Does an ATS reject your resume? What 25 recruiters said.
92% never auto-reject on content. 100% use knockout questions. Where the famous rejection figure came from, and what actually filters you out.
The survey
In late 2025 a resume company asked 25 recruiters working across eleven systems (Workday, iCIMS, Lever, Greenhouse, SuccessFactors and others) what their ATS actually does with a resume.1 The answers were consistent: 92% said the system never auto-rejects on resume content or formatting; 100% use knockout questions on the form; 44% have a match score available; 8% use it to reject.
The number everyone quotes
“75% of resumes are rejected by ATS before a human sees them” traces to a sales pitch by a vendor called Preptel around 2012. The company closed in 2013. No study, no dataset, no method. The figure drifted to 70% and 88% in later articles because there was never an original to pin it to.2
What actually happens
The file is parsed into fields: name, contact, titles, companies, dates, skills, education. Recruiters then search and filter the pile. On Naukri Resdex that is a Boolean string plus filters on experience, CTC, notice period and location. On LinkedIn Recruiter it is standardised title first. The newer AI layers (Workday’s HiredScore grades, Greenhouse’s Strong/Good/Partial/Limited) sort the list; their own documentation says they do not reject.3
The two ways to lose
Your resume parses into the wrong fields, or it does not contain the words the recruiter searches for. Both are fixable, and neither is a rejection. That distinction is the whole reason this site scores parse fidelity and findability separately from readability.
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Enhancv, “Does ATS reject resumes?”, recruiter survey, September–October 2025, n=25. ↩
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Uncharted Career and Hiring Thing traces of the Preptel claim; see also Jan Tegze’s 2019 six-month application experiment. ↩
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Greenhouse Talent Matching data-processing FAQ; SmartRecruiters SmartAssistant documentation; Oracle Taleo candidate prescreening documentation. ↩
Questions this article answers
Does an ATS automatically reject resumes?+
Not on content or formatting. The only automatic rejection in mainstream systems is a knockout question on the application form: work authorisation, location, a required licence.
Where did the 75% figure come from?+
A 2012 marketing claim by a vendor that closed in 2013. No study, dataset or method was ever published. It has been recycled through news articles ever since.
So does formatting matter at all?+
Yes, for a different reason. A badly parsed resume lands in the database with the wrong title, dates or skills, and never appears in the recruiter's search. That is a visibility problem, not a rejection.