Research

Original data on how hiring actually works in 2026. We run controlled tests and publish the raw numbers, the method, and the honest limits, so you can act on evidence instead of folklore. Every study is reproducible and free to cite.

The ATS Autopsy: what breaks when a machine reads your resume

We read 48 synthetic resumes with three open-source text extractors in June 2026. A clean single-column resume lost 0 percent of fields; a resume built as an image lost 37.5 percent. Layout is the lever, not PDF versus Word.

How an ATS actually reads your resume

An applicant tracking system files your resume, it does not judge it. Here is how the parse works, why a failed parse is not a rejection, and the few layouts that break a machine read.