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Jul 27, 2023

Why your resume gets ignored by recruiters

Wowee, I love editing my resume for each new job!

Said no one ever…

Anytime you submit your resume into a job site, it gets sent over to an ATS. (That’s an Applicant tracking system). It’s a piece of software that helps recruiters rank, track, and ultimately hire applicants. 98% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS. In my estimation, most companies Series A and beyond have some sort of ATS.

Here’s what it does with your resume:

  • Scans it.

  • Reformats it to a plain text file.

  • Compares that text file against keywords in the job description, or keywords that the recruiter has defined.

  • Scores your resume based on match percentage of those keywords

  • If a recruiter wants, from there they can use that match % to help rank candidates.


That's it…



It’s really not that different from what Google does to rank websites.

Here’s what a study Harvard Business school said about how those rankings work:

”..For example, most use proxies (such as a college degree or possession of precisely described skills) for attributes such as skills, work ethic, and self-efficacy. Most also use a failure to meet certain criteria (such as a gap in full-time employment) as a basis for excluding a candidate from consideration irrespective of their other qualifications.” Source

“more than 90% of employers […] initially filter or rank potential middle-skills (94%) and high-skills (92%) candidates” by criteria like skills, credentials, and years of experience.

Want to see how it’s done exactly?

Check out this article from Lever one of the smaller ATSs. They walk you though a common resume screening process step by step.


To make it even more complex: recruiters and companies all use resumes differently.

  • Some say that they manually review every applicant's profile.

  • Some say they just find the first 10 qualified candidates and then stop looking.

  • Some apply filter out applicants based on work-visa status or even things unrelated to resume.

  • Some say they only apply use those resume keyword rankings when theres a ton of applicants and they don’t want to review them all.

  • Sometime the company is so small, there is no recruiter and you just talk straight to the CEO.


The real truth is that most recruiters really have no clue if the candidates are qualified or not based on their application + resume. Most of the time they’re really no better than a coin flip, at judging if the candidate will even pass the next interview or not.
About 55% accurate.


Wait what? Why are recruiters so bad at this?

Hard to say, but one theory is just that resumes themselves are simply “low signal.” IE they just don’t give human reviewers enough info to determine if the candidate is a good fit or not. This makes sense since we saw recruiters use brand names, as a proxies to determine if an applicant is qualified. If I didn’t have enough signal, I’d look for indicators like that.


So what makes a recruiter want to interview a candidate?

We want to know so we hand use this info to our advantage. Let’s got back to that US study:


Experience at a top company.

Welp, it’s mostly about having name brands on your resume. The attribute that was most predictive of whether a recruiter would want to interview that candidate was experience at a top company.

These resumes were 35% more likely to be selected. These top firms are mostly made up of FAANGs and FAANG adjacent companies.

  • What are these top companies?

    Airbnb, Amazon, Anthropic, AWS, Apple, Asana, Atlassian, Bloomberg LP, Checkr, Coinbase, Coursera, Cruise, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Flexport, GitHub, Google, Gusto, HashiCorp, Instacart, Instagram, Jane Street, Jump Trading, Khan Academy, LinkedIn, Lyft, Medium, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Oculus, OpenAI, Palantir, Peloton, Pinterest, Postmates, Quora, Reddit, Robinhood, Roblox, Salesforce, Segment, Slack, Snap, Snowflake, SpaceX, Spotify, Square, Stripe, Tesla, Thumbtack, TikTok, Twilio, Twitch, Twitter, Two Sigma, Uber, Udemy, Waymo, Whatsapp, Yelp, and Zoom


Identifying as an underrepresented minority.

Admittedly, this is less resume focused. But applications from Black or Hispanic candidates are also associated with an increased likelihood a recruiter would interview a candidate — by 21%. This is likely due to DEI (Diversity and Inclusion) initiatives.


So what attributes do candidates most often get disqualified for?

This piece is a bit more messy and squishy in terms of data. So bear with me. When recruiters are asked to judge a resume, the top reasons the give for rejections are:

  • Missing skill (about 53%)

  • Unclear what they worked on (about 29%)

  • No top firm (about 16%)

A meta analysis of the discarded resumes showed that what recruiters say doesn’t quite line up with what they do. Again this data is a bit squishy here so take this with a grain of salt. But turns out that the main rejection reason isn’t “missing skill” — it’s “no top firm.” (Source) Welp, that seems to be a theme now doesn’t it?


What should you take away from this?

Take any “feedback” from recruiters with some healthy skepticism. Like we saw, these folks tend to be dishonest about why the really accept or reject candidates. And they tend to be pretty poor at even picking out qualified candidates.

Tailoring your resume CAN help, espeically if you can call attention to top firms that you may have worked with. But for more tactile changes (like customizing your bullet points) you're likely to see diminishing returns.

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