Parmy Olson, Columnist

Employers Beware: Hiring Software Could Weed Out Future Stars

Not all companies should rely on algorithms to filter through the flood of resumes.

What’s your biggest weakness?

Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images North America
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Finding the right person for a job can seem impossible when hundreds are applying for a single position at once. Many employers have turned to software to whittle those candidates down, but there’s a problem: The software can snub perfectly good workers.

So-called Application Tracking Systems, the official term for resume-filtering software, were designed to help companies cope with the growing number of job applications flooding in for each vacancy over the past two decades. Nearly all Fortune 500 companies use this kind of software for recruiting, according to a Harvard Business School study released earlier this month.