If you Google "how to get past ATS", you'll find a hundred tools promising to crack the code. Optimise your keywords. Score 90%+. Beat the robot gatekeeper.

It's compelling. It's also mostly nonsense.

I say this as someone who's spent 20 years in technology, worked with recruitment agencies, and built a product that analyses CVs against job specs. We could easily have positioned CV Screened as "the ATS beater." We didn't. Here's why.

ATS isn't the villain people think it is

Most applicant tracking systems do one job: organise applications. They store your CV, attach it to a job, and let a recruiter search and filter. That's it. They're databases with a search bar.

The idea that an ATS is silently rejecting you because you used "project management" instead of "project delivery" is, in most cases, a myth. Some enterprise systems do rank or filter candidates - but even then, a human is making the call on who gets a phone screen.

The bottleneck isn't a robot. It's a recruiter with 200 applications open, 30 seconds per CV, and a shortlist to build by Friday.

The real first sift is a human with no time

Here's what actually happens:

  1. A recruiter opens your CV (usually a PDF, sometimes parsed text).
  2. They scan the top third - current title, recent company, and anything that jumps out.
  3. They check whether your experience roughly matches the job spec.
  4. They make a gut call: progress, reject, or maybe-pile.

That entire process takes about 10 seconds. The problem isn't that a system filtered you out. The problem is that in those 10 seconds, your CV didn't say the right things in the right order.

Keyword stuffing actively hurts you

The worst advice in the "beat ATS" playbook is: cram in every keyword from the job spec.

I've seen CVs where candidates have copy-pasted the entire job description into a white-text footer. I've seen profile summaries that read like a thesaurus exploded on a LinkedIn post. These don't pass a sift - they fail it, because the second a human reads them, they feel off. Recruiters develop a nose for this. It reads like gaming, not experience.

The goal isn't to trick a parser. It's to make a busy person think: "This one's worth a call."

What actually clears the first sift

After years of watching how recruiters work - and now building tooling that replicates their judgement - here's what I've seen consistently matter:

  • Evidence over claims. "Reduced manual processing by 40% across 3 product lines" beats "results-oriented leader" every time.
  • Relevant terms, used naturally. If the job asks for "stakeholder management," don't hide it - but don't shoehorn it into every bullet either.
  • Structure the recruiter expects. Name, title, company, dates, responsibilities, outcomes. In that order. Don't make them hunt for the basics.
  • The top third does the heavy lifting. Your most recent role and your profile summary are where the decision is made. Everything else is backup.

Where CV Screened fits

We don't claim to beat an ATS. We don't score your "ATS compatibility." What we do is show you how your CV reads against a specific job spec - the same way a recruiter would scan it.

We flag what's missing. We tell you what to move higher. We point out where the evidence is thin. And we give you a recruiter reality check - a blunt take on how you'd land at first glance.

The goal is simple: make those 10 seconds count. Not by gaming a system, but by making sure the right things are visible when a real person looks at your CV for a real role.

That's a harder promise to market than "beat the ATS." But it's an honest one. And it actually works.