"I apply for job and the recruiter comes to my linkedin page and then like an hour later I get the rejection email and I don't know where I'm going wrong in that area." Financial analyst candidate, on a free Huntr support call
🏠 The Ultimate Job Search Guide
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A person reads your resume. An applicant tracking system (ATS) stores your resume, runs the form you fill in, and lets recruiters search. An ATS doesn't reject resumes on its own. I reviewed 9 ATS platforms and asked recruiters with experience at Amazon and Microsoft. They all said the same thing.
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"An ATS is a filing cabinet. That's it ... It doesn't make decisions."
Ted Staeb, technical recruiter at Microsoft
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"I have never used AI in screening applications, so every application that comes to me ... there's a human eye on it."
Gino Calavitta, go-to-market recruiter at Meshy, an AI company
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"A person reads every single resume. There is no AI involved at all, period ... Every, every application is read by a person."
Kristen Fife, senior technical recruiter, on contract at Amazon
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"The filters are boolean with a better paint job."
Ted Staeb, technical recruiter at Microsoft
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Recruiters can search the applicant pool by keyword. The search is smarter than most people think:
"We don't care what keywords you put in because platforms like Monster and Dice ... included semantic search long back, you know, five, six years ago." Vikas Pathak, recruiter, formerly at 7-Eleven
A search for "software engineer" also finds "programmer" and "coder." Use the words the job post uses for skills you have, and stop there.
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The questions on the form can reject you on their own. Work authorization, location, a license, or a minimum number of years are the usual ones. Greenhouse, for example, lets employers set rules that reject applicants based on those answers.
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"Does every employer make use of knockout questions? Yes, that is where I think a lot of people are getting frustrated is the knockout questions." Kristen Fife, senior technical recruiter, on contract at Amazon
So a rejection can arrive in minutes, at any hour.
"If you get rejected in five minutes at 1:38am and Tuesday morning, like, of course you didn't look at my resume." Ted Staeb, describing how candidates read a fast rejection. He traces most fast rejections to knockout questions.
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Answer every eligibility question truthfully. If you fall just short of a requirement, apply anyway. Recruiters look at near misses.
"I need six plus years of experience ... And Sam Wright has got five, five years and eight [months]. So that doesn't disqualify him ... We review, we fight with the hiring managers." Vikas Pathak, recruiter
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Workday sits behind about 1 in 5 job postings in our count, second only to Greenhouse. Some employers add a tool that sorts applicants. Workday's HiredScore grades candidates from A to D. You won't see your grade. When a recruiter has enough A candidates, the rest may never get read. A federal lawsuit, Mobley v. Workday, asks whether tools like these act as decision makers. The court let the case go forward, but has not found that the tools discriminate. I wrote about the case in my open letter to Workday.
The parser causes trouble too. A recruiter I interviewed called Workday's parser "hands down the single worst parser I've ever used." Workday's parser can drop contact details from headers and scramble bullets.
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What you can do: put your name, email, and phone at the top of the page itself, not in the header area of Word or Google Docs. Parsers often skip that area. After you upload, read every field the form fills in, and fix what broke. Then apply early, before the recruiter has enough strong candidates.
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