Most applicant tracking systems let an employer set rules: reject anyone without a degree, anyone who answers no to a question, anyone whose resume lacks a term. These rules are not a single product. They are a feature built into many systems, and they are often configured once and never revisited.
How Common Filtering Is
Harvard Business School's research found that "roughly two-thirds of employers we surveyed in the US, UK, and Germany (63 percent) reported that they used a recruitment management system," and that "more than 90 percent of employers we surveyed that used an RMS relied on it to make a first cut or rank potential middle-skills (94 percent) and high-skills (92 percent) applicants." The same research describes how these systems "rely heavily on "negative" filters, such as "exclude candidates without college degrees" or "rank candidates who have not been employed for a six-month period," to winnow the applicant pool."
The researchers' conclusion: "In filtering out all but those candidates who match exacting and expanding requirements, companies reject many experienced, reliable, and creative individuals."
How the Two Compare
| Question | Keyword and knockout filters | TrueScan HR |
|---|---|---|
| What it reads | Specific terms and answers to set questions | The full resume against the job description |
| How it scores | Pass or fail on each rule | A match score with matched and missing skills and a narrative assessment |
| Who decides | Often the rule, automatically, before a person sees the resume | The reviewer; the score informs the decision |
| Different wording for the same skill | Missed unless every variant is listed | Read for meaning against the job |
| Veteran handling | Military titles and codes rarely match civilian keywords | Veteran Mode translates military codes and duties into civilian skills |
The California Angle
The Civil Rights Council's definition of an automated-decision system names "Screening resumes for particular terms or patterns" as an example. Under its regulations, a facially neutral selection device that has an adverse impact on a protected group "is permissible only upon a showing that the selection practice is job-related and consistent with business necessity." An automatic rejection rule that nobody has reviewed is hard to defend on those terms.
What to Do With Your Current Filters
List every automatic rejection rule in your system, write down why each one exists, and remove any rule you cannot tie to a real requirement of the job. Our post on knockout questions walks through that review. For the rules you keep, a tool that reads the resume and explains its result gives a reviewer a way to catch the qualified candidates a rule would have dropped.
This page is general information, not legal advice, and TrueScan HR is not a law firm. Statements about other products come from each vendor's public pages as of October 19, 2026, and may have changed since. Product names are trademarks of their owners.
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