12 Phrases Your ATS Is Quietly Penalizing — Found by Running 200 Resumes Through 5 Systems

The follow-up I owed myself. Last week I reverse-engineered 5 ATS systems and that post hit harder than I expected, partly because it gave readers a mental model but mostly because it made them ask the obvious follow-up question: Okay, but which words specifically should I delete from my resume? So I ran another batch — 200 anonymized resumes through 5 different ATS-style scoring pipelines (3 commercial, 2 open-source replicas tuned to match the commercial outputs) and looked for phrases that co