Entire HR Team Fired After Manager Uses His Own Resume To Prove Their System Is Auto-Rejecting All Candidates
His discovery raises the question of how often this happens at other companies and how ill-suited tech is to recruiting.
fizkes | Shutterstock At this point, we all know that the job market and the job search process have gone absolutely haywire. Unless you're getting hooked up with a job from a connection, you end up sending hundreds of applications mostly to no avail.
Arguably, the most infuriating part is when you submit an application and receive a rejection minutes or even seconds later, making it obvious that your resume wasn't even glanced at. What gives? In one manager's case, it was for the stupidest reason possible — and a LOT of people got fired because of it.
The manager proved that his HR department's applicant tracking system was auto-rejecting all candidates.
The ATS, or applicant tracking system, has become the bane of every job seeker's existence, basically making submitting a job app the digital equivalent of balling up your resume and hurling it into the ocean like Gob Bluth in "Arrested Development."
There are often several reasons for the so-called "resume black hole," but frequently, it's because the software simply can't make sense of even the slightest deviation from the "norm," like, say a resume gap. And the integration of AI seems to be making all of this worse — including exacerbating discrimination.
But one manager on Reddit discovered an entirely different kind of mess-up that is so idiotically simple, that you have to wonder if the same sort of error is happening all the time.
After his HR department hadn't found a single candidate for a job, the manager submitted his own resume. It was auto-rejected.
The manager posted their story in a comment on a separate Reddit post in which a job seeker from another company lamented a "world record rejection" after applying for a job. Both emails — one containing the confirmation receipt of their application and the other their rejection from the job — arrived at 10:56 a.m.
Obviously, there is no possible way that their application was actually reviewed by anything besides a software product with requirements that are entirely too stringent and inscrutable, which is absolutely infuriating on its face. But it may well be that the ATS in question was simply making a deeply stupid error.
"Auto rejection systems from HR make me angry," the manager wrote in their comment. They went on to explain that while searching for a new employee recently, their HR department was unable to find a single qualified candidate for the job in three months of searching.
Naturally, the manager became suspicious and decided to investigate. "I created myself a new email and sent them a modified version of my CV with a fake name to see what was going on with the process," they wrote. "And guess what, I got auto-rejected. HR didn't even look at my CV."
Most of the HR team was fired because a typo in the ATS caused every application to be rejected.
When the manager brought the issue to upper management, "they fired half of the HR department in the following weeks." It turned out the entire problem resulted from a typographical error with enormous consequences.
The manager works in the tech space and was trying to hire developers. But HR had set up the system to look for developers with expertise in not only the wrong development software but a development software THAT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST ANYMORE.
"They were looking for an AngularJS developer," he wrote, "while we were looking for an Angular one (different frameworks, similar names)." AngularJS was discontinued in 2010. In 2010!
"Since the [ATS] was auto-rejecting profiles without AngularJS in it we literally lost all possible candidates," they explained. "The truly infuriating part was that I consistently talked to them asking for progress and they always told me that they had some candidates that didn't pass the first screening processes (which was false)."
It's hard not to wonder if this kind of stupidity is happening elsewhere as well and exacerbating the other major problems experts say are messing up the job market, like companies replacing HR staff with AI tools and a skeleton crew of over-extended recruiters with untenable workloads.
The bottom line is that Human Resources is called HUMAN resources for a reason — the job deals with real, live human beings. When it comes to recruiting and hiring, it couldn't be clearer at this point that software and tech simply aren't up to the job of evaluating candidates.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.