I haven't experienced it myself (haven't applied for a job in a long time), but there are lots of reports here on HN of people getting online applications rejected withing minutes, or late at night - definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes. This has been going on for a long time - it's not just a recent "AI" thing - resumes used to get rejected for not having the right keywords on them.
> lots of reports of people getting online applications rejected within minutes
Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone and pc is my work email. It’s probably prioritised wrong, but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an application that doesn’t meet the tech stack or YOE requirements when I have 20 who do, I’m just going to reject them.
> or late at night
ATS let you schedule emails. I used to send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK
> definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes
I don’t doubt it, but I doubt that it’s rampant to the degree you’d believe on this site. I’d instead that it’s far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter, is spending about 15 seconds looking at “does the tech stack match, how much experience, and how many other candidates are there that I think have an edge”. The people on this site are a small minority of very smart folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a topic you are an expert in, you’ll quickly realise that you shouldn’t take everything you read on here as absolute.
Another suggestion - Reach out to two different recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might need to pay them to do it). You’ll get two totally different responses. Both might work, and neither might work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria. Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the past 5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold to fix that problem was snake oil.
