ATS-Friendly Resume: How Applicant Tracking Systems Read Your Resume

What an ATS does

An applicant tracking system stores applications and helps recruiters search and filter them. When you apply, it parses your resume into fields — name, contact, job titles, employers, dates, skills, education — and recruiters then search those fields, often by job title and keywords. Some systems also rank candidates by how well they match the posting.

There is no single "ATS score": Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo and others all parse a little differently. The rules below work across them.

Formatting rules

• Use one column where you can. Modern systems handle clean two-column layouts, but tables and text boxes are often read in the wrong order or skipped.
• Keep contact details in the body, not a page header or footer.
• Use standard headings: Summary, Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications.
• Use real text. A scanned or image-only PDF has nothing to parse. Test by selecting text in your PDF.
• Avoid decorative symbols as bullets (★ ➤ ✔) and emoji — they are often stripped or garbled.
• Consistent dates: month and year for every role.
• Standard fonts and sizes — any common font at 10–12 pt.

Keyword rules

• Mirror the posting's wording for skills and titles: if it says "Power BI", do not write "Microsoft BI tools".
• Include both acronym and full form for important terms once: "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)".
• Put keywords where they prove something — in bullets — as well as in Skills.
• Never paste hidden keywords or the job description in white text. Recruiters see the parsed text, and it ends applications.

Test it

Paste a job description into the free ATS resume checker to see which terms you are missing, and every template here is labelled by how well it parses.

Questions

Related guides

• How to Write a Resume: A Step-by-Step Guide
• How to Tailor Your Resume to a Job Description
• Skills for Your Resume: What to List and How