The ultimate goal of ATS is to store the resume data of every person on the planet, indexed and searchable so that recruiters can easily and quickly find the very best available candidates worldwide and offer them opportunities provided they are open to being contacted. Your skills and many other aspects of your footprint are being indexed, stored, and accessed by Artificial Intelligence, sometimes thousands of times per day. Just one ATS system alone has nearly 1 billion resumes on file and it tracks every single change in your resume constantly and automatically. If this sounds a little like George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" it is. If you are reminded of Arnold in "Rise of the Machines" it could be. Love it or hate it, Artificial Intelligence is here and it is growing exponentially.

Elon Musk is often quoted, saying "AI poses an existential threat to humanity." Meanwhile, he is taking advantage of this point in time by building autonomous robot vehicles and most recently, humanoid robots that appear and act highly human. He is planning to use AI to fly to and create a Martian settlement.

You do not have to be a passive player in all this. There is no tacit agreement that says you are fixed in stone. In China, 200 A.D. documents were etched on wood blocks and for more important tomes, in stone. In 1040 the Chinese had moveable typeface, which was a great improvement, but a real pain in the neck to change. By 1961 America had IBM Selectrimatic typewriters that could self-correct, but significant changes needed to be retyped. Today, you can store your resume in the cloud, access it with your smartphone, change it and send it. And THAT is exactly what you should do in order to take advantage of ATS and make it work for you, not just for recruiters and employers.

Although you shouldn't change your history, virtually everything else is fair game, and if your resume is structured properly, its actually easy to change very quickly which can make your resume much more competitive, sometimes by several magnitudes!