Automatic and systematic rejection by ATS is largely a myth, with the most recent studies showing that only a minority of recruiters actually configure this type of filter.
The real risk is not rejection but ranking: a poorly optimised CV can end up buried at the bottom of a list of scores and never be seen by a human being.
In Luxembourg, the multilingual and cross-border nature of the labour market makes things even more complicated, as candidates often have to adapt their CV in French, English and German depending on the position.
ATS, or applicant tracking systems, have become established in a large share of recruitment processes, including in Luxembourg, where companies receive a growing number of applications for every open position. According to the Hellowork 2024 study relayed by France Travail, 80% of recruiters were using or planning to use an ATS, a rate that rises sharply in larger organisations.
Faced with this widespread adoption, the idea that these programmes act as ruthless gatekeepers, discarding CVs without any human involvement, has become widely accepted among candidates. But what do the data actually say about how ATS work and how they are really used in Luxembourg and European companies?
Contrary to a persistent belief, outright automatic rejection of CVs by an ATS remains uncommon. A 2026 survey of 25 recruiters by Enhancv found that 92% of them do not use any automatic rejection filter in their ATS, and only 8% have set up elimination based on content rules. A broader survey of around a hundred recruitment professionals, analysed by Source to Match, confirms this figure, with 92% of respondents saying they do not use automatic filters.
What an ATS actually does is assign a score to each application based on weighted criteria, with keyword matching ranking first, as detailed in Hays' guide on making CVs compatible with ATS. The recruiter then reviews applications ranked from the highest to the lowest score, and in practice, for positions receiving a high volume of applications, often only the top 10 to 20 profiles are examined in detail. A poorly structured CV will therefore not necessarily be rejected by the software, but it risks staying invisible because no human ever looks at it, which amounts to the same outcome for the candidate.
In the feature on recruitment myths published by Silicon Luxembourg magazine in July 2026, headhunter Corinne Lawson Avla flags a related phenomenon: she observes that linear CVs, automated filters and the uncritical use of artificial intelligence tend to screen out career paths with gaps, even though these periods often reveal valuable human skills such as adaptability or resilience. This observation echoes the concerns raised about ATS and their rigid use in certain recruitment processes.
The Luxembourg labour market has features that particularly feed this myth. With a small but highly internationalised market, where residents, cross-border workers and candidates from across Europe all coexist, companies in the Grand Duchy receive applications written in a wide variety of formats and languages, which complicates ATS configuration and can heighten candidates' sense of being screened out arbitrarily.
The Luxembourg site Connexion-Emploi notes that ATS scan CVs for specific keywords before passing them on to a recruiter, and that a well-written CV lacking these essential terms risks never being read by a human being. The platform therefore recommends that candidates reuse the exact wording found in Luxembourg job postings to maximise their chances of being noticed, a practice that is all the more strategic in a country where hiring frequently takes place in French, English and sometimes German.
This linguistic complexity also reinforces the role of the human recruiter in the process. As several recruitment practitioners interviewed in the Silicon Luxembourg feature point out, companies in the Grand Duchy continue to rely on structured evaluations and scoring grids to differentiate between candidates, with the ATS being just one step among others rather than a single, definitive filter.
Rather than trying to outsmart a supposedly hostile algorithm, candidates would do better to focus their efforts on the clarity and relevance of their application. The recommendations that come up most often in ATS studies analysed by Enhancv converge on a few points: use a text-based PDF or Word format rather than a scanned image, structure the CV with clear section headings, and above all tailor the content to each job offer by reusing the keywords and skills mentioned in the listing.
In Luxembourg, this adaptation must also take the language of the job offer into account. A position advertised in English in the financial sector will call for a CV and keywords in English, while a listing in a more French-speaking environment will require the opposite, a nuance also covered by Connexion-Emploi in its writing advice. Avoiding overly creative CVs, with complex tables, icons or multiple columns, also remains a useful precaution, since these graphic elements can disrupt automated reading by some older ATS, as France Travail also points out in its guide to recruitment software.
Finally, it is worth remembering that even in companies equipped with an ATS, a human recruiter is almost always involved in the final decision. The real challenge, then, is not to outwit a piece of software, but to build an application clear and targeted enough to catch attention, whether that of a sorting algorithm or a recruitment officer in Luxembourg.
The myth of automatic and systematic rejection by ATS does not hold up under scrutiny of the available data, which shows instead that a large majority of recruiters prefer ranking over elimination. For candidates in Luxembourg, the stakes nonetheless remain real, since a CV poorly adapted to a listing's keywords risks being relegated to the bottom of a list of scores, out of the recruiter's sight.
In a labour market as multilingual as the Grand Duchy's, staying attentive to CV format and adapting it to each job offer therefore remain useful habits, not to win over a machine, but to make life easier for the recruiters who, ultimately, always make the decision.
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