ATS-friendly CV: how to get past the software and reach a human

What an ATS actually does with your CV

Most medium and large employers, and nearly all recruitment agencies, run applications through an ATS such as Workday, Greenhouse, Taleo, Lever or iCIMS. When you upload a file, the system extracts the plain text, then tries to assign pieces of it to fields: name, contact details, job titles, employers, dates, education, skills. It then compares those fields with the requirements from the job advert and, in many systems, ranks or filters candidates on that basis.

Nothing about the visual design matters at this stage. The only question is whether the text can be extracted, in the right order, and whether the words the recruiter searched for are in it. A beautifully designed CV that fails that test loses to a plain one that passes.

What breaks parsing

These look fine in the preview and fall apart once the system reads them.

• Text inside images, text boxes, shapes or graphics. To the parser these are blank space. Contact details set as an image are the classic failure.
• Tables used for layout. The text often comes out in the wrong order, with cells from different rows run together.
• Two or more columns. Some parsers read across both columns line by line, turning your skills list and your job history into one unreadable stream.
• Headers and footers. Many systems skip them entirely, so a phone number or email placed there is lost.
• Icons instead of labels. A phone symbol with no word "Phone" next to it is frequently ignored; use plain words.
• Creative section headings. "My journey" or "Where I have made a difference" is not recognised as "Experience", and the whole section may be assigned to nothing.
• Unusual fonts, ligatures and scanned PDFs. A scan is a picture, and the parser cannot read pictures without OCR, which most do not run.

How to format an ATS-friendly CV

The rule is simple: one column, standard section names, text as text. Use "Experience", "Education", "Skills", "Summary" or "Personal statement". Put the job title, employer and dates on their own lines. Use a consistent date format throughout, with month and year. Stick to a common font such as Arial, Calibri, Helvetica or Georgia at 10 to 12 points. Bullet points are fine; nested bullets and tables are not.

Keep the contact details in the body of the document at the top, not in the header. Spell out the name of every tool and qualification exactly as the industry does, and do not rely on abbreviations alone: "Google Analytics 4 (GA4)" covers both searches.

Keywords come from the job advert, not from a list

Recruiters search the ATS for the terms in their own advert. So the keywords that matter are the ones in front of you: the job title, the named tools, the qualifications, the responsibilities that are repeated. Use the same wording. If the advert says "stakeholder management" and your CV says "worked with clients and partners", a search for the phrase will not find you.

This is not an invitation to stuff the document. Keywords need to sit in a sentence that shows you actually used the skill, ideally with a result attached. A skills section with forty comma-separated terms and no evidence reads as padding to the human who opens the file next.

The free builder has a job-ad matching feature: paste the advert and it lists which of your skills appear in it and which requirements are missing from your CV. It is a quick way to see the gap before you send anything.

PDF or DOCX?

Modern systems read both correctly, provided the PDF contains real text rather than an image. PDF preserves your layout on every device and cannot be accidentally edited. DOCX is safer with a handful of older systems and is what some agencies ask for because they reformat CVs before sending them to clients. If the advert or the upload form names a format, use that one. If it does not, a text-based PDF is the default.

How to check your CV before you send it

There is a test that takes thirty seconds. Open the PDF, select all, copy and paste into a plain text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit. What you see is roughly what the ATS sees. If the text is in the wrong order, if sections have merged, or if your phone number is missing, the system will have the same problem.

Online "ATS score" checkers are a rough guide at best; they do not use the same parser as the employer and their scores are not comparable. The copy-paste test plus a careful read against the job advert is more reliable.

If you use the builder, there is a separate "PDF (ATS)" export next to the standard PDF. It drops the visual layout and writes a single-column, text-only version with standard headings, so you can send the designed version where a human will read it and the ATS version where a portal will.