ATS & Humans need to meet halfway. My two very different conversations about hiring surely seem to suggest so.
A friend in HR was telling me about the overwhelming pressure recruiters are under. Hiring targets, tight timelines and an increasingly competitive talent market in India and the Philippines.
If you ever looked at hiring insights for any role irrespective of job portal/ platform, you notice that almost everyone applies for an open role. Different backgrounds, experience levels, industries and sometimes, barely any connection to the role.
When hundreds or thousands of applications land for one role, how else do you bring scale, speed and consistency into the process? Right? You probably get it why ATS has to exist.
But then I had another conversation. A college junior by many years asked me for advice on her job search.
Her strategy is simple and approach meticulous: Make the CV ATS-compliant and leave no stone unturned while doing so. She uses a combination of ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools to optimise her CV, applies for roles and repeats the process.
The result? A few responses. Plenty of rejections. And she follows essentially the same approach every time. I honestly didn’t have much advice to offer her except connecting her to my friend in HR.
These two conversations about 2 weeks apart got me thinking.
If recruiters are using technology to filter candidates at scale, and candidates are using AI to optimise themselves for those filters… are we creating an arms race between candidates and algorithms?
And what gets lost in that process? Can an ATS recognise transferable skills or understand context or spot an unconventional candidate who could actually be brilliant in the role?
But equally… Can we really expect recruiters, already drowning in applications and hiring targets, to manually assess every CV?
Would love to hear from recruiters, hiring managers and candidates — what are you seeing?
What's the right trade off?
Rohit Mishra
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