How Applicant Tracking Systems Work (All About ATS Part 1)

This is the first part of a two part series on crafting your resume to the way that companies are currently hiring.

Part 1 is all about how Applicant Tracking Systems work.

Part 2 will go over how to specifically craft your resume to get through the ATS, recruiters, and land you a job.

This series is brought you to by Jobscan.co — scan your resume against your desired job description and optimize your resume, fast.

Get 2 free scans today!

Applicant Tracking Systems: evil rejection robots or innocuous productivity tool?

Every career coach will tell you that Applicant Tracking Systems are the biggest concern in job hunting. They say an ATS will filter out your resume for the smallest infractions, like using font colors or formatting it incorrectly.

Every recruiter will tell you that an ATS doesn’t really do anything. It’s just a simple way to post jobs and manage applicants. They say an ATS makes it easier to keep candidates informed, and that it’s necessary to deal with the large volume of applicants they receive for each job.

I am neither a career coach nor a recruiter. My livelihood doesn’t depend on either of these things being true; I just want you to get a job. So, I’m attempting to sift through the noise and misinformation and help you understand what really matters when it comes to crafting a resume that leads to interviews.

The thing that both career coaches and recruiters miss in this situation is what candidates are actually concerned about: when you submit a job application, are you actually being considered?

The answer, unfortunately, is it depends. It’s not exactly honest to say that an ATS is the main obstacle to getting a job, but it’s even more dishonest to say that it is not a factor in candidates being accepted or rejected. It depends on the company, the recruiter, and the systems that they use.

The Truth about how an ATS works

All of the big applicant tracking systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Workable, Ashby etc) have the capability to automate recruiter actions and candidate experiences.They also provide parsing and filtering tools that allow recruiters to create complex searches and take action in bulk.

Automation and filtering create opportunities for recruiters to reject resumes without ever reading them.

When would you be automatically rejected?

The most common automated filter is something you might recognize: when the job application has specific questions, like “Are you eligible to work in the US?” or “Do you have at least 5 years experience as a CSM?” or “What’s your desired salary range?”

If you come across a job application with these questions, it is very likely that it is set up to automatically reject candidates based on specific answers.

In my view, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing — just providing the questions on a job application helps candidates self-select out of roles that aren’t right — but it can be frustrating when the “right” answer isn’t clear in the job description.

Even so, it would probably be a better, more fair experience not to automatically reject any resumes.

Additionally, an ATS may use a candidate scoring system, whether automatically generated based on the job description, or based on criteria from the hiring manager, and the ATS may automatically reject a candidate that doesn’t meet or exceed a certain score.

Other common automations they may be using to automatically reject candidates:

• you’ve applied for other roles at the same company;

• you didn’t submit a cover letter (even if it wasn’t required);

• you left answer fields blank (even if they weren’t required);

• you’re not in the right region (even if it’s remote);

• you didn’t go to a Ivy League School or have FAANG or Fortune 100 experience (even if they don’t require this on the job application).

I’m not defending any of those reasons — I find the last two incredibly discriminatory and frustrating actually, however I know they happen and I want you to know, too.

But it’s not just automation.

An ATS provides tools to allow recruiters to make decisions based on generated information, or even their own biases.

Using tools like a candidate scoring system, a recruiter may simply filter by the score and only look at the top 10-20% of candidates.

Or, a recruiter might see a pattern across early applicants and start filtering for only candidates with advanced degrees or from specific universities. Even though it wasn’t a listed requirement, it becomes one and the ATS makes it easy to add this new attribute to candidate searches.

A recruiter might wait a few days and let the candidates apply, then start to keyword search for specific keywords dictated by the hiring manager — and only look at those resumes that have the keyword.

And once a recruiter has created their smaller group of candidates to choose from, they can reject everyone else in one click - without ever looking at the applications.

None of these features are AI — not technically anyway. When recruiters say things like “we’re not using AI to reject you!,” it’s because they’re using other technological tools to reject you. It’s really just pedantry, and not particularly useful.

But it doesn’t mean they can’t — and don’t — use AI in the process, however the way it’s used might not be how you’d expect.

AI & ATS

Generative AI — ChatGPT and most of the current AI tools making headlines right now are Generative AI tools — is best at taking simple inputs and creating detailed outputs, and this is where AI is mostly being used within applicant tracking systems.

AI is used for things like:

• generating paragraph summaries about candidates from submitted resumes;

• quickly personalizing an email from a recruiter to a candidate;

• finding a good interview time based on multiple schedules;

• crafting complex keyword searches out of simple prompts;

• helping write the job description based on certain desired attributes.

Features like these are how AI is currently being used at systems like Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby — all systems that do purport to create a good candidate experience, and are the most popularly used by tech companies.

Again, this doesn’t mean there aren’t more nefarious companies finding ways to use AI to make hiring decisions, and that doesn’t mean these companies won’t develop something that does this as well.

My commitment is to consider this when I share jobs — if you notice I mostly share jobs that use Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby because I can feel confident that the ATS won’t be used in bad faith.

Is the ATS to blame for getting rejected?

Sort of.

Most of the time, the ATS is not responsible for quick, unconsidered rejections.

It is responsible for giving recruiters the tools to make quick, unconsidered rejections. And unfortunately, these tools are the industry standard.

In the macro, I think applicant tracking systems deserve a lot of the blame for how hard it is to get a good job right now. They make it harder for recruiters to see candidates as human. They encourage greater volume of applications to justify their existence, and they emphasize the recruiting experience more than the candidate experience.

But in the micro, when it comes to your specific application, it is generally the recruiter or hiring manager rejecting you - even if they’re not really reading your resume.

The most common reasons your resume is getting rejected:

• You don’t have the keywords recruiters are searching for on your resume.

• You did the bare minimum a lot of other candidates did a bit more — like submitting a cover letter or answering long-form questions.

• They had enough warm candidates — found by the hiring manager or recruiter and invited to reply, company referral — to consider cold applications.

• There’s some information on your resume that may cause confusion — or bias — about your abilities or experience.

• They had enough candidates apply in the first few days to consider later submitted applications.

I definitely don’t defend these reasons, only share so that we can figure out how you can overcome the little things and actually get to the interview.

How to format your resume with ATS in mind

Your resume format is not typically a reason you are getting automatically rejected.

However your resume is currently formatted is probably fine for most modern applicant tracking systems, even if it is more design-heavy, with elements like images or tables, it isn’t likely to be rejected automatically.

But it may cause problems when hiring teams are trying to extract information from it, and cause you not to show up in searches. For this reason, I like to recommend staying as close to plain text as possible.

Here are some basic formatting tips to guide you:

• no images, tables, columns, or any other design elements. Eliminate as much necessary “formatting” as possible and focus on one big column.

• Don’t build your resume in things like Canva — a “designed” resume no longer matters, and the text may be too difficult to parse. Just use Google Docs or Word.

• Use the same font throughout, and don’t use any colors other than black.

• Write out acronyms – systems like Greenhouse don’t recognize acronyms properly.

In Part 2, I go over how to actually write a resume that makes recruiters want to call you.