Is Your Applicant Tracking System Screening Out Great Career Returners?

Technology has made hiring faster. But faster is not always fairer. As recruitment agencies in South Africa and internal HR teams increasingly use applicant tracking systems to sort CVs, an uncomfortable question deserves attention: are capable career returners being rejected before a human being sees what they can offer?

A career break is not a capability break. People leave paid employment to raise children, care for relatives, recover from illness, relocate, study or retrain. Yet a CV gap can be interpreted as risk rather than reality. Once that assumption enters automated CV screening, one quiet preference can become hundreds of decisions.

The ATS is not necessarily the villain

An applicant tracking system, or ATS, helps employers collect applications, read CV data, search for keywords, apply screening questions and rank candidates. Used well, it saves time and adds structure.

The trouble starts when its rules are too rigid.

A filter may favour candidates who are currently employed, have used a skill within the past year or show uninterrupted experience. None of those conditions says “exclude career returners”. Nevertheless, that may be the outcome. The software applies the criteria it has been given, consistently and at scale.

This is why the issue is bigger than “biased AI”. Technology often does not invent the prejudice. It industrialises an old assumption that recent, continuous employment is the best evidence of current competence.

Why South African employers should care

South African businesses cannot afford to overlook experienced people because their careers are not perfectly linear. Returners may bring technical knowledge, maturity, resilience, sector experience and a clearer sense of what they want from their next role.

They may also have used the break productively through short courses, freelance projects, community work, caregiving or professional development. These experiences do not always fit standard CV fields, but they can strengthen judgement, adaptability and people skills.

There is a governance consideration too. POPIA addresses decisions with legal or substantial effects that are based solely on automated processing intended to profile a person. Its application depends on the facts, but employers should consider meaningful human review, transparency and a candidate’s opportunity to question an automated outcome. 

Fair hiring is not about lowering standards. It is about ensuring that the standards measure what the job genuinely requires.

5 ways employers can stop good talent slipping through

1. Audit every knockout rule

Review screening questions, mandatory dates, ranking criteria and thresholds. Ask whether each rule predicts performance or merely rewards a conventional career path.

1. Test matched CVs.

Run equivalent candidate profiles through the process, changing only the length or reason for the break. Compare parsing, ranking, recruiter visibility and progression.

1. Make skills easier to see.

Give greater weight to total relevant experience, verified competence, training and work samples. A candidate’s last payroll date should not outweigh ten years of proven ability.

1. Create meaningful human checkpoints.

Review borderline, low-ranked and automatically excluded applications, particularly where a gap appears decisive. Human oversight must involve judgement, not a quick click to confirm the machine.

1. Measure the quality of rejected candidates.

Hiring dashboards often focus on time-to-fill and cost-per-hire. Add false negatives to the conversation. How many people screened out could actually perform the work?

What career returners can do

Candidates cannot control every employer’s technology, but they can make their value easier to identify.

Use a clean CV format with standard headings. Tailor the wording to the genuine requirements in the advert. Add a short career-break entry rather than leaving a mysterious blank, and describe relevant training, consulting, volunteering or project work completed during that period.

Lead with a strong professional profile and key-skills section. Where appropriate, state total years of relevant experience so the reader sees the depth behind the dates. Never hide or falsify employment history; frame it with confidence and context.

Temporary or contract work can also be a practical bridge back into employment. It provides recent experience, rebuilds networks and gives both candidate and employer an opportunity to assess the fit.

Better technology needs better human judgement

Applicant tracking systems are useful tools. They should help employers find talent, not quietly hide it. The question is not whether companies should abandon technology, but whether their hiring process recognises ability in all its forms.

MASA sources, screens and places candidates across permanent and temporary roles, with staffing solutions for many South African industries. Our recruitment consultants help employers look beyond a pile of applications towards the people capable of doing the work. 

A CV gap may tell you that someone’s path changed. It does not tell you that their value disappeared.

Ready to build a responsive, skills-focused workforce without losing the human insight that good hiring requires? Visit MASA’s home page to explore recruitment, temporary employment and outsourced staffing solutions, and speak to a consultant about finding talent an automated filter might miss.