The State of the ATS
Everyone repeats the same unsourced statistics about résumé screening. We had a better idea: publish what we can actually measure. This is aggregate, anonymous data from real résumé checks run on Past the Bots — how cleanly résumés parse, how well they match the jobs they're sent to, and where it goes wrong.
455
Résumés analyzed
Anonymous, aggregate — counts only
92
Median parse health
Out of 100
9%
Don't read cleanly
Scored under 75 on parse health
32
Median job match
From 201 JD comparisons
Parse health across 455 résumés
How cleanly an ATS extracts a résumé's fields. Low scores mean the machine is losing your name, contact details, or whole sections.
Likely fails1%Risky8%Reads clean91%
31.6%
0255075100
Job match across 201 résumés
How well a résumé covers the important terms of the job it was checked against.
Weak match78%Partial match17%Strong match5%
11.4%
0255075100
By role family
Median scores per peer group. Only families with a reportable sample appear.
| Role family | Résumés | Median parse | Median match |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | 208 | 92 | 37 |
| engineering | 79 | 82 | 37 |
| product | 47 | 92 | 52 |
| marketing | 36 | 92 | 12 |
How this was measured
- What it is. Every résumé checked on Past the Bots contributes its parse-health score, and its job-match score when a job description was supplied, to an anonymous histogram. We store counts only — never résumé text, never identity.
- Parse health is our deterministic measure of how much of a résumé an ATS recovers: contact fields plus recognizable sections, penalized for the structures parsers mishandle (multi-column layouts, tables, text inside images, scanned files).
- Role families are assigned by keyword from the job description or résumé text. They're a coarse peer group, not a job-title taxonomy.
- What it isn't. This is a sample of people who chose to check a résumé, so it skews toward active job seekers who suspected a problem. It is not a random sample of all résumés, and we don't claim it is. We publish a family only once it clears a minimum sample, and we don't quote statistics we can't compute from this data.
Where does your résumé land?
The numbers above are the distribution. This is how you find your spot in it.