What if the real power of an ATS isn’t getting you hired — but deciding whether your career inside the company goes anywhere at all?
Last night I was reading a Harvard Business Review article arguing that in large organisations, the problem isn’t just finding talent — it’s putting the right people on the right projects, and by extension, deciding who gets to move up and who doesn’t.
For years we’ve thought of ATS platforms as CV scanners. And in a sense, that’s exactly what they are — as the excellent Luca Gerini has been teaching us: keywords, filters, shortlists, job or unemployment.
But until now, nobody had given me any visibility into what actually happens to the CV data you leave behind in an ATS after you’ve been hired — and how that data, combined with whatever performance notes your manager feeds into the system, quietly shapes your trajectory inside the company that took you on.
The HBR research suggests that systems like Workday, and the new wave of Talent Marketplace platforms, are starting to play a significant role in surfacing internal projects and lateral moves — wherever the machine detects a match with your inferred skill set. In other words: the machine decides whether you get promoted, whether you get assigned to a death-march project, or whether you keep receiving the same flat, non-committal feedback — “we source talent externally” — regardless of how hard you’ve worked to be visible on the right projects.
The roulette wheel is rigged, ladies and gentlemen. The house always wins. This is obviously more true in large organisations, full of overlapping teams, projects, and skill sets. Italian SMEs, you’re still safe — for now.
So I have to ask: in light of this HBR study, are you still confident that your network alone is enough? Or are you starting to worry that these systems — and the short-sighted HR processes behind them — might be deciding your future without a shred of human judgment, regardless of how much effort you’ve actually put in?
Also: kudos to Simone Enea Riccò, whose book on algorithmic truth had already mapped out exactly this kind of scenario.
I’m genuinely curious what you think — and if there are any HR professionals among the readers of this post, I’d love to know whether you’re actually using the nudging features the HBR article describes, and how.
Leave a comment. 😈