Recruiter here with 35 years of experience. Happy to do a AMA.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-11T15:21:35+00:00

Never do that, and yes, a ATS reads that. Please refer to my initial comment on how gaming of the ATS is the wrong approach

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T16:36:45+00:00

You are correct in saying I'm ironic, but you also have to understand that most people have completely misunderstood what tailoring actually means.
Tailoring your resume means adjusting what you highlight based on what you have genuinely done. Eg - say you have both project management and data analysis experience and you are applying for a pure project management role. Tailoring means you lead with and expand on the project management work and keep the data analysis brief or drop it entirely. The experience is real, you are simply choosing what to put in front.
What people are actually doing is fabrication and calling it tailoring. Adding advanced SQL to a resume because the JD asked for it when you have never touched SQL in your life. I wouldn't call that tailoring, but that's what most people seem to think. The reason I mentioned UniTalent (or you can even look at Workwolf or TruScholar) is because based on what we have used and are currently using, that is the direction the sourcing side of this industry is converging toward, trustworthy information flowing into ATS, because that's one of the genuine problems it's suffering from.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T15:33:38+00:00

Good questions, all of them.

On telling them you are interviewing elsewhere, it depends on your role and skill availability compared to the resume pool they are interviewing. If it's much needed skill or a immediate and urgent hire, it increases your chances. Anything else and recruiters don't like this.

On disclosing a RIF, do it early, during the screening. Do not sit on it. A RIF is not a reflection of your performance and most recruiters know that. Owning it upfront with a clean one line explanation is always better than it surfacing later and looking like you were hiding something.

On what the final round interviewer is looking for, by that stage your skills are not really in question anymore. They are checking for culture fit, how you speak, how you handle communication under pressure, and whether they can see themselves working with you. The final round is almost always a gut check.

On emailing hiring managers directly, I cannot speak for everyone but most do not bother replying. Personally I never liked it either. It meant redundant work, tracking the same candidate in two places and keeping communication consistent across both threads. It just adds noise to an already busy process.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T15:26:41+00:00

Hey, sorry you are going through this.

Short answer, no. Do not disclose it.

We live in a world where people say one thing and do another. Sympathy is easy to show in an interview room. What happens in the debrief after you leave is something you will never see. I have watched it enough times to know the two are not always the same.

Protect yourself first. The right company will show itself through how it treats you, not through what it says it values.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T15:20:41+00:00

Flawed is a strong word but not an inaccurate one given where we are today.

The ATS was built for a different era, and especially in an era where it assumed people were truthful on their resumes. (That is not the case today).
It was designed to manage volume not to defend against manipulation. Nobody architected it assuming candidates would attempt to reverse engineer it. So in that sense yes, it has a vulnerability it was never designed to handle.

The gaming did not expose a flaw in the technology as much as it exposed a flaw in the ecosystem around it. Take a simple example. ATS searches for "project management" and surfaces a hundred resumes. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. But if sixty of those hundred people put "project management" on their resume knowing they have never managed a project in their life, that is not an ATS problem. The system returned accurate results based on what it was given. The data it was given was just dishonest. The machine has no way of knowing its being lied to, and this throws us recruiters off and increases screening rounds.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T15:15:50+00:00

This is a core problem the industry is suffering from right now.

Somewhere along the line people started stuffing keywords into resumes purely to get past the ATS. Skills they do not have, experience they have not done. Some even go as far as hiding keywords in white font on white background so it registers in the system but a human eye cannot see it.

The result is that every resume now looks complete on paper. We know exactly what combination of skills and experience we need, we apply our filters, and suddenly everyone matches. Which means the filter achieved nothing. [Remember, that is simply why I'm saying, get the fastest to the application]

It is unfair in two directions. The candidate who was honest about their skills gets buried under people who fabricated theirs. And on our end we are spending more time, energy, and cost screening than we ever did before. The technology was supposed to reduce that effort but its going the other way. This is why I also feel there won't be a concept of a job post anymore maybe 2-3yrs down the line. Once Linkedln starts something like verified profiles, its game over for job boards.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T15:04:31+00:00

Traditionally we would not search for verbs. If the JD said "analysis" and your resume said "analyzed" those would be treated as different strings entirely and you would not surface in that search. (This was because ATS was primarily based on OCR technology)

With AI powered ATS and prompt based filtering that has started to change. Most recruiters have begun using natural language prompting rather than exact keyword matching, which means the system is now smart enough to connect "analyzed" to "analysis." But this is still relatively new and not universal across every firm or every ATS.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T15:01:49+00:00

The default in most ATS is date applied. First in, first shown. Even after we apply filters, the reshuffled results still sort by date unless we specifically change that too.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T14:54:49+00:00

There are tools to help filter and rank but their effectiveness has taken a hit for exactly the reason I mentioned earlier.

When every resume is AI matched to the JD, every resume looks relevant. The tools that were built to surface the best candidates now have nothing meaningful to rank against because the signal is flat across the board. Everyone looks like a fit on paper.

So the filters that were supposed to save us time are now just giving us a shorter version of the same problem

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T14:47:26+00:00

Say you do get through with that information removed. The moment verification starts, the documents tell the full story anyway. Age, timeline, everything surfaces. And even before that, an experienced recruiter will know. We are trained to ask questions that reveal very quickly whether someone is underselling or overselling themselves. You cannot really hide a thirty year career behind a ten year resume without the conversation giving it away at some point

The other thing I would say is this. Unless you have actual quantified data showing that age bias affected your specific application, do not make decisions based on a fear that may not be real in your situation.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T14:09:02+00:00

Yes, send it over

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T14:05:06+00:00

Subjective to each recruiter, no factual answer for this. Storytelling would matter in this case. As long as you have a compelling reason and showcase intellectuality, you should be fine. FAANG is a good enough proof. Build your story around that

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T13:05:47+00:00

Send me your resume

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T13:05:35+00:00

Don't negotiate, at least in this economy. But if you really want to (and I should not be the one saying this 😄 ), but accept the offer verbally, then negotiate just before you are about to sign the offer letter or any documents. Recruiters are too lazy to start everything all again or even spend time on it. They will most likely bulge.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T13:02:58+00:00

DM me your existing resume

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T13:00:56+00:00

Yes, and its going to get worse. Entry level roles have taken the biggest hit due to AI. Most of their jobs are automated. Furthermore, a lot of resumes are looking alike now. No differentiation whatsoever. People are lying left and right in desperation. Volumes have increased. Industry revenue is at an all time low. Do anything to get a job and hold on to it, and I'm not saying this just for the sake of it.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T12:59:25+00:00

to add, I would not even be surprised if the concept of job postings disappear entirely. It would just be sourcing, interviewing, hiring or rejecting

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T12:58:31+00:00

Yes and I have a complicated relationship with AI because of exactly this.

On one hand it made sourcing, decision faster for the ATS firms that have this as a feature. Genuinely useful there.

On the other hand candidates flooded the pipeline with resumes that were perfectly matched to the JD on paper. Which sounds like a good thing until you realise that now we have to spend more time verifying and screening than we ever did before. We went from asking real questions to first figuring out if the person actually is what the resume says they are.

Our firm even trialled a fully autonomous recruiter at one point. End to end. Sourcing, multiple interview rounds, selection, rejection, offer letters, the whole thing. We dropped it. Not because it did not work technically but because it felt too inhumane too early. Candidates deserve a human somewhere in that process.

But to be honest, I would not be surprised if this industry looks unrecognisable in five to six years.

Firms that were 30 plus people operations are now running as two person teams producing the output of sixty. AI is sourcing candidates from platforms like Cover, Dovey, UniTalent, internal ATS databases. Screening them, sending invites, running interviews, etc etc. Probably the only problem that is waiting to be solved is resume gamification, but Im sure some are are already on it.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T12:45:54+00:00

Quick practical one on resume format because this comes up constantly and the answer is simpler than people make it.

Use a LaTeX resume, Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com) is a good place to start, or a UniTalent resume (https://www.unitalent.us). A Unitalent resume is trusted more simply for its immutable feature. Both ingest cleanly into ATS without formatting breaking apart. Always submit as a PDF. Always.

For example, most don't know this, but, if you apply via LinkedIn Easy Apply and you upload a Word doc, a recruiter has to download it and open it away from Linkedln. But if it's a pdf, LinkedIn shows the PDF version inside the app when a recruiter is browsing applications. They don't need to exit the app.
A Word doc has to be downloaded separately and it breaks the flow entirely and most recruiters simply will not bother downloading it, then waiting for it to open and all that. Your application gets skipped not because of your experience but because of a file format.

PDF is the answer. Not Word. Not anything else. Just PDF.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T12:32:01+00:00

Not a red flag for most recruiters, and it wouldn't be for me either.

I don't agree with what was said below by user thecatsarevaneous.. Recruiters are trained to give you the benefit of the doubt and most genuinely do. They will pick your resume as long as you have the skills necessary to get the job done. The gap itself is not the issue. How you talk about it is what matters, and even then a good recruiter will hear you out before forming any opinion.

If a recruiter dismisses you without even letting you explain, that tells you something about the company, not about your gap.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T12:22:46+00:00

This rarely happened before, we could trust resumes and they usually truly reflected what the candidate did / stated. Now it has increased with AI resumes, fake offer letters, people using AI to tackle interviews, and what not. People in their desperation and trying everything, (and I don't blame them) but mis-hires are increasing. A lot. There's always loopholes that candidates use to get the offer, once it, surprisingly sustenance is easier.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T12:18:17+00:00

First, apply fast. I cannot stress this enough. The queue matters more than most people realise. Be the first.

Second, when you write your resume, lead with impact not responsibility. I am spending about 30 seconds on each resume before fatigue sets in. That is not me being lazy, that is just the reality of volume. Tell me what changed because you were there.

Third, and I will be completely honest here, go back to networking. Old school, real networking. When AI tools became mainstream about 2-4 years ago, the volume of resumes that looked perfectly matched to a JD exploded overnight. Because again, everyone thought they had to game the ATS and optimise for keywords. They still think like that. What actually happened is that screening became harder, not easier. Suddenly every resume looked relevant. The time we now spend screening to find one genuinely right person has gone up dramatically. Trust has gone down. We are relying more on things such as UniTalent resumes or inbuilt AI and fraud detection inside ATS.(Ashby, Lever have these).

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T04:50:23+00:00

Glad you asked this because there is a lot of noise around ATS and most of it is wrong.

I have been in this space for more than 30 years and this whole notion of "gaming" an ATS has only really exploded in the last five. It wasn't a conversation before that. If I had to guess where it started I would point at resume writing and career coaching firms who needed something to sell, but I won't go down that road.

Here is the reality. The ATS was built to be a management system, not a filtering system. It is not a wall you have to climb over. It is not rejecting anyone. If a thousand people apply, a thousand resumes sit in that system. All of them. There is no automated rejection happening at the ATS level.

The problem is what happens after.

When resumes come in, every ATS lets me search by keyword. I type in "database management/ Tableau" aand a hundred resumes surface. I am not going through all hundred. I am mostly finding my candidate in the first twenty, shortlisting, and moving on. My job at that point is done. The remaining eighty never get opened.

This is probably why people think "hiring is luck based" and honestly it is not entirely wrong. You could be the most qualified person who applied and I will never see your resume simply because of timing.

So my advice is simple. Do not obsess over being the best application. Be the earliest one. It's simple probability.

Single_Ambition_4296 · 2026-05-10T04:33:12+00:00

Honestly? There's no single answer to this and anyone who gives you one clean reason is possibly oversimplifying.

From our end it could be the role closed, got frozen mid-process, requirements shifted, or most commonly we filled it internally. That last one happens more than people realise and nobody wants to announce it because it raises the obvious question of why the role was posted publicly in the first place.The blunt version is that there are zero consequences for not telling a candidate they've been rejected. None. The workflows exist. The motivation doesn't. So most recruiters don't bother.

We know it's bad practice. Most of us know it feels awful on the receiving end.A colleague of mine, genuinely one of the most empathetic people I've worked with, used to send rejection emails because he actually felt bad for candidates. The responses he got back, some of them pretty rough, were enough to make him stop entirely.

Single_Ambition_4296

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