Applicant tracking system (ATS) rejected my resume: Is it true?

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Applicant tracking system (ATS) rejected my resume: Is it true?<br>Spoiler: yes and no!

Andrew Stetsenko<br>Apr 22, 2025

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👋 Welcome to The Global Move newsletter, where I share practical advice and ~100 relocation-friendly tech jobs every Thursday.<br>Become a paid subscriber to access weekly handpicked job lists and insights from recruiters at Atlassian, Meta, and more.

Before jumping into reading this, I want to assure you that 2 real humans (a software engineer and a tech recruiter) with total 30+ years in the field were involved in writing this article.

Let’s discuss this together. As the job market, especially in tech, gets more competitive, I revisited one of the most talked-about (and feared) topics: the ATS , or Applicant Tracking System . Because, according to an urban legend, the ATS can automatically reject a resume and squash a candidate’s chances of getting a job.<br>Why do I care about this issue so much? Honestly, I’m tired of watching my friends panic whenever they hear, “Your resume won’t make it past the ATS.” These stories pop up so often. So, instead of answering every friend asking, I put my thoughts together.

Why should my voice be relevant?<br>As you know, I’m the founder of The Global Move. But, before that, I founded CV Compiler (read about it on TechCrunch), which later got acquired by Resume Worded. So, I’ve been working with resume parsing and machine learning since 2018.<br>This write-up is relevant because I relied on other specialists. To add a bit of extra tech expertise, I spoke with Oras Al-Kubaisi, a software engineer with over 25 years of experience and the founder of Resume Yay and Job Description AI. The conclusions you’ll read here resulted from our conversation.<br>Since we’re here… Besides reading this article, one good recommendation for dealing with ATS anxiety is to follow the fantastic Amy Miller, who worked for Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Amy started a YouTube channel explaining ATS and sharing practical tips for job seekers.<br>What is an ATS?

Simply put, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a tool companies use to manage job applications. It acts as a large database of candidates and includes features to help HR teams post jobs, track hiring progress, gather feedback, and manage recruiting-related tasks. ATS software also supports collaboration and allows managers, team leads, and other decision-makers to stay involved when picking profiles.<br>In short, it helps streamline the entire hiring process. When you upload your resume through a web app, you’re probably funneling it to an ATS.<br>An ATS is like a CRM, but for recruiters.<br>There are dozens of ATS solutions out there: Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, TalentHR, and so many others.<br>And there is NO one standard that works for all the ATS solutions. Referring again to the CRM world, if Salesforce has some feature, Zoho might have it, too. But the realization — or how the software engineers built it — might be entirely different.<br>It makes sense that companies go looking for ATS solutions. Employers move to ATS platforms that offer features like applicant tracking, candidate management, scheduling, and analytics in one place because it makes their hiring process simpler. As companies grow, they need ATS platforms that can handle more complex compliance and regulatory requirements. They might need, for example, to offboard an employee or to sign documents.<br>How or why they might choose one ATS over the other is entirely up to them. Maybe an HR manager already knows of a system. Perhaps they just Googled for a solution and one provider had done a fantastic SEO jobs. Many ATS satisfy most of the needs a company might have.<br>The ATS has some logic and criteria to it. HR managers can config it so that it scopes down to certain candidates only. I’ll talk about that soon enough.<br>Like a CRM, an ATS is a business tool with multiple criteria and various stakeholders, and its primary goal is not to auto-reject candidates. Yes, that’s entirely against what some myths claim about it.<br>The Global Move has both free and paid editions. To get ~100 handpicked relocation-friendly tech jobs delivered every Thursday, choose a paid subscription.

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How could auto-rejection work?

Some ATS platforms can assign a Matching Score to your application based on how well your resume aligns with the job description. This is typically a simple algorithm that checks for overlapping keywords, titles, and skills. If your score is too low, your resume might not be shown at the top of the list — or even shown at all — especially when recruiters are flooded with candidates. In some setups, employers can set a minimum score to automatically filter out resumes below that threshold. While that technically counts as auto-rejection, it’s not personal — it just means your resume didn’t hit the right buzzwords for that specific role.<br>Is it legal to...