There is a layer of AI recruiting tooling that has quietly become unavoidable in 2026. Most candidates do not know they are interacting with it, because the recruiter on the phone is human and the email is signed by a human, but the first filter and the first conversation in roughly half of all postings I tracked this quarter goes through software. I wanted to know how good the software actually is. Specifically: does the same resume get the same treatment across the five biggest tools? Or are some of them just throwing applications away? I picked one application of each kind that I would actually accept if it became real. I sent the same resume — same role-fit, same seniority — to five different recruiting platforms. Then I tracked what happened. Two of the five worked. Three did not. The failure modes are interesting because they are different from each other.…