An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a category of enterprise software that enables the end-to-end electronic management of a company's recruitment and hiring workflow. When a candidate submits a resume online, the ATS is the very first gatekeeper it encounters — long before any human eyes ever see it. The system automatically ingests the document, runs it through a parsing engine to extract structured data (name, contact info, work history, education, and skills), and then scores or ranks the candidate against the specific job description using keyword-matching algorithms. Popular ATS platforms include Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo, and BambooHR. Each platform has its own parsing engine with slightly different rules, sensitivities, and scoring models, which is why a resume must be formatted with broad ATS compatibility in mind rather than optimized for one specific system. Critically, a low ATS score can result in automatic archiving of a candidate's profile before a recruiter has ever reviewed it — a phenomenon responsible for the vast majority of application ghosting.
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