A couple of weeks ago I presented at the British Association of CV Writers for the second year running. I presented on the same topic as last year, which is A Recruiter’s Guide to ATS. Although it’s only been 11 months, the presentation was made up almost entirely with new content.
That tells you something about the pace of change, but it is not the only thing that has stayed with me since. What has stayed with me is the turnout.
Almost the whole membership was there. For a lunchtime session in May, that is not normal. I went in expecting a regular crowd and found something closer to a full house.
The reason became clear pretty quickly. People arrived anxious. There is so much conflicting information about ATS at the moment, so many LinkedIn posts promising the secret formula, so many clients turning up to consultations quoting things they have read online. It reminded me of the frustrations I would have as a child playing with a shape-sorter, turning the piece every which way, convinced it should fit if you just find the right angle. A lot of us have been wondering whether we are getting it wrong.
The open discussion at the end was supposed to last five minutes. It ran much longer. One after another, people shared their experiences and asked the questions they had been sitting on. What came through most clearly was relief. Relief that the way they have been working, articulating a person's value in their own words, telling a real story about a real career, is exactly the right thing to be doing.
Following the presentation, I thought that you could benefit to know what we talked about, it could really help with your next job application.
What the Data Says
The figure most of our clients have heard is that 75% of CVs are rejected by ATS before a human ever sees them. It is everywhere. I have lost count of the consultations that have started with a version of that line.
It is not true. It traces back to a 2012 sales pitch by a US company called Preptel, which closed the following year. The methodology was never published. Investigations by The Interview Guys, HiringThing and ResumeAdapter have all reached the same conclusion.
The figure that does have weight comes from the Harvard Business School and Accenture Hidden Workers report. 88% of employers say qualified candidates get screened out by automated filtering criteria set by humans. The criteria are set by people. The system carries out the instructions it has been given. An insightful report for those with ‘established’ careers. Let me know if you would like a copy.
Enhancv ran a separate study in 2025, looking at how 25 recruiters use their ATS. Only 8% had configured content-based auto-rejection. The other 92% were reviewing applications manually or using knockout questions on the application form for things like right to work or location.
When I shared those numbers in the session, you could feel the room settle a little. The bot we have all been told to fear is not making the decisions. People are. Which means the CVs we have been writing, the ones built around a real person's story, were never the problem.
Why the bot-beating advice has gone wrong
A few months ago I rewrote a CV for a senior client who had been out of work for nearly a year. They had been getting nothing back but automated rejections. We pulled apart the job adverts they were targeting, identified the key skills, and built a CV designed to parse and rank. The interviews followed almost immediately.
Then I got an email from the client. We need to talk about the CV.
One of the senior members on the interview panel knew the applicant well. The feedback was direct. They were lucky to have been interviewed. The CV was too wordy. They had to search for the relevant experience and impact, and they were lucky they bothered to look. The CV had been written for the system, not for them.
That feedback has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have heard from a client. I had written a CV that beat the system and almost lost the human. I told the story at BACVW and saw a lot of nodding heads. Several people said versions of the same thing had happened to them.
This is what happens when we accept the framing that the bot is the audience. We end up writing the wrong CV.
What’s Next For ATS
The systems themselves are moving away from the keyword-matching model that gave rise to all the bot-beating advice in the first place.
Workday's Skill Cloud now contains over 200,000 standardised skills, and the system infers relationships between them. If a CV demonstrates project management through real examples, it will be credited with related skills like stakeholder engagement, planning and risk management. iCIMS launched Copilot in early 2024, powered by GPT-4. SAP SuccessFactors uses Textkernel parsing, which processes over 2 billion CVs a year, with AI on top that reads context rather than counting words.
The shift, in plain terms, is from "did you list it" to "did you do it". Real examples beat keyword density. A CV that shows the work outperforms a CV that lists the keywords.
This is also where AI is most likely to get worse before it gets better. A client of mine was put through Workday's new conversational candidate experience a few weeks ago. They described the output as AI slop. I went and tried it myself on their behalf and would not disagree. The Candidate Experience Agent was not helpful. It will harm candidate experience before it improves it, and clients will need our help navigating that.
Our Value as CV Writers
This is what I wanted the room to leave with, and what I want to leave you with.
We are not in the business of cramming CVs with keywords. We never were. Our value is articulating someone's professional worth in a way that is true to them, supported by evidence, and readable both by a parser and by the person at the other end of the process.
There is no single ATS. Ongig has tracked over 100 different platforms. Workday struggles with Canva PDFs. Taleo only handles standard fonts. Greenhouse does not auto-rank at all. iCIMS scrambles sidebar content. If you tried to write a different CV for each one, you would lose your mind, and so would your client.
There is one shape, though, that passes through every hole. It is the CV that shows the work, shows the impact, and lets the evidence carry the keywords. Single column. Standard headings. Real examples with quantified outcomes. A summary at the top that earns the next seven seconds. Contact details in the body, not the header. Acronyms spelled out. Consistent dates.
These are not new principles. They worked for Resumix in 1988. They work for Workday Illuminate in 2026. They will work for whatever the next wave of AI brings.
We are human writers, writing for humans. That is the circle that passes through every shape.
If any of this has been on your mind, let me know. You can reply to this email or book a virtual brew using the link below.
Thank you for continuing to trust me to guide you each month. I look forward to hearing about the goals you are working towards.
Best of luck!
Dave Crumby
Your Career Optimiser | Certified CV Writer