Do you think the ATS system has made hiring better or worse?

4 Comments

1. Danielle Peterson, MBAJuly 28,2025 at 3:15PM UTC

   Much worse!

2. AnonymousJuly 28,2025 at 9:13PM UTC

   I'm a little confused by this reasoning.. have you used ATS' or are you speculating as an applicant? I can't see a situation where an ATS would take away a job from a recruiter. That's like saying CRMs are taking jobs from sales people. An ATS is a tool used by recruiters to organize, track and communicate with applicants. Yes, it does automate moving applications into statuses based on stipulations they set, but it's implemented because online applications allow for wide reach & because of bot applications there are way too many applications to go through for the recruiters. The ATS allows them to continue doing their job.. in very few scenarios would the answer be to have more recruiters. My company has 450 employees and when I applied to my role there were 600 applications. Could you imagine how much salaried time it would take for recruiters to go through that manually? It wouldn't be worth it. They would just have the same amount of recruiters and they would randomly grab to first 30 applications and go off that, shoving the rest aside.

   ATS' just trade random inattention for imperfect automated inattention. It might not be better or worse.

   I 100% believe we should always keep the human element priority. I just think that perspective lacks the reality that we're in. It's not the ATS that's the problem.. it's the environment that requires the need for it that is making this experience worse. My 2 cents anyway

3. AnonymousJuly 29,2025 at 3:00PM UTC

   I don't think you can across the board say that it's made things better or worse. I think it's going to depend on the individual organizations and the systems they utilize and how they have configured their systems. ATSs have the potential to make things so much better, make for a much more pleasant candidate experience. But too many companies aren't putting what they need into it to get what they need out of it.

4. AnonymousAugust 3,2025 at 9:12PM UTC

   While that's not the only thing making the hiring situation more difficult today that in decades past, it is a contributing factor. The more we lose the human touch, the worse the situation will get. AI has legitimate uses, but it should NOT be making decisions on whether to interview someone. It isn't alive, doesn't have a conscience, and reflects the biases of its creators (look at the fiasco with Grok if you don't believe me on that; it said some things that were blatantly hate speech!) AI can be useful, but let's heed the warnings of many science fiction writers and not put it in charge.