Software engineer Angelina Lee was sick of applying for jobs and not getting any call-backs, so she decided to run an "experiment" to see why she kept getting rejected.

Suspecting no-one was actually looking at her CV, she knocked up a new version, but this time with a twist.

She changed all the hyperlinks to link out to Rick Astley's song Never Gonna Give You Up - a long-standing internet joke known as 'Rick Rolling'.

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She then changed the description of her experience and skills to highlight some rather unusual personal attributes.

"Team coffee maker – ensuring team of six was fully caffeinated" one part said of a previous role. She also spruiked her ability to increase team bonding by "organising a team sack race".

One bullet point even boasted of her "record for most vodka shots in one night" during college.

"No way I get calls back with this right? Wrong," she wrote in a reddit post that has since gone viral.

After firing off the fake CV to a bunch of top tech firms in the US, she said she had a 90 per cent success rate, including getting positive responses from major firms DropBox, RobinHood, GrubHub and Aussie tech giant Atlassian.

Why? Because she changed her work history to include Instagram and Microsoft. That seemingly made all the difference - companies are keen to hire from competitors and industry heavyweights.

"Just incredible. Every time I read it again I catch something I missed," reacted one Reddit user. "What dogs*** screening procedures do these companies have where qualified people can't get in but this could?"

Angelina Lee was not her real name. Like the CV, that was also fake. But the experiment highlights an often overlooked reality for job seekers: When applying for jobs, you've first got to get past the screening software.

Do Australian employers use software to screen CVs?

It is "very common" for major Australian companies to use software to filter the CVs of job applicants, according to Nick Deligiannis, the managing director of recruiting giant Hays in Australia.

"In fact, next time you apply for a job, chances are it’ll be an algorithm that firstly screens your application," he told Yahoo Finance.

Known as an application tracking system, or ATS, advances in AI and machine learning mean key information is sniffed out before a human touch is applied to the hiring process.