Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
Also called ATS, applicant tracking software, recruiting software.
The software an employer uses to receive, store, search, and move job applications through their hiring process.
An applicant tracking system is the database behind a company's careers page. When you hit submit, your application becomes a record in it: parsed contact details, a parsed work history, the file you uploaded, and a status that a recruiter moves from stage to stage. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Ashby, SmartRecruiters and Taleo are the ones you will meet most often, and you can usually identify which one a company uses from the domain in the application URL.
The persistent myth is that an ATS scores your resume and rejects it automatically. Mainstream systems do not work that way. What they do is parse your document into structured fields and make the result searchable, so a recruiter reviewing 400 applications filters by keyword, location, or a knockout question and reads a fraction of the pile. You are not rejected by an algorithm — you are never surfaced to the human who was going to read you.
That distinction changes what you should actually do about it. Exotic layouts, text inside images, and multi-column designs hurt because they parse into garbage fields, not because a robot dislikes them. Missing the vocabulary the recruiter searches for hurts because you fall out of the result set. Both are fixable without gaming anything: use the words the posting uses for the things you genuinely did, and use a layout that survives parsing.
Resume parsing
The automated step that converts your uploaded resume file into structured fields — name, roles, dates, skills — inside an employer's hiring system.
Keyword optimization
Using the employer's own vocabulary for skills and tools you genuinely have, so you appear in the searches a recruiter runs.
Knockout question
An application question whose wrong answer removes you from consideration automatically, before any human review.
Resume tailoring
Rewriting an existing resume for one specific posting so the relevant experience is the visible experience.