You've probably heard the stat: 75% of resumes get filtered out by software before a human sees them. Job seekers spend hours tailoring applications and hear nothing back. The average candidate sends 200 applications to land one offer. Most of those applications never reach a human pair of eyes.
Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I'm a staff software engineer. I build and scale products to millions of users. On this blog I share stories from building tools that solve problems I've personally experienced in the tech industry.
About 6 months ago I was looking for a new job. During that time I learned firsthand how the modern hiring pipeline works. You spend 45 minutes crafting a resume, hit submit, and no one sees it anyway.
I knew I had to adjust resumes. Not faking experience, but choosing the right wording and highlighting the right parts. You can't send a 5-page resume and expect anyone to read it.
That experience led me to build Resume Hedgehog. Because using AI chats for that is tedious, and I think I can offer a good tool based on my experience and skills.
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The Problem Is Structural, Not Personal
Here's what happens when you apply for a job in 2025:
- You submit a resume. It goes into an Applicant Tracking System like Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, or Taleo
- The ATS parses your resume into structured data: job titles, dates, skills, education
- The ATS scores your resume against the job posting's requirements. Keywords matter enormously. If the posting says "Kubernetes" and you wrote "container orchestration," you might score zero for that skill
- A recruiter sees the top-scored resumes. They spend an average of 6 seconds scanning each one
- Everyone else gets filtered out. No human ever reads their application
This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's documented. Companies receiving 500+ applications per role need automated filtering. The problem isn't that ATS exists. The problem is that candidates are up against a system they can't see, using tools that don't help.
As Bill Gates recently noted, the job market for programmers in 2026 will be bumpy. ATS filtering already made it bad. And now it's just more complicated, because AI is biased.
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Why "Use Keywords" Is Terrible Advice
Every career article tells you to "use keywords from the job posting." Which ones, exactly?
A typical software engineering job posting contains 800-1500 words. It mentions technologies, methodologies, soft skills, industry terms, experience levels, and company values. Some of those words are in the ATS scoring criteria. Some aren't. You have no way of knowing which.
Even if you identify the right keywords, you can't just stuff them in. The resume still needs to read naturally when a human eventually sees it. You need the right keywords in the right context, attributed to the right experience, in the right section of your resume.
Doing this manually for one job takes 30-60 minutes. Doing it for 10 jobs takes a full workday. Doing it for 200 jobs? Nobody does that. They send the same resume everywhere and wonder why their callback rate is under 5%.
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What Resume Hedgehog Actually Does
I think the problem isn't about generating a nice resume. It's about collecting information about a candidate and cherry-picking the details that fit the job offer the best, then using proper wording and synonyms to present them.
Here's the flow:
Step 1: Parse Your Profile. When you paste your resume or describe your experience, the system extracts every piece of structured information: contact details, work history, skills, education, certifications, projects. The system uses specific instructions like "Do NOT lose or omit any information. Every single detail from the input must be captured." Your profile grows over time as you answer follow-up questions. Nothing is ever deleted.
Step 2: Extract the Job's Requirements. When you paste a job description, a separate operation extracts what the employer wants: required skills, experience level, employment type, benefits. This structured extraction is essential to generate a well-tailored resume.
Step 3: Generate a Tailored Resume. A single API call takes your complete profile and the job's requirements and produces three outputs:
- An updated user profile enriched with any new information you've provided
- A tailored resume with your experience reorganized and rephrased to match this specific job's language
- Three follow-up questions to surface achivements and skills you haven't mentioned yet
The rules governing generation are strict. Never remove job positions, because employment gaps get flagged. Never remove education entries. Never invent information. The system reorganizes what you have. It doesn't fabricate what you don't.
The philosophical point that drives the entire design: Resume Hedgehog is a presentation tool, not a fabrication tool. It's the difference between a lawyer preparing your case and a lawyer inventing evidence.
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The Follow-Up Question System
Most resume tools generate a document and stop. Resume Hedgehog asks questions.
After every generation, you get three targeted questions. They're not generic. They're specifically chosen to strengthen your application for this particular job. And they come in typed formats:
- Text: "Describe a specific project where you used Kubernetes in production"
- Yes/No: "Do you have experience with CI/CD pipelines?"
- Choice: "What is your highest level of cloud platform experience?" with options from No experience to Advanced
- Multichoice: "Which databases have you worked with?" with options like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB
- Number: "How many years of experience do you have with Go?"
There's one rule that overrides everything else: if the user's profile is missing essential contact information like full name, email, or phone, the first question always asks for it. A resume without contact details is completely useless.
Each answer enriches your profile. By the third or fourth job application, your profile is comprehensive enough that the questions shift from basics to specifics. The kind of details that make a resume genuinely stand out. It's good because you can recall these aspects of your experience that will be useful at your new job!
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The Adversarial Hiring System
I want to be honest about something: the hiring system is adversarial.
Companies use ATS to reduce their workload. ATS uses keyword matching because it's cheap and scalable. Candidates are expected to reverse-engineer what a machine wants while simultaneously impressing a human who spends 6 seconds reading. The incentives are misaligned at every level.
Some tools respond to this by fabricating credentials. They'll add skills you don't have, inflate titles, or generate cover letters full of lies. This is a terrible strategy. It might get you past ATS, but it falls apart at the interview. What job seekers need is sisu, not deception.
Resume Hedgehog takes the opposite approach: use the system's rules against it, honestly. If the ATS wants specific keywords, we find the experience in your background that maps to those keywords and present it using the exact terminology the employer used. If the recruiter has 6 seconds, we put the most relevant information first.
You're not cheating. You're presenting your qualifications in the language the system is designed to understand. That's not gaming. That's communication.
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The Numbers Game, Automated
Here's the math that makes this matter:
- Manual resume tailoring: 30-60 minutes per application. At 10 hours/week, that's 10-20 applications
- Generic resume blasting: 5 minutes per application, but a callback rate under 5%. You need 200+ applications
- Resume Hedgehog: about 2 minutes per tailored resume. At 10 hours/week, that's 300 applications, each one tailored
Job seeking unfortunately rewards both volume and quality. You need both. Automated tailoring gives you the callback rate of a hand-crafted resume at the volume of mass applying.
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Try It Yourself
I built Resume Hedgehog because the job market shouldn't punish qualified people for not knowing that in ATS parlance, keywords matter more than skills.
If you're in an active job search, try it free at resumehedgehog.com. You get 10 credits at signup, enough to generate several tailored resumes and see the difference for yourself.
The robots are filtering you. Now you have a way to speak their language.
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The job market is tough, but the tools are getting better. Don't let an algorithm decide your career.
This article was born from job-hunting frustration. If you found it useful, support my next project
If you want to read more of my articles visit https://tomaszs2.medium.com/
Sources
- Harvard Business School study on ATS rejection rates - Research showing how automated hiring systems filter out qualified candidates
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- Even AI Experts Feel Behind: What Andrej Karpathy's Confession Means for Programmers - Karpathy's take on how fast the AI field is moving, even for insiders
- Linus Torvalds Says AI Codes Better Than Him; Here's What It Means - What happens when the creator of Linux admits AI writes better code
- Future Software Engineer Career: Complete Roadmap - Where software engineering jobs are heading in the AI era
Have you experienced the ATS black hole? How many applications did it take before you heard back from a single company?