The ATS isn’t the one rejecting your application — it’s the recruiter. This is a common point recruiters make, particularly when responding to claims from resume-writing companies that promise candidates they can “beat” the ATS using specific templates or professional reviews.
Jay Miller, CEO at Uplink, a recruiting firm, wrote on LinkedIn: “The ATS is not rejecting your resume. Some people keep pushing this Zombie Lie, but it’s not true, so I thought I would try to address it. One of three things is most likely happening: A person has viewed your resume and rejected you, you were disqualified based on knock-out questions, or a person has not viewed your resume and rejected you.”
Of the three rejection scenarios Miller mentioned, the last two are often what candidates mistakenly believe is the ATS rejecting them. Whether it’s being disqualified by knockout questions or the ATS giving a low score, leading a recruiter to reject the application without reviewing the resume, these situations fuel the idea that candidates need to “beat” the ATS.
Here is a story that resulted in high drama. A hiring manager wrote on Reddit.
Auto-rejection systems from HR make me angry. I’m a tech lead, and for 3 months, HR wasn’t able to find a single person for the position we’re looking for. I’ve created myself a new email and sent them a modified version of my CV with a fake name to see what was going on with the process and guess, I got auto rejected. HR didn’t even look at my CV. I took this up to management, and they fired half of the HR department in the following weeks; the issue was they were looking for an angular js developer while we were looking for an Angular one (different frameworks, similar names); this kind of silly mistakes must and can be fixed in minutes, and since the CVs were auto rejecting profiles without angular js in it we literally lost all possible candidates. The truly infuriating part was that I consistently talked to them asking for progress, and they always told me that they had some candidates who didn’t pass the first screening process (which was false).
People who work in HR are incredibly mediocre and lazy.
The hiring manager then explains that they answered all the “tell me about a time” questions and were still rejected “.02” seconds later. According to Miller’s possibilities, this is clearly a rejection due to a knockout question. The hiring manager figured out that a recruiter entered the wrong information. But is this the type of mistake that results in the company firing half the HR department?
Well, it seems so.
The hiring manager identified the recruiters involved as “medicocre and lazy.” But generally, companies don’t terminate multiple people for a lazy error.
However, someone claiming to be the recruiter at issue popped into Reddit to explain what happened.
One of the things this person claimed, albeit in a now-deleted post, that someone helpfully took a screenshot of (remember, the internet doesn’t forget!), is that this was not a bad ATS or even a human mistake. It was purposefully done because the hiring manager had “become impossible to deal with.”
If it was sabotage, then it’s definitely a reason to terminate. Having the ATS criteria set to auto reject anyone who didn’t meet the criteria also gave plausible deniability–oops it’s a typo.
But it also highlights the sometimes antagonistic relationship between hiring mangers, recruiters, and candidates. Three groups that can all benefit from each other but sometimes turn antagonistic.
LinkedIn summarized this recruiter/hiring manager conflict as follows:
Hiring managers and recruiters may have different goals, priorities, and criteria for evaluating candidates. Hiring managers may focus more on the technical skills, fit, and performance of the candidates, while recruiters may emphasize the sourcing, screening, and engagement of the talent pool.
It’s easy to become angry at a colleague when they have different goals and priorities that prevent you from reaching your goals.
Ideally, the goals should align so that the correct candidate ends up in the role. If recruiters don’t believe managers make the correct assessment as to what skills they need, then managers won’t believe the recruiters are making a better assessment.
The conflict between recruiters and candidates who are tired of the ATS rejecting them–based on human entered criteria–is easily solvable. Make it look like a human did the rejection by setting the rejection to wait X number of hours and only send the rejections during normal business hours.
Is this “dishonesty” unethical? Airports have been known to do something similar–make the walk to baggage claim longer than necessary to reduce complaints about how long it takes for baggage to arrive.
This wouldn’t have saved the recruiters in the Reddit case because the hiring manager would still want to know why his “perfect” resume was rejected. But for most candidates, it would look like a human had involvement.
The conflict between hiring managers and recruiters is more complicated and not fixed by slight-of-hand like the candidate problem could be.
