Your CV Is Being Read By a Robot Before Any Human Sees It

**75%** of CVs are rejected by ATS before a human reads them. **6s** average time an ATS takes to score and filter your CV. **98%** of Fortune 500 companies use ATS to screen applicants. ## We All Get the Same Email You know the one. It arrives two, sometimes four weeks after you applied. Sometimes it never arrives at all: > Dear [First Name], Thank you for your interest in the [Position Title] role at [Company Name]. After careful consideration, we have decided to **move forward with other candidates** whose experience more closely aligns with our current needs. "After careful consideration." **There was no consideration.** No human read your CV. The system scored it, compared it against a threshold, and automatically sent that email. ## What Is an ATS, Actually? An **Applicant Tracking System (ATS)** is software that companies use to manage job applications at scale. Think of it as an inbox manager that's been given the power to delete emails before your hiring manager ever sees them. When you submit an application on a company's careers page, your CV doesn't land in a recruiter's inbox. It gets parsed — converted into structured data — and stored in the ATS. The system then scans your CV for specific keywords, formats, work history, and qualifications. ### Here's what the ATS is actually checking - **Step 1: Keyword matching** — Does your CV contain the exact words from the job description? "Led a team" and "team leadership" are not the same thing to a machine. - **Step 2: Parsing your structure** — Can the system read your CV? Multi-column layouts, tables, headers in text boxes — these often completely confuse the parser. - **Step 3: Education & experience scoring** — Did you attend the right schools? Do your job titles match? - **Step 4: Threshold comparison → rejection** — If your score is below the recruiter's threshold, the system moves you to rejected automatically. ## The Problem Nobody Tells You **The ATS doesn't know if you can do the job.** It only knows if your CV uses the right words in the right places. You could be the most qualified candidate who ever applied and get automatically rejected because you wrote "managed budgets" instead of "P&L ownership," or because your CV was designed with a two-column layout the parser couldn't read. **The most common reasons ATS rejects perfectly qualified candidates:** 1. CV uses graphics, tables, or columns that break the parser 2. Keywords don't exactly match the job description 3. Job titles don't fit expected patterns 4. Missing required fields (LinkedIn URL, phone, location) 5. Saved as the wrong file format ## Why Companies Use It Anyway When a single job post gets 400 applications, something has to filter them. No team can manually review 400 CVs with genuine care. The ATS solves a real problem — but it creates a new, invisible one: **the filtering happens before any human judgment is applied.**