ats-detective

ats-detective is a skill for Claude Code from squerne/open-career-skills. It costs 81 tokens per session (1,878 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for identifying a company's Applicant Tracking System (ATS), the software it uses to collect and screen job applications, and applying that system's known CV rules.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect a careers URL or other evidence, identify the ATS vendor, and tailor a CV for a named company or job application.
Why use it?
Different ATS products handle dates, keywords, file types, and layouts differently. Identifying the actual system prevents you from tailoring a CV for the wrong software and reports uncertainty when the system cannot be confirmed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

Good fit Use it to inspect a careers URL or other evidence, identify the ATS vendor, and tailor a CV for a named company or job application.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/squerne/open-career-skills/ats-detective
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add squerne/open-career-skills --skill ats-detective
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/squerne/open-career-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ats-detective

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/squerne/open-career-skills/ats-detective/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/squerne/open-career-skills/ats-detective)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/squerne/open-career-skills/ats-detective"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/squerne/open-career-skills/ats-detective/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ats-detective

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/squerne/open-career-skills/ats-detective"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/squerne/open-career-skills/ats-detective.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 81 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,878 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00081 $0.01878
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00939
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00376
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00188

Measured 11d ago against content hash 6e97c37f1507, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ats-detective scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/ats-detective/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ATS Detective (prompt-only)

Generic "ATS-safe" advice is one-size-fits-none. The parsers genuinely differ: Workday reads January 2023 - Present reliably and mangles 01/2023; Greenhouse and Lever do semantic matching where Taleo does near-literal keyword matching; some vendors auto-fill the application form from a DOCX and ignore a PDF's layout entirely. Knowing the vendor turns a pile of general rules into three or four specific ones.

Iron rule, same as everywhere in this workspace: you only report a vendor you actually confirmed. A board that answers is evidence. A guess from the company's name or your training data is not. When you cannot establish the vendor, say so and fall back to the generic rules in Step 4 - that is a perfectly good outcome, and much better than confidently tailoring for the wrong parser.

Step 1: Read the URL first (free, and the strongest evidence there is)

If the user has a posting or careers URL, the host usually IS the answer, and this needs no request at all. Match the hostname:

Host contains Vendor
myworkdayjobs.com, myworkdaysite.com Workday
boards.greenhouse.io, job-boards.greenhouse.io Greenhouse
jobs.ashbyhq.com Ashby
jobs.lever.co Lever
apply.workable.com, jobs.workable.com Workable
jobs.smartrecruiters.com SmartRecruiters
.icims.com iCIMS
taleo.net, oraclecloud.com/hcmui Oracle Taleo
successfactors.com, .sapsf.com SAP SuccessFactors
.recruitee.com Recruitee
.teamtailor.com Teamtailor
.bamboohr.com BambooHR
.breezy.hr Breezy
jobs.jobvite.com Jobvite
.applytojob.com JazzHR
jobs.personio. Personio

This is an observation of the company using that system, not an inference. Stop here when it hits; the path segment or leftmost subdomain is also the company's board slug, which is worth telling the user (boards.greenhouse.io/stripe means the slug is stripe).

A careers page on the company's own domain that immediately redirects to one of these hosts counts too: follow the redirect and read the final URL.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 96 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A 6e97c37f1507

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ats-detective is a skill published in the GitHub repository squerne/open-career-skills (22 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 1,878 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.