I spent three days trying to outsmart an ATS machine

Staring at the blank white screen

I really thought I had a decent resume. It was clean, simple, and detailed everything I did at my last office for the past three years. But then I started looking into what actual global companies use to filter people out, and that’s when things started feeling weird. I kept hearing about this thing called an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, and apparently, it’s not even a person reading what I wrote. It’s just a machine looking for keywords. I felt like I was writing for a robot rather than a hiring manager, which is a strange feeling to get used to. I sat at my desk for hours just tweaking bullet points.

The obsession with STAR structures

Everyone keeps talking about the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result. It sounds simple enough when you read about it in a course like the one YBM offers, but applying it to my actual life felt exhausting. I kept thinking back to my time as a junior analyst, trying to stretch simple daily tasks into these massive, high-impact stories. I remember spending about 45 minutes just trying to rephrase one single line about a report I filed in 2022. It didn’t feel like I was explaining my career anymore; it felt like I was solving a logic puzzle. Is this really how they want us to describe ourselves? It feels so rigid, like I’m stripping away the parts of the job that were actually interesting just to make sure the machine likes the phrasing.

Paying for help vs doing it alone

I looked up various ways to get help, like professional programs or even just downloading templates that claimed to be ‘ATS-optimized.’ I even considered some paid courses that promised to teach you how to write these resumes properly. Some of them cost around 200,000 to 300,000 KRW, which felt like a lot for something I wasn’t even sure would work. I eventually found some free templates online, but then I spent half the night worrying if the formatting was too complex for the system to scan. You know, like if using a column-based layout would just make the computer ignore my entire work history. It’s a frustrating cycle—you try to make it look professional, but then you worry that ‘professional’ actually means ‘unreadable by software.’

The uncertainty of the whole process

I saw a post about an internship program in Pohang recently, and the requirements were standard: cover letter, CV, and everything else. It made me realize that even if I follow all these ‘rules’ about keywords and STAR structures, there’s still no guarantee anyone actually looks at it. I keep updating my LinkedIn and checking my inbox, but it’s quiet. I don’t know if my resume is sitting in some digital abyss or if it was rejected in three seconds by a piece of code. It’s a strange mix of feeling like you’re doing the right thing by preparing, but also feeling like you’re just guessing in the dark. Maybe I’m overthinking the system and underthinking the human element, but it’s hard to tell when you’re doing this from your own bedroom.

Still adjusting the keywords

I’m currently staring at my screen again, thinking about adding a specific line about a project I worked on that had a clear KPI. I know I should probably just send it out as is, but I can’t help but tweak the verbs. It feels like every time I move a word around, I’m changing my identity for a job I don’t even know if I’ll get an interview for. I’m not sure if I’m building a stronger application or just wasting time trying to satisfy an algorithm that might not even exist in the way I think it does. I suppose I’ll hit send eventually, but the doubt about whether the machine ‘understands’ me is probably going to stick around for a while.