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1,600 applied, 30 seen: New York hiring manager slams resume filters as ‘extreme’
A hiring manager revealed that resume filtering software is flawed, as only 30 out of 1,600 applicants reached him.
After seeing hundreds of job seekers complaining about getting rejected by resume filtering software, one hiring manager has claimed that the system has shocked recruiters like him as well, with just how broken the hiring process can be.
In an anonymous Reddit post, a manager at a global company in New York City shared that although 1,600 candidates applied for an entry-level position on their team, only 30 resumes actually made it to his desk.
“1600 people applied to an open role on my team, I only received 30 applications as the hiring manager,” he wrote, adding that he was able to select eight candidates for screening, but even then, the process didn’t go smoothly.
“The recruiter has only screened 5 of my 8 picks and an additional 'high level' reference that came in from god knows who,” the post continued.
Following up in the comments, the manager blamed inaccurate resume filtering systems for the failure to hire so many potentially qualified applicants.
“At this point, resumes are getting filtered to the extreme. I seriously feel for anyone applying right now, and wanted to shed some insight as a hiring manager that we are equally frustrated," he added.
The post struck a nerve online, especially among job seekers who have felt the sting of sending out hundreds of applications with no response. "I noticed the same thing recently…more than 99% auto-rejected. So I manually went back to the discarded stack and manually reviewed them all. The vast majority really were not what we were looking for, but I did find 1-2% more that should have been directly considered by someone in our process," shared another hiring manager.
Another remarked, "And what happens if these 8 people turn out to be garbage? Are you going to throw away the other 1592 resumes, ghost them, blacklist them, and start another batch of 1600 resumes? The ATS is broken; we know that for years but companies are worse than the ATS for knowing about the problem and have done nothing about it.
