate done” and started asking “how does this candidate think.” The company processes close to 1.8 million applications a year. Instead of a human skimming resumes for buzzwords, candidates play short cognitive and behavioural games, and the ones who pass move to video interviews before a single CV is ever reviewed. Completion rates jumped from 50 percent to 96 percent, because, unsurprisingly, candidates prefer being assessed on ability over being filtered by pedigree.

Zoho went further and simply removed degree requirements from its internal job postings entirely. Founder Sridhar Vembu has said any manager who posts a job requiring a degree gets a polite note from HR asking them to take it out. Zoho runs its own in-house training pipeline for candidates without a college background, betting that raw aptitude, taught the specific skills a role needs, beats an unrelated degree every time.

None of these are charity programs. These are companies with brutal margins and shareholders, running the numbers and concluding that the old filter was actively costing them talent.

What Needs to Change, Concretely

Kill the resume as the first filter : Replace it with a short, real work sample, something close to actual day-one work. Twenty minutes of a candidate doing the job tells you more than twenty seconds of a recruiter deciding your resume “looks right.”

Test learning speed on the spot : Give candidates something they genuinely don’t know and watch what happens. Do they ask sharp questions? Try, fail, and adjust? Or freeze? This single behaviour predicts performance far better than a transcript.

Stop hiding “experience required” inside the word “preferred”: If a role truly needs prior experience, it isn’t entry-level, so stop pricing it like one if it doesn’t, strip the line entirely. That single word filters out exactly the humble, self-aware candidates most worth hiring.

Fund the manager, not just the hire: Zoho’s and IBM’s models work because there’s real training infrastructure behind them, not because they simply lowered the bar. A brilliant new hiring process feeding into an untrained manager with no time to onboard anyone still produces a disengaged fresher within six months.

Measure managers on fresher development, not just team output : Nobody invests real time in someone else’s growth if their own scorecard doesn’t reflect it. This is the quiet reason most “invest in freshers” initiatives die inside their first year.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Companies love to say they want to build talent, not just buy it. Fresher hiring is where that claim gets tested every single week, and most companies are failing it in plain sight, in job postings nobody in leadership has actually reread in years.

Unilever, IBM, and Zoho aren’t running experiments anymore. They’re running at scale, with real numbers to show for it, while most competitors are still writing “entry-level, 2+ years’ experience preferred” and wondering why the talent pool feels thinner every year.

It was never thinner. The filter just got worse. Fix the filter, and the “talent shortage” most companies complain about will turn out to have been sitting in the applicant pool the entire time, waiting to be actually seen.