The Unfair Reality of the Applicant Tracking System (ATS): Why Your Perfect Resume Isn’t Enough
The ATS does not have a mind of its own yet and it’s not automatically rejecting you - we are.
In this blog, I will take a deeper dive into what’s causing your application to get rejected so quickly and the types of people being affected the most.
Let’s get to it.
The ATS is a necessary evil
As a recruiter, I’ll be the first to say that I do not want to imagine a world without using an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) for my job. We talk a lot about the negative aspects of the application process, but can you imagine how inefficient the hiring cycle would be without recruiters using an ATS?
The ATS is vital for many reasons, and I’ll list my top 3:
1. Network Management. Any recruiter who has 6+ months of experience will easily have more than 500 candidates in their ownership they are pursuing. Some recruiters are better than others at keeping in touch or remembering your profile, but imagine if we didn’t have a tool to send reminders for touchpoints and organize our lists. According to a January 2023 survey by Robert Half, hiring managers say it takes an average of 11 weeks to fill a vacant role. Those become rookie numbers if the ATS isn’t present.
2. Automation of admin work. Another huge time saver. Whether it’s being able to autofill your information for new hire paperwork or arranging your upcoming interviews, it’s as easy as a click, type info or drag/drop, save, and done (at least by the time it gets to recruiting). If we’re saving 20% of time here and 5% of time there, that ultimately leads to more time for us to recruit and possibly contact you.
3. It streamlines internal communication. This may come as a shocker, but recruiters are not the only person involved in the hiring process. What you don’t want as a candidate is your recruiter, HR, the hiring manager(s), and anyone else involved in your chance at employment to have a number of channels used to stay organized. In most ATS that I’ve worked with, your profile is created and ALL information & important communication is tied to it vs being in some 20 string deep email chain or even on paper in some file folder on the interns desk.
These aspects absolutely help streamline the application process, but as I mentioned above, some things are out of your hands.
The First Round Knockout
No, I’m not talking about boxing but sometimes the feeling is the same. I’m talking about you spending 10-20 minutes to fill out an application (essentially twice considering most don’t read your resume) only to get an automated response saying you have not been selected for the role.
“But how did they even look at my profile that fast?” If that’s your immediate thought, I am with you.
As a recruiter who spends a lot of time on LinkedIn, being automatically rejected seems to be the cause for the defeat the ATS phenomenon that’s happening right now. Here is a secret…shhh..it’s not the ATS.
I’ll be the first to say your experience is what you have and if it doesn’t meet the minimum qualifications input into the ATS, you should expect to be rejected. The timing of it being instantaneous or 2 weeks down the road, that’s beyond me.
What you likely experienced in your application process is a string of knockout questions.
Knockout questions are pre-screening questions asked at the beginning of the application process to eliminate candidates. The thought process is that the hiring manager will not waste time on unqualified candidates. According to an article by Jobscan, these questions fall into a few categories:
Basic functions, logistics, and legal - Here you often see “What are your salary requirements?” or “Are you willing to work overtime?”
Qualifications - “Do you have X number of years of experience?” If the role says a minimum of 7 years of experience is required and you input 6, you’re probably out. You will also see questions on salary requirements, certifications, and if you possess a degree.
Culture - Top questions may include your stance on relocation, if you work best alone or on a team, and even a possible checklist of your most ‘important’ factors in a new role that you must select.
Being that I’m fresh on the #opentowork train after being laid off, I’ve included an image in Figure 1 that shows a sample of knockout questions I encountered this evening on a job I applied to.
There are only 4 knockout questions on this application, but if I’m not comfortable with a background check, drug test, working onsite, and I don’t have direct recruiting experience, my application would likely have been out as soon as I hit apply.
There isn’t an opportunity to talk deeper with the recruiter, so you have to answer yes to everything, lie to hopefully get a chance to clear the air, or not be considered at all.
For applicants, it’s not the simple questions that are setting people back, it’s the questions more deeply rooted in bias that is limiting the entering of great talent into organizations.
The Hidden Worker
The term Hidden Worker was coined by Accenture and the Harvard Business School in a joint 2021 study that examined more than 8,000 hidden workers and 2,500 executives across the U.S., the U.K., and Germany.
What is a Hidden Worker?
It is an employee who: is long-term unemployed, has mental and/or physical health problems, does not have a degree, comes from a disadvantaged background, is a caretaker/homemaker, a veteran, and someone who possesses a neurodiversity disability.
The term hidden in this instance does not mean that the candidates are hiding, but rather that they are excluded from being considered by antiquated hiring processes.
How are they excluded? Well, a large reason has to do with the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and job descriptions.
Almost 50% of the companies surveyed weeded out resumes that present a “work gap” of more than six months through automatically screening out with their ATS. Additionally, 88% employers believed that qualified high-skills candidates were vetted out of the process because they did not match the exact criteria established by the job description. That number rose to 94% in the case of middle-skills workers.
Figure 2 summarizes how much additional work is having to be put in by hidden candidates to obtain an offer.
How did the parents who have stayed home to raise their children lose their skills? The family members who had to serve as a caretaker for an ailing parent - they lost their skills out of nowhere? The list goes on.
The process of any hiring cycle starts with the job description and the statistics aren’t any better compared to the problems we see with the ATS. For middle-skill job postings, only 19% of employers significantly modified a job description and that number rose to 35% for high-skill job descriptions. Consequently, only 21% of employers reported that all of their high-skill hires met all of the requirements listed in their job postings.
Despite the overload of negativity one may gain from these statistics, nearly two-thirds of the business leaders surveyed reported that, once hired, previously hidden workers performed “better or significantly better” in six key areas that matter most to employers: attitude and work ethic, productivity, quality of work, employee engagement, attendance, and innovation.
Wow! So after all of that, the skills didn’t disappear and they were in fact great employees. Who would have guessed?
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, I hope you now see that the ATS is a byproduct of what employers do (or aren’t doing) on the front end before you ever hit apply. When the ATS has a mind of its own, I’ll be back to write about it again.
For the vast majority of people in hiring positions that I’ve interacted with over the years, their intentions are pure and it’s more of a lack of knowledge that’s causing most of the problems.
Here are my 3 recommendations to those in HR and positions to hire:
You need to consult a third-party on how to create job descriptions that will generate the most qualified candidates without eliminating the hidden candidates. Katrina Kibben is the CEO and Founder of Three Ears Media - a company that specializes in writing for recruiting. Check out their work and you'll be better instantly. Invest in your job postings and it’s guaranteed to speed up the hiring process…which, you know..saves you money!
Don’t always require a degree for every job you post. I totally understand if you are hiring a pharmacist or a college professor, but I’m talking about the middle-skill and high-skill roles that the vast majority of us work in. And if you must, at least let it align with the role. How does someone with 5 years of experience in accounting with a music degree get to apply to your new accounting role but the person with the same experience and no degree gets bypassed?
Keep your knockout questions focused on the legal matters of hiring and eliminate the items that you can determine later in the process. As this article has shown, you will end up finding more candidates that are qualified.
If you are a candidate in the hiring process and realize you are classified as a hidden candidate, keep your foot on the gas. It’s disheartening to realize you have to input double or even triple the amount of applications, but you have to keep going until companies get better with hiring, which I feel like is right around the corner. There is currently more talk than ever on this exact subject and more companies being created to assist with this type of work, so it’s only a matter of time.
Until then, I recommend you check out opportunityatwork.org to join their network and get assistance from them. They have a program called STAR (Skilled Through Alternative Routes) that connects many categories of hidden candidates to opportunities in the workforce.
I’d love to know what I was right on and what you disagree with - share and tag me!
