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ATS: what happens to your CV after you click “Apply”?

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Illustration: at night on a lake below Alpine peaks, a lighthouse's gold beam, like a recruiter's search, finds a paper boat folded from a CV; two others further out are still in the dark.

Once you apply, software sorts your CV into fields, where the recruiter then looks for the terms used in the job ad. As for the 75% of CVs supposedly rejected by robots, that figure comes from a sales pitch.

2 min read

From click to recruiter

In Switzerland, most applications arrive by email or through an applicant tracking system (ATS), according to a 2024 survey of 936 HR managers and executives by von Rundstedt and HR Today. No recent Swiss survey measures the share of employers that use one. Vendors active in Switzerland, such as Abacus Umantis and rexx systems, offer CV parsing, according to Personal Schweiz magazine (2024).

Parsing, explains the vendor Workday, fills in fields from the CV. Recruiters then search for candidates using their own keywords, as another vendor, Greenhouse, and the Basel-based Roche group explain. Roche adds, however, that its recruiters review every candidate and the CV they attach.

The figure of 75% of CVs rejected by robots traces back to a 2012 sales pitch with no published methodology, according to Canadian researchers writing in The Conversation (2026). A 2021 study by Harvard Business School and Accenture found that 63% of the employers it surveyed (in the US, the UK and Germany) used such software. More than nine in ten of those used it for initial screening or ranking, with their own filters (a degree, a six-month employment gap).

A readable CV, item by item

There is no universal “ATS-friendly” CV, The Conversation points out, because the software varies from employer to employer. All these systems, however, read text rather than images or icons. The table lists the pitfalls flagged by vendors, Roche and public bodies.

How an ATS handles your CV

CV element What the ATS does What to do
File Accepts Word and PDF (Greenhouse); may see a scan as a blank page (France Travail) A PDF with selectable text, or Word if the portal asks for it; a clear file name (SECO)
Layout Some misread columns and tables, or lose the header (Roche, RChilli) A single column; name and contact details in the body of the document
Photo, logos, icons Reads text, not images; the photo still shows in the preview (Greenhouse) No text inside an image; language levels in words, not stars (France Travail)
Headings and dates Sorts by familiar headings; does not read a year on its own as a date range (Roche, RChilli) Standard headings (“Education”, “Work experience”); start and end month and year, on one line
Keywords Used by the recruiter to search (Greenhouse, Roche) The terms in the ad that match your actual background, including the job title, spelled correctly
Application form Fills in fields, not always all of them; may include knockout questions (Workday) Check every field before submitting; answer precisely, work permit included

Sources: documentation from Workday, Greenhouse and RChilli; Roche (careers site); The Conversation and France Travail (2026); SECO (2018).

What we think

In our view, an application is far more likely to be lost to a misread CV or an imprecise answer to a knockout question than to a robot. So the check must be repeated for every vacancy: the wording of the ad changes, and so do the portal and its form. Going over these six points for each application is what takes time.

For each vacancy, the free version of ApplyNow prepares a CV that follows Swiss conventions, in the language of the ad, ready for you to review. Rather than sending the same CV everywhere, you are better off making fewer applications, each one checked against the job you are applying for.

Sources

Published on 19 October 2026, by Greg Lefebvre