Do ATS Scores Help You?
By Soozy G. Miller, CPRW, CDCC, CDP
Are you seeing social media posts about ATS scores? It's enough to make you crazy.
“Jobscan said I was an 80% match, but I got a rejection with seconds. What is going on?!”
If you've been using popular resume scoring systems like Jobscan or any AI programs, and you’ve been getting really high scores, and then immediate rejections, you're probably feeling very confused.
Let me explain what’s going on.
ATS stands for applicant tracking system, the software that companies use to track job applicants. When you ask platforms like Claude or ChatGPT, Jobscan, or Resume Worded (free and paid) to score or rate your resume (as compared to a specific job or not), they attempt to simulate how a real company ATS would score your resume. But they can’t.
Nobody except the actual ATS user knows which features inside each ATS are actually being used, and there are a lot of options. Even employees within the same division, department, and team might use the ATS differently. There are many optional features inside the ATS, including scoring. But that does not mean that the ATS user at that moment is using any of the available features.
In fact, scoring isn’t very popular in hiring because there are so many other features in the ATS that can better assess a resume. Also, any hiring person with experience can assess the resume within seconds without technology.
There has been extensive hiring research done at huntr.co, including interviews with many recruiters, and it turns out leaders at Fortune 50 companies are treating the ATS like a basic file cabinet and looking at every resume. The score is simply an added step that doesn’t help them. I never use a score. I can tell if a candidate is worth talking to within seconds. The senior recruiters at Amazon AI and Microsoft look at every single resume. No scores there.
I get asked to test ATS simulators all the time. None of them work. I tested one by uploading a resume and a job posting that I knew were absolutely not a match. The system gave me a 7 out of 10 rating for the resume. Nope.
These are currently popular ATS simulators:
Teal
Resume Worded
Rezi
Kickresume
Upplai
ResyMatch
And countless others are in production since AI became popular. Each ATS simulator claims that your ATS score will be high and that’s all that you need.
If you are using any of these scoring programs, let’s see, how do I say this politely? User beware.
When you see a post in social media with a beautiful graphic of a resume, or a beautiful graphic of ATS operations, and it’s talking about increasing your resume score, run away far and run away fast. The score you get may make you feel awesome and proud for about 10 seconds before you are rejected. Again.
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Better job. More pay. More control.
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