Half of the HR department was fired in the following weeks
A shocking discovery led to the termination of an entire HR team after a manager uncovered a critical error in the company’s applicant tracking system (ATS). The system, designed to streamline hiring, was automatically rejecting all job candidates, including the manager’s test application. Sharing his experience on Reddit, the manager revealed that the HR department had struggled to find suitable candidates for three months, unaware of the systemic issue. He then decided to conduct an investigation.
He created a pseudonym, submitted his resume, and was shocked when it was automatically rejected within seconds. He wrote on Reddit, “I’ve 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 and guess, I got auto rejected.” Despite his impressive qualifications, he was instantly rejected without any human oversight. “I got auto-rejected. HR didn’t even look at my CV,” he shared.
This discovery led to a startling revelation: the company’s applicant tracking system was automatically dismissing candidates without evaluation.
Upon presenting his findings to upper management, the consequences were swift and severe. “Half of the HR department was fired in the following weeks,” the manager noted, highlighting the gravity of the situation.
Notably, the position required Angular expertise, but the system was filtering for AngularJS, a distinct and outdated framework. ”The issue was they were looking for an angularjs developer while we were looking for an Angular one (different frameworks, similar names), These kinds of silly mistakes must and can be fixed in minutes, and since the CVs were auto-rejecting profiles without angularjs in it we lost all possible candidates. 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). People who work in HR are incredibly mediocre and lazy,” he explained on Reddit.
