Applicant Tracking Software - Useful tool or survival of the fittest?

Early this year I casually started to look for work in Seattle. I attached my resume to jobs I would find on LinkedIn and also contact interesting small companies direct, because they tend to list key people and their contact details on their website. While I almost always heard back from small companies, even to just have an informal conversation about what I am after and what they do or to inform me that there are no positions open, I did not receive one call back from companies I applied to on LinkedIn. This puzzled me but I thought it was just that they might have had an influx of job seekers and I just didn’t make the cut.

However, I was just not aware of Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) that most of the companies use. I found out about ATS when I attended the workshop by Jobscan. The speaker said something like: “The resumes that fare the worst are usually those designed by designers, the most beautiful ones with different layouts and sections.” I felt like someone punched me in the stomach. My resume was creatively designed by my husband, who is an interaction designer. During the same workshop, we were encouraged to log into the jobscan.co website and enter our resumes and a job description for a job we felt we were qualified for to see how we fit.

The whole workshop gasped when most of us scored below 45%. One woman commented she is only 33% match for a role she has been doing for years. It’s all about keywords and layout and avoiding formats that are not recognised by ATS. I found out that abbreviations, such as my PhD, might not be recognised by some ATS systems, immediately rejecting me for roles I was applying for. If you are not familiar with how ATS works, here is a quick summary: recruiter would typically get a document with resumes listed in order of matching qualities. resumes below 85% are probably immediately rejected and never even seen by a human. And this score comes down to keywords programmed for a particular job.


This made me think about it a lot. What is actually important to companies hiring for these roles? And are they getting the best candidates for the role by using ATS systems, or just those that are clever enough to play the system? Sure, using ATS saves time, because a human would take a while reading 200+ resumes to determine who might be the right fit for the company and the role. But what are the disadvantages? 

First of all, you may miss candidates that you want because their resume did not, in some way, pass the ATS. Perhaps they missed a few keywords or used different terms and this gave them lower rating, which means they will never be seen by the right person. You may also have lots of unsuitable candidates that have figured out how to beat the system by loading their resumes with the right keywords while not really being suitable for the role. And the keywords are often right there in the job description.


A while back I was doing some freelance work for a company using AI within their product, and while testing the product, I was pretending to be a customer. I soon realised how the system worked and instead of real answers I could just load lots of right keywords and get the desired results. When read, they made no sense.
I am sure no one intended for it to be used in this way but it gave me better results this way.

And keywords are everywhere and they are everything. I am writing a book on my PhD subject at the moment and the initial excitement, felt when I was offered a book deal by my first choice publisher, was soon tarnished by the fact that my title needs to carry as many keywords as possible and as such, has to be chosen by the marketing department and not me. Same with chapter titles. It’s all about the search results. 

One can look at it from an evolutionary point of view and say that beating the system is a sign that the candidate is smart and resourceful and as such, might be right for the role. But I can’t help wondering how many people are there, sitting in the ATS reject folder who would be awesome candidates, yet they never came to the attention of the right person because they used the wrong formatting, a wrong abbreviation or did not use carefully chosen key words.