I saw the other day that Workday, which has between a 25%-30% market share in the US and is used by many fortune 500 companies, has former CIA director Tenet on the board of it's foundation.
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That got me thinking about how powerful a weapon ATS would be if you had no moral qualms about persecuting your political enemies. If a government is willing to use the IRS to go after conservative companies, build portals to track Trump supporters, and worm their way into ANY voice of authority, going as far as to plant mods in important subreddits, I think it is fair to say they would weaponize ATS.
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How would that happen? Applicants to jobs are very easy to cross-reference against a database. They provide addresses, cell numbers and emails. Also, since so many applicants usually apply to high-profile, high-paying corporate roles, most recruiters don't look at all the resumes that come through. Instead, they rely on applicant boosting and searches which might provide an opportunity to de-boost people. The left has gone so far as to purify and weaponize almost every college in the US. Why wouldn't they do the same to powerful corporations?
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I have personally used ATS to apply for high-profile corporate roles for decades, and only recently, in the last 2 years, has my success in hearing back on these significantly declined. Some of the issue of course might be the fact that I'm a white male and that these companies are somehow using equal opportunity information to deprioritize people in the process. But I think it is easy to presume that all of us here are on SOME type of list. Every time I go direct to a hiring manager or talent manager they love my background and want to talk, but i now no longer get any attention if I am applying through a major ATS.
But here are my questions:
-Anyone have anything to add?
-Does anyone here use these programs on the recruiting end?
-How would they be weaponized?
-How would one go about attempting to dig into or confirm this?
I work for an international staffing company as a developer. There are tons of ATS providers both big and small. After your data goes through the ATS and you get hired, your data will likely be imported into several other systems.
The EU and California have passed laws that give you some control over your data if you live within those regions, but the rest of us are not protected. Fortunately, the financial risks are so great, that companies that get your data have designed their systems to simply not maintain historical data that contains PII (Personally Identifiable Information) to keep them from facing any liability.
To your other points, most ATS systems do have AI capabilities that can be enabled if the client wants them. Almost all of them can easily filter out white guys or any other attribute they want and you'd never know it unless you sued them. If you did sue them, my parent company would be dragged into the suit so you can bet your ass that we don't let them do any illegal filtering withing our system but we don't know nor care what they do with the data once it's through our systems. You are wise to be wary of these systems.