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Comment by returningfory2 | Hacker News Reader

The sample "Hiring Pipeline" chapter says that auto-rejections from ATS systems are a "myth" and that most/all resumes are screened by a human. Is this really true? I'm suspicious.

The next sample chapter even contains an anecdote strongly suggesting it's not a myth:

> With how the recruitment industry is going with ATS systems, one-touch-tooling, and AI, it’s all about optimizing the top of the funnel to streamline the workflow. In this setup, it is key that you have a resume where a machine can identify that you have 80% of what the company is looking for.

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Worked in recruiting most of my career. I've never seen a system that auto rejects anyone. In recent years I have seen systems that puts cold applications into some type of qualified or less qualified bucket.

Easy solution: Ask your recruiting team/hr department if your company has something like this in place. There are only 3-5 major ATS's that are used by ~80% of companies.

Had a funny thought. What would happen if I just put tons of key words in a hidden area of a document to make keyword scanners happy. Old school keyword stuffing. Then the visible portion was my actual resume. I bet I could get in the better bucket. Could even scrape the job listing to fill the hidden stuffing.

I used to work at one of those ATS companies, and our resume parser specifically looked for keyword stuffing like that, where people would fill the white space with keywords in white font. These get marked as keyword stuffed. Though what our clients did with those resumes I have no idea. We once had one that was about 20 pages long, just every skill you can imagine, one after another white text on white field. It actually caused a downstream issue when the parsed resume data was too big lol

There are normally checks for this type of thing. Remember it's another engineer who is building the ATS not a recruiter haha

Hey returningfory2, great spot on the comment in the quoted section: "With how the recruitment industry is going with ATS systems, one-touch-tooling, and AI, it’s all about optimizing the top of the funnel to streamline the workflow. In this setup, it is key that you have a resume where a machine can identify that you have 80% of what the company is looking for".

I talked with the recruiter I quoted later on, and while they think eventually the industry will go towards having more automation, she also confirmed she did not see any automation like this, today. I probably should have made that more clear!

It's crazy how widely spread this misunderstanding is.

You can normally find the ATS for a job application by taking a quick peak at the source. Most companies are using a handful of ATSs and if you check their offerings, they don't include automated rejections.

I mean... If the ATS ranks candidates and the company has a policy of only looking at/considering high ranking candidates, then it's an "auto rejection" in practice. I don't know if this sort of thing is common, but it's possible.

Ours asks a couple (basic) questions right before submitting the application- if anyone answers "no" to any of them we don't consider that resume.

Sure, automatic ranking is also "possible". The point is that it isn't being used in practice.

Those questions aren't related to what is being discussed: ATSs filtering people based on the contents of their resume.

I don't think any ATS will actually "reject" a resume on any grounds. HOWEVER, what really is the difference between "reject" and "ignore"?

I think what essentially happens is that resumes get ranked and high priority indicated factors (like a lack of Bachelor's Degree for example) will cause a resume to end up so low in the stack that it essentially doesn't exist. I know that when my company puts up a job posting we get over 100 resumes the first day. We might look through the top 30-40 resumes a day. While the other 70 resumes haven't officially been "rejected", they effectively are, since they will never see human eyes. Maybe companies with fewer applications go through every resume, but every company I have worked at gets more resumes than a single hiring manager can realistically go through, especially if they have other responsibilities (like running their department). So the ATS ranks them and we look at 30ish per day. Manually upvoting or favoriting the ones we read that we like.

The myth/rumor that certain factors get rejected by the ATS is effectively true. Rejected might not be the correct term. But "buried" could be more appropriate. But the idea that they aren't going to be considered by humans is effectively true at large organizations that get lots of applicants.

Interesting timing. The Ask a Manager blog just yesterday published a guest post by someone who tracked down one of the commonly cited statistics that drives the supposed myth. The research does not debunk the claim itself, though both the author and the blog runner share their own comments about the veracity of the claim.

https://www.askamanager.org/2020/10/your-job-application-was...

There's no guarantee your low ranked application is looked at. Why would they if there's a big enough pool of applications the ATS liked? A human just has to pull the trigger.

It can hold that auto rejections don't exist and low scoring applications are junked (by hand).

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