The truth about the ATS (redux)

Greg Wyatt • July 9, 2024

I find myself in a busy patch at work, which has taken time away from writing these articles.

As I have around 5x as many subscribers as when this was written, I hope you don’t mind me resharing this article on the ATS.

As you may be aware Applicant Tracking Systems get bad press, particularly from career coaches and CV writers who sell to hope. So this attempts to lend a more objective view.

I should point out things are changing, and AI will make things like automated applicant sifting more viable - but that is only starting to happen now, and will be more effective than what has been alluded to.

And the point of this article still holds - write effectively for a human reader, and you will be ATS compliant implicitly. This article may help.

‘Enjoy’:

Aah, the much-maligned ATS, the systematic terminator of applications.

The impenetrable barrier to your much-deserved job, which only a select few know how to navigate.

Or is it?

Today’s article gives a run-down on how ATSs work, how recruiters and hiring processes use them, and how that may inform your approach to your applications.

This is a long one, and still doesn’t get into the detail - if you have any questions do comment online or by email.

There’s no question how frustrating they can be to apply through, but are they a barrier to entry or simply an administrative requirement?

If you’ve ever used any ERP or corporate software, you’ll see they all have much the same purpose, built from the same foundations for users with equivalent skill sets.

And as a job seeker, I’m sure you have many common experiences of ATS, with the many applications you have made.

They all have common features, built to varying levels of quality and ease of use.

When ATSs first came out they replaced filing cabinets the same way email replaced letters. And as they’ve developed over time they’ve taken on more features, in service of the employer and hiring process.

Today some of the most useful features of ATSs are those of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for automated comms and workflows.

Indeed they are probably better described as a Vacancy Management System which applications go through, rather than the other way around.

They ease the administration of internal recruitment functions.

They can be integrated into job boards to make it easier to administrate both adverts and applications, with features that make it easier to communicate, coordinate and arrange.

The common factor is administration, speed and efficiency.

Speak to many Talent Acquisition people about an ATS, and they’ll often say it's an electronic filing cabinet.

The article is also symptomatic of how many CV coaches talk about the ATS, in that it makes it a thing of intent, and as such you should take it with a pinch of salt.

I find it strange that ATSs are given a persona - they're just bits of software that are supposed to help employers.

ATSs have no intent, they facilitate the intent of their Employer-users from how they are configured. Not every feature an ATS offers is implemented or even adopted.

Do you use all the features of MS Office, even if they might make your life easier?

What about when Word goes mad formatting your CV (resumes too of course) - automation that works against you.

You’ll see from the article that an ATS can parse documentation, which means to strip the data from an application and standardise it for use in the process.

Parse is a word you may recognise from Bard/Gemini/ChatGPT, whereby AI parses information based on your intent. Have you ever noticed the results are often quite wonky?

In the same way, recruiters can use parsing and other automation to rank and file applications - but we know the results are often patchy and can work against our goal.

When automation consistently works against us, why would we use it?

Many of the automation features on offer simply aren’t great, especially in older platforms.

Of course, it’s true that automation is often used poorly. Another example of bad you’ll likely recognise - is when someone sends you a Toilet Cleaner job and you’re only interested in Solutions Architecture.

Nonetheless, it’s a human choice to use this kind of automation, not a baked-in requirement.

Yes, it is possible for an ATS to score your application so low you don’t get a look in, if it’s configured that way, but unless volume is impossible to manage, that’s not a feature that is necessarily helpful for us.

It’s more likely however that we’ll run keyword searches through such a high level of applications, to form our long list of people to contact.

It would be reasonable to expect a recruiter to at least look at every CV if say there were only 100 applications.

How about 400? 2,000? More?

At scale, many employers move from recruitment by selection to recruitment by elimination. Something automation can help with, if a human decides.

An ATS is there to help recruiters administer applications at scale, and it is only as good as how it is configured and used.

While often it’s worse than that because it is designed for the employer and not the applicant.

[Actually, that’s the whole problem with recruitment right there. Candidates should be the priority throughout recruitment, in service of the recruitment process.

I call this outside in recruitment, compared to the transactional nature of inside out (company first).]

And because ATSs work for the employer, the experience of applicants is often not a consideration. ‘You do the work, and then maybe we’ll consider you.’

It's institutional arrogance.

Workday often gets bad stick. It’s terrible for job seekers.

I saw an advocate for HR systemic best practice say that people just don’t understand its benefits, as a component of a wider system.

He said that the requirement for multiple Workday accounts is down to data privacy and siloed data that doesn’t cross employers.

These may be true points, but they don’t reflect the experience of people those companies may wish to employ.

Were candidates the priority, there are simple solutions - we use Facebook to log into many websites. Why couldn’t you have a centralised Workday account that can be used for multiple employers?

It just isn’t a priority for many hiring processes, who have the money.

Nonetheless, while their design may cause no end of frustration for applicants, their purpose isn’t to eliminate you from the process.

1/ What about automated instant rejections?

2/ What about duplicated data entry?

3/ What about tailored compliant CVs?

4/ What about keyword matching?

5/ Rejected on Sunday at 3am!

(Answers in the next section)

Common complaints and advice around the ATS.

I’d suggest that these are misleading notions because they make an ATS a barrier to pass and not the tool it is.

It’s better to write CVs for the end user, in a way that shows how you meet the requirements of the process; because all of these questions relate to human decisions.

1/ In a volume process, it’s not uncommon to reject every application after the first hundred, when good candidates are already in view.

Alternatively, you may fail a killer question, such as “Do you have a work permit” or “Do you have a degree in HR” or “Do you have 5 years experience in this software that has existed for 3 years”. These are all questions set by the hiring process.

Other reasons too - mainly human-driven.

2/ On an ATS, parsing is often weak and redistributes content in a gobbledygook way. Data entry allows more consistent processing of data.

3/ Tailored compliant CVs are straightforward - don’t use images, columns or tables. Plain text, and simple formatting. Show how you meet the criteria.

4/ What about keyword matching? Any vacancy has keywords associated with it. An application should show how you truthfully meet their essential criteria, using their terminology. While also showing your strengths in the skills, tech and achievements you have.

5/ Likely configured to close the vacancy at a set time and send out auto-rejections.

Most recruiters know that people don’t know how to write effective CVs.

Why should you?

So we will find other ways to determine your candidacy.

For example, you may use “HR Manager” in your CV as the perfect candidate for a “Head of People”, so we will include your terminology in our searches.

For every skill, there are synonyms and applicable skills.

Sourcing is a detailed specialism, because candidate data is hard to unravel.

Of course, many recruiters assume the CV is the candidate, so your challenge is to help everyone see you as a candidate of choice.

What key words could we be searching on and assessing CVs against?

Instead of worrying about beating the ATS, consider how you can help hiring processes see you as a good candidate.

The same principles that increase ATS performance also work for humans, and it’s humans who you want to decide on you. Not just at the initial stage, but at the decision stage too.

Keyword cramming and other tactics designed to boost ATS performance have a resemblance to cheating. These can work against you, with good reason, if integrity is a principle.

Help human readers make a positive decision with a good enough CV and appropriate action that supports your application.

Something I’ll write about another time.

I should point out, that this isn’t a defence of the ATS.

Many are crummy and leave a sour taste.

It’s just that if you are arbitrarily eliminated from a hiring process, it will most of the time stem from a human decision.

Which in my book makes it worse.

Indeed automation should be a force for good.

For example, there is no reason, other than a lack of intent, for employers not to respond to every application when it is a basic feature of an ATS.

I should also point out that things are going to change.

AI has the potential to bring a significant step change in recruitment automation, and that will be another conversation entirely.

Automated interview arrangements, chatbot style pre-application conversations, contract management and so on - all of which should improve candidate experience.

In the meanwhile, next time someone advises you it’s the ATS that’s holding you back, ask

“Where is the money?”

Yes ATSs can be shoddily designed. Yes they can poorly used. And yes the system is stacked against the majority of job seekers.

But it's people who are accountable, not a bit of software.

Thanks for reading,

Greg

Jump the shark. A Recruitment AiDE, pt 13

By Greg Wyatt • January 29, 2026
May 2023 You’ve heard the phrase, I take it – “jump the shark”? It’s the moment when one surprising or absurd experience can indicate a rapid descent into rubbishness and obscurity. When it’s time to get off the bus. Typically in media. Jumping the Shark comes from an episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz does a water ski jump over a shark. 👈 Aaaaay. 👉 A sign creators have run out of ideas, or can’t be bothered to come up with fresh ones. In movies, sequelitis is a good example of this – an unnecessary sequel done to make some cash, in the hope the audience doesn’t care about its quality. Sometimes they become dead horses to flog, such as the missteps that are any Terminator film after 2. It’s an issue that can lead to consumers abandoning what they were doing, with such a precipitous drop in engagement that the thing itself is then cancelled. Partly because of breaking trust in what was expected to happen next. And because it’s a sign that the disbelief that was temporarily suspended has come crashing down. If you don’t believe that your current poor experience will lead to further, better experiences, why would you bother? Once you’ve had your fingers burnt, how hard is it to find that trust in similar experiences? It doesn’t have to be a single vein of experience for all to be affected. Watch one dodgy superhero movie and how does it whet your appetite for the next? You didn’t see The Eternals? Lucky you. Or how about that time we had really bad service at Café Rouge, a sign of new management that didn’t care, and we never went again? Just me? Did they sauter par-dessus le requin? Here’s the rub – it matters less that these experiences have jumped the shark. It matters more what the experience means for expectation. So it is in candidate experience. It’s not just the experience you provide that tempers expectations – it’s the cumulated experience of other processes that creates an assumption of what might be expected of yours. If you’re starting from a low trust point, what will it take for your process to ‘jump the shark’ and lose, not just an engaged audience, but those brilliant candidates that might only have considered talking to you if their experience hadn’t been off-putting? Not fair, is it, that the experience provided by other poor recruitment processes might affect what people expect of yours? Their experiences aren’t in your control, the experience you provide is. Of my 700 or so calls with exec job seekers, since The Pandemic: Lockdown Pt 1, many described the candidate experience touchpoints that led to them deciding not to proceed with an application. These were calls that were purely about job search strategy, and not people I could place. However, one benefit for me is that they are the Gemba , and I get to hear their direct experiences outside of my recruitment processes. Experiences such as - ‘£Competitive salary’ in an advert or DM, which they know full well means a lowball offer every time, because it happened to them once or twice, or perhaps it was just a LinkedIn post they read. Maybe it isn’t your problem at all, maybe your £competitive is upper 1% - how does their experience inform their assumptions? Or when adverts lend ambiguity to generic words, what meaning do they find, no matter how far from the truth? How the arrogance of a one-sided interview process affects their interest. The apparent narcissism in many outreaches in recruitment (unamazing, isn’t it, that bad outreach can close doors, rather than open them). Those ATS ‘duplicate your CV’ data entry beasts? Fool me once… Instances that are the catalysts for them withdrawing. I’d find myself telling them to look past these experiences, because a poor process can hide a good job. It’s a common theme in my jobseeker posts, such as a recent one offering a counterpoint to the virality that is “COVER LETTERS DON’T M4TT£R agree?” Experiences that may not be meant by the employer, or even thought of as necessarily bad, yet are drivers for decisions and behaviour. I can only appeal to these job seekers through my posts and calls. What about those other jobseekers who I’m not aware of, who’ve only experienced nonsense advice? What about those people who aren’t jobseekers? What about those people who think they love their roles? What about all those great candidates who won’t put up with bad experiences? The more sceptical they are, and the further they are from the need for a new role, the less bullshit they’ll put up with. What happens when an otherwise acceptable process presents something unpalatable? Might this jumping the shark mean they go no further? Every time the experience you provide doesn’t put their needs front and centre or if it’s correlated to their bad experiences…. these can prevent otherwise willing candidates from progressing with your process, whether that’s an advert they don’t apply to, a job they don’t start, or everything in between. Decisions that may stem from false assumptions of what a bad experience will mean. Instead, look to these ‘bad experience’ touchpoints as opportunities to do better: instead of £competitive, either state a salary or a legitimate reason why you can’t disclose salary (e.g. “see below” if limited by a job board field and “we negotiate a fair salary based on the contribution of the successful candidate, and don’t want to limit compensation by a band”) instead of a 1-way interrogation… an interview instead of radio silence when there’s no news - an update to say there’s no update, and ‘How are things with you by the way?’ instead of Apply Now via our Applicant Torture Sadistificator, ‘drop me a line if you have any questions’ or ‘don’t worry if you don’t have an updated CV - we’ll sort that later’. Opportunity from adversity. And why you can look at bad experiences other processes provide as a chance to do better. With the benefit that, if you eliminate poor experience, you'll lose fewer candidates unnecessarily, including those ideal ones you never knew about. Bad experiences are the yin to good experience’s yang and both are key parts of the E that is Experience in the AIDE framework. The good is for next time. Thanks for reading.  Regards, Greg

How To Network For A Job - Jobseeker Basics XIV

By Greg Wyatt • January 26, 2026
The following is Chapter 42 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . In a sense it's a microcosm of how any commercial activity can see a better return - which is to put the needs of the person you are appealing to above your own. It feels counterintuitive, especially when you have a burning need, but you can see the problem of NOT doing this simply by looking at 99% of job adverts: We are. We need. We want. What you'll do for us. What you might get in return. Capped off by the classic "don't call us, we'll call you." If you didn't need a job, how would you respond to that kind of advert? In the same vein, if you want networking to pay off, how will your contact's life improve by your contact? What's in it for them? 42 - How to network for a job Who are the two types of people you remember at networking events? For me two types stand out. One will be the instant pitch networker. This might work if you happen to be in need right now of what they have to offer or if mutual selling is your goal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but it’s a selling activity pretending to be networking. If you want to sell, go and overtly sell rather than disguise it with subterfuge. Lest we mark your face and avoid you where possible in future. The second is the one who gets to know you, shows interest and tries to add to your experience. You share ideas, and there’s no push to buy something. They believe that through building the relationship when you have a problem they can solve, you’ll think to go to them. It’s a relationship built on reciprocity. One where if you always build something together there is reason to keep in touch. And where the outcome is what you need if the right elements come together: right person, right time, right message, right place, right offering, right price. Job search networking is no different. The purpose of networking in a job search is to build a network where you are seen as a go-to solution should a suitable problem come up. In this case the problem you solve is a vacancy. Either because your active network is recruiting, or because they advocate for you when someone they know is recruiting. It is always a two-way conversation you both benefit from. Knowledge sharing, sounding board, see how you’re doing - because of what the relationship brings to you both. It is not contacting someone only to ask for a job or a recommendation. A one-way conversation that relies on lucky timing. That second approach can be effective as a type of direct sales rather than networking. If you get it wrong it may even work against you. How would you feel if someone asked to network with you, when it became clear they want you to do something for them? You might get lucky and network with someone who is recruiting now - more likely is that you nurture that relationship over time. If your goal is only to ask for help each networking opportunity will have a low chance of success. While if your goal is to nurture a relationship that may produce a lead, you’ll only have constructive outcomes. This makes it sensible to start by building a network with people that already know you: Former direct colleagues and company colleagues Industry leaders and peers Recruiters you have employed or applied through Don’t forget the friends you aren’t in regular touch with - there is no shame in being out of work and it would be a shame if they didn’t think of you when aware of a suitable opening. These people are a priority because they know you, your capability and your approach and trust has already been built. Whereas networking with people you don't know requires helping them come to know and trust you. Networking with people you know is the most overlooked tactic by the exec job seekers I talk to (followed by personal branding). These are the same people who see the hidden jobs market as where their next role is, yet overlook what’s in front of them. If you are looking for a new role on the quiet - networking is a go-to approach that invites proactive contact to you. Networking with people who know people you know, then people in a similar domain, then people outside of this domain - these are in decreasing order of priority. Let's not forget the other type of networking. Talking to fellow job seekers is a great way to share your pain, take a load off your shoulders, bounce ideas off each other, and hold each other accountable. LinkedIn is the perfect platform to find the right people if you haven't kept in touch directly. Whatever you think of LinkedIn, you shouldn’t overlook its nature as a conduit to conversation. It isn’t the conversation itself. Speaking in real life is where networking shines because while you might build a facsimile of a relationship in text, it's no replacement for a fluid conversation. Whether by phone and video calls, real life meetups, business events, seminars, conferences, expos, or in my case - on dog walks and waiting outside of the school gates. Both these last two have led to friends and business for me though the latter hasn’t been available since 2021. Networking isn’t 'What can I get out of it?' Instead, ‘What’s in it for them?’ The difference is the same as those ransom list job adverts compared to the rare one that speaks to you personally. How can you build on this relationship by keeping in touch? Networking is systematic, periodic and iterative: Map out your real life career network. Revisit anyone you’ve ever worked with and where Find them on LinkedIn Get in touch ‘I was thinking about our time at xxx. Perhaps we could reconnect - would be great to catch up’ If they don’t reply, because life can be busy, diarise a follow up What could be of interest to them? A LinkedIn post might be a reason to catch up When you look up your contact’s profile look at the companies they’ve worked at. They worked there for a reason, which may be because of a common capability to you Research these companies. Are there people in relevant roles worth introducing yourself to? Maybe the company looks a fit with your aspirations - worth getting in touch with someone who may be a hiring manager or relevant recruiter? Maybe they aren’t recruiting now. Someone to keep in touch with because of mutual interests. Click on Job on their company page, then "I'm interested" - this helps for many reasons, including flagging your interest as a potential employee Keep iterating your network and find new companies as you look at new contacts. This is one way we map the market in recruitment to headhunt candidates - you can mirror this with your networking The more proactive networking you build into your job search, the luckier you might get. While you might need to nurture a sizeable network and there are no guarantees, think about the other virtues of networking - how does that compare to endless unreplied applications? I often hear from job seekers who found their next role through networking. This includes those who got the job because of their network even though hundreds of applicants were vying for it. While this may be unfair on the applicants sometimes you can make unfair work for you. It can be effective at any level.