We recently had an open position that could have been a fit for a new grad with some internship experience or a solid portfolio of projects from just school. W

We recently had an open position that could have been a fit for a new grad with some internship experience or a solid portfolio of projects from just school. We had just over 20 applicants and selected 6 for interviews using a rubric to score candidates by reviewing CV/resume and cover letter. The rubric doesn't include a specific "years of experience" guideline anywhere. Of our 6 selected candidates, 3 were new grads and 3 were experienced candidates. At that point in our process, 1 of our 3 new grads ghosted us and never responded to multiple contact attempts to schedule an interview - this may have been our top candidate by initial rubric evaluation. One of our other new grad candidates accepted another job and backed out of our scheduled interview. The third new grad did interview and had an unremarkable interview. Ultimately, one of the experienced candidates received a job offer. This experienced candidate was one of the top two by initial rubric review along with the new grad who ghosted us. Funnily enough, these two candidates were the only unanimous selections by everyone on the hiring committee to interview, even using a rubric. There were several parts of the process I found interesting. First, just over 20 applicants is typical for applicant count for an opened position over the last 8-10 years for us. There wasn't a noticeable uptick in applicants despite the general perception of it being a "bad hiring market." Second, we continue to find that many candidates don't have a CV/resume or cover letter that leans into demonstrating the candidate can write code. Maybe this is a result of general hiring processes that lean into automatic scanning and processing of CV/resumes and cover letters while my group actually reads these somewhat carefully and usually from a "we hope this person clearly demonstrates we should interview them" perspective. Third, despite my personal misgivings, the hiring process clearly selects for "has worked with <insert specific set of technical tools> experience. Even a great candidate can't seem to be attractive to other folks in our hiring process if their past experience doesn't include <specific tool/framework> use. Fourth, and this was a change different from past hiring, 4-5 of the applicants were ML/AI-focused candidates with MS degrees (and one PhD). This position is/was clearly just a normal app developer job in an organization that doesn't ship software for sale - we do small-scale app dev and data management for our internal organization users. These ML/AI-focused candidates were interesting for other reasons. Almost none of them demonstrated any experience on paper besides "wrote a little python to load some ML/AI tool and ran experiments." This isn't bad experience on the face of it, but their CV/resumes and cover letters didn't talk about software dev at all. To a candidate, it was almost all "ran and tweaked model for small gain in performance" for some data set. I'm not sure where these folks will land in the current hiring market?