Locked Out: Proven Strategies to Navigate ATS Filters, Overcome Workplace Bias, and Win Senior-Level Roles in a Shifting Job Market for Black Professionals - Softcover

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Same résumé. Different name. Thirty to fifty percent fewer callbacks.

You have the credentials. You have the track record. You have done, without exception, everything you were told would work.

And the applications keep going silent.

Most job-search advice will tell you to network harder or fix your résumé. That advice was written for a market that isn't the one you're standing in. Because what you're facing isn't one obstacle—it's three, operating at the same time.

The Triple Barrier

• Algorithmic filtering. Software ranks and sorts before any person reads a word — and the patterns it learned came from decisions humans already made.
• Human bias at the screen. Résumé audit studies have found identical applications drawing 30–50% fewer callbacks when the name reads as Black.
• Dismantled infrastructure. The DEI programs and internal advocates that once created a side door have been cut, quietly, across most of the corporate market.

Any one of these is survivable. Running simultaneously, they produce a search that feels personally hostile and looks, from the inside, like a verdict on you.

It isn't a verdict. It's a system. And systems can be read.

What this book gives you

• A diagnostic—which of the three barriers is actually stopping you, so effort goes where it converts instead of everywhere at once
• A résumé the machine reads correctly—formatting that survives the parser, keyword work that isn't stuffing, and the tailoring pass that doesn't take your whole evening
• The side-door strategy — how referrals, sponsorship, and warm introductions actually get built when the formal channels have been cut
• Interview and negotiation moves—including how to answer the questions that get asked of you and not of others, without shrinking
• A way to hold your footing — the psychological work of staying steady through a search designed to make every silence feel personal

Who this is for

Black professionals with real seniority and real results—often mid-career, often the only one in the room—running a search in a market that changed while they were busy being excellent at their jobs. If you have started wondering whether the problem is you, this book was written to answer that question with evidence rather than encouragement.

What it isn't

It is not a book about how unfair things are. You already know. It's not a pep talk, and it's not a list of affirmations. It names each barrier precisely, explains the mechanism, and hands you the moves that work against it.

You were never the problem. You were locked out. This is how the lock works — and how to get past it.

From the author of the Career Strategies Substack newsletter.

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