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Top 10 ATS Systems Employers Use in 2026

Kayvan Zahiri

Founder, ResumeAI

Kayvan is the founder and lead engineer of ResumeAI. He writes the product and the code, and recently open-sourced the State of ATS 2026 dataset that maps the Applicant Tracking System used by 738 large employers.

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The short answer (verified, updated August 2026): among the 704 large employers we verified against their live careers portals (of 738 checked; re-verified July 2026), the most-used ATS platforms are Workday (38.0%), Greenhouse (12.6%), SAP SuccessFactors (9.6%), Oracle Cloud HCM (6.9%), and iCIMS (5.5%). The top 3 cover 60.3% — and 36 distinct platforms are in use, so there is no single "ATS" to beat.

Understanding Which ATS Your Application Goes Through

Nearly every large employer runs an Applicant Tracking System, and each system parses a resume differently — formatting that works perfectly in one ATS may break in another. Every ranking and example below comes from our portal-verified State of ATS 2026 dataset (738 large employers checked by hand, 704 verified, re-verified July 2026, open data) — not from vendor marketing.

1. Workday Recruiting — 38.0% of verified large employers

Verified users: Adobe, Bank of America, Boeing, CVS Health, Capital One, Accenture

The single most common ATS among large corporations — but at 38%, far from the "75%" figure often repeated online. It integrates with the company's broader HR suite. Tips: Workday parses standard formats well. Use clear section headings (Experience, Education, Skills). Avoid tables, columns, and graphics. Always fill in all fields in the online application — do not rely solely on your uploaded resume.

2. Greenhouse — 12.6%

Most resumes are screened by an ATS before a human sees them

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Verified users: Airbnb, Coinbase, Databricks, Datadog, DoorDash, Cloudflare (plus Anthropic and most AI labs' peers)

Greenhouse is the tech industry's favorite and focuses heavily on structured hiring processes. Tips: Greenhouse has solid parsing capabilities. It extracts skills, work history, and education reliably from well-formatted PDFs. Include a skills section with keywords matching the job post.

3. SAP SuccessFactors — 9.6%

Verified users: EY, American Airlines, BMW, Audi, Honda, Capgemini

Popular with multinational corporations, especially in Europe — and growing: our July 2026 re-verification found several large employers had quietly migrated onto it. Tips: Parsing is stricter than modern systems. Keep formatting simple, use standard section headers, and avoid non-standard characters.

4. Oracle Cloud HCM — 6.9%

Verified users: JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Kroger, Hilton, Albertsons, Oracle itself

Oracle's modern recruiting cloud (the successor to Taleo) — routinely missing from ATS market-share lists even though it runs hiring at some of the biggest employers in banking and retail. Tips: Handles standard PDFs well. Complete every form field; the structured application data matters as much as the uploaded file.

5. iCIMS — 5.5%

Verified users: Atlassian, Costco, Uber, AMD, Alaska Airlines, Aon

One of the largest dedicated ATS providers, popular in retail, healthcare, and manufacturing. Tips: iCIMS supports PDF and Word formats. Use standard headings, avoid headers/footers (they may not parse), and include both spelled-out terms and acronyms (e.g., "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)").

6. Avature — 3.7%

Verified users: Deloitte, IBM, Bloomberg, Bain & Company, CBRE, Ally Financial

A flexible enterprise CRM/ATS that big consulting, finance, and services firms increasingly run as their primary apply flow. Tips: Parsing is solid but portals are heavily customized per company — read each form carefully and fill every required field rather than relying on the parsed resume.

7. Eightfold — 3.4%

Verified users: Microsoft, Netflix, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, AstraZeneca

An AI-native talent platform that matches your whole profile against the role — not just keywords. Tips: Eightfold reads context, not just keyword counts. A clear career story with concrete skills and outcomes beats keyword stuffing here.

8. SmartRecruiters — 2.7%

Verified users: McDonald's, ServiceNow, AB InBev, AbbVie, AECOM, Accor

A modern, user-friendly system common at global consumer and services companies. Tips: Good parsing of PDFs and Word docs. Still, stick to clean formatting for best results.

9. Taleo (Oracle, legacy) — 2.5%

Verified users: UnitedHealth Group, Kaiser Permanente, Hyatt, Cognizant, Jacobs, D.R. Horton

The system career advice still warns about most — but its install base is collapsing: it ranked #6 in our June 2026 audit and fell to #10 by the July re-verification as employers quietly migrated off it. Where it survives, its parsing is the most dated on this list. Tips: Taleo has the most issues with complex formatting. Use a single-column layout, no tables, no images, and standard fonts. See our ATS-friendly format guide.

10. Ashby — 2.1%, and rising fast

Verified users: OpenAI, Snowflake, Notion, Plaid, Ramp, Confluent

The high-growth tech world's new default — Ashby was the #1 destination in our July 2026 migration tracking, and most frontier AI labs run hiring on it. Tips: Ashby has modern parsing that handles most formats well. It is particularly good at extracting structured data from clean, standard resumes. Worth knowing: several household names run none of the above — about 4% of verified large employers (Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, LinkedIn, plus federal agencies) use their own internal systems with no third-party parser to optimize for. And Lever, long a startup staple, now runs hiring at under 1% of large employers — several of its biggest logos migrated away in 2026.

How to Optimize Your Resume for Any ATS

Regardless of which system a company uses, these principles apply universally:

  • Use a single-column layout — Multi-column designs confuse many parsers
  • Stick to standard section headings — Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications
  • Use common fonts — Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, Helvetica. See our resume font guide
  • Avoid images, charts, and graphics — ATS cannot read them
  • Submit as PDF — Unless the posting specifically requests Word
  • Mirror job description keywords — This is the single most important factor. Use our resume keywords guide
  • Check Your Resume Against Any ATS

    Want to know which of these systems your target employer runs? Look any company up with our free company ATS lookup, or check your resume against the specific parser with the free ATS checker — no signup, 3 checks a day free. Pair it with our AI resume builder to create a resume optimized for the system that will actually read it.

    For a deeper understanding of how these systems work, read our complete guide on what is an ATS.

    Ready to optimize your resume?

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