What Counts as Experience?

Finding a job these days is a brutal thing. Artificial intelligence is doing the initial screening and the interviews. There are ghost postings that never lead anywhere. If you do get through, people are facing five, six, sometimes seven rounds of interviews, only to be left hanging, wondering whether there will ever be feedback. Recently I had several colleagues go through this entire process—screening, panels, take-homes, final rounds—only to be rejected and watch the company repost the same opening a week later.

I sat down with a couple of them to talk about their experiences. This is what they had to say. Names have been anonymized.

So let’s just start with the headline question. When you see a job posting that says “5–7 years of experience,” what goes through your mind?

Elizabeth: Frustration, mostly. Because depending on how you count, I either have well over a decade of relevant experience or I have “not enough.” And the difference depends entirely on whether you count lived experience as a Blind person in tech, or whether you only count W-2 roles with the right titles in an unbroken sequence. HR counts the second one. AI screens count the second one. Nobody counts the first.

What should I have done instead?
The honest answer is: I survived.

Patrick: I laugh, honestly. Because I have a master’s degree, I’ve shipped accessibility audits on enterprise-level products, and I’ve trained development teams. But I also have a four-year gap in my work history because of a chronic illness that nearly killed me. So an ATS sees a hole. It doesn’t see the years I spent learning WCAG inside and out while I was bedridden, teaching myself through screen reader testing, contributing to open-source projects, and doing pro bono audits for nonprofits that couldn’t afford to hire anyone. Those years don’t count. They were the hardest years of my life and they were also where I learned the most.

Elizabeth, can you walk me through your path? How did you get into accessibility work?

Elizabeth: I started as an undergraduate doing freelance digital accessibility work. Attended a small university for three years. Left with an incomplete degree due to factors beyond my control—things I won’t get into here, but it wasn’t a choice. I planned to take a year off. Then there was a global pandemic.

I worked a string of essential-worker positions to pay my bills. Through all of that I kept up with the accessibility industry—some freelancing, an internship, earned my professional certification, and eventually landed a full-time accessibility consulting role.

And how did that go?

Elizabeth: Less than a year in, the other shoe dropped. This was during a period of economic instability broadly, and the rise in anti-DEI sentiment specifically. The tech accessibility industry shed positions across the board. I lost mine. And I’ll be honest—I was in my early twenties and wasn’t at the top of my game in that role. That’s on me. But “wasn’t at the top of your game at twenty-something” shouldn’t mean your career is over.

Patrick, what was your path?

Patrick: Similar shape, different details. I was already a mid-career developer—had about eight years under my belt, working mainly in front-end—when I got sick. It wasn’t subtle. I went from full-time employment to unable to work at all, fast. Recovery took years. During that time I got deep into accessibility partly because I was using assistive technology myself and started noticing how broken everything was. I started auditing things. Started filing bugs. Started writing about what I found.

By the time I was well enough to work again, I had no formal accessibility job title, a massive employment gap, and a portfolio of work that existed mostly in GitHub issues and community Slack channels. Try getting an ATS to parse that.

Both of you have mentioned certifications. How has that played into things?

Elizabeth: I earned a professional accessibility certification when I was still freelancing—paid for it out of pocket while working retail. It was a huge investment, and it helped me land that first FT role. But after I lost that position, I was back to retail gigs and freelancing, and I couldn’t afford the continuing education credits required to renew it. So the credential lapsed. Which means now, on paper, it looks like I never had it.

Patrick: I never got one. I looked into it—during recovery, I had the time but not the money. The training programs were outside my budget. By the time I was back on my feet financially, I’d already built a body of work that demonstrated competency far beyond what any certification exam would test. But none of that matters to a system that filters by checkbox.

Let’s talk about the interview process itself. What’s it been like in the current market?

Elizabeth: Exhausting. I’ve done panel interviews where I could tell nobody had read my application materials beforehand, because they asked me questions that were answered right there on the first page. I’ve done take-home assignments that took twenty-plus hours and gotten zero feedback afterward. I had one role where I made it through five rounds and the rejection email was automated. Five rounds and I didn’t even warrant a human signature.

Patrick: I had a company fly me out for an on-site—the whole thing, travel, multiple panels, a presentation I prepared for two weeks. Three weeks of silence after. I followed up. They said they were “still deciding.” Two weeks after that, I saw the role reposted. I wasn’t rejected for a reason. I was rejected so they could keep fishing. And my labor—the presentation, the prep, the travel—was just free consulting to them.

Elizabeth, you mentioned being told you’re “not senior enough” for some roles while being rejected from entry-level ones. Can you expand on that?

Elizabeth: Sure. For the senior roles, they look at my formal work history and say I don’t have enough years in titled positions. Fair enough on paper. But then I apply for roles asking for five to seven years—and those reject me too. Usually it’s the gap, the incomplete degree, the “non-traditional path.” So I’m simultaneously overqualified and underqualified depending on who’s reading, and somehow never just right.

Patrick: I get the exact same thing from the opposite direction. I have senior-level development experience, so I’m told I’m “overqualified” for accessibility roles that pay less. But I don’t have the accessibility-specific titles they want, so I’m also “under experienced.” Nobody seems to know what to do with someone who has deep technical skills and deep accessibility knowledge but acquired them in an unconventional order.

What do you think “experience” actually means? Not what HR says it means—what it actually means.

Elizabeth: Living it. I’ve been navigating the world as a Blind person for well over a decade. Every single day I encounter inaccessible technology, and I know exactly why it’s inaccessible and how to fix it. That’s not something you learn in a bootcamp. That’s not a certification. That’s lived expertise that no amount of “years of professional experience” on a job description can substitute for.

Patrick: Experience is what you know and what you can do. Not the timeline it took to get there. I learned more about real-world accessibility from four years of being a disabled user dealing with broken interfaces than many people learn in a decade of “accessibility specialist” roles where they never actually use assistive technology themselves. The gap in my résumé was a gap in employment, not a gap in learning.

Last question. What should you have done differently?

Elizabeth: (laughs) That’s the question, isn’t it? What should I have done instead? Not gotten sick? Not hit a pandemic? Not lost a job during an industry-wide contraction? The honest answer is: I survived. I kept working, kept learning, kept showing up in whatever way I could. The problem isn’t what I did. The problem is that the system doesn’t have a category for people whose careers look like mine.

Patrick: I’d frame it differently. The question isn’t what I should have done. It’s what employers should stop doing. Stop treating nonlinear paths as red flags. Stop letting algorithms filter out the exact people who understand accessibility best—disabled people whose lives forced them to become experts the hard way. Stop posting jobs you’re not actually hiring for. And for god’s sake, stop asking for seven interviews and then sending a form letter.

This is obviously a big issue in tech. Let’s discuss it more on LinkedIn and Bluesky.