Getting a resume through an ATS takes less than people think: a single column, standard headings, text you can select with your cursor, and the same words the job posting uses. Those four things solve most of the problem. The rest of this guide is the detail — and, more usefully, why each rule exists.

Before a recruiter sees your resume, software almost always reads it first: the ATS (Applicant Tracking System). It helps to be clear about what it is and isn't. It is not a test you pass or fail, and it is not a judge weighing your career. It is a reader — and like any reader it can understand you well, understand you halfway, or not understand you at all. When it doesn't, your application slides down the list and often nobody ever opens it.

What is an ATS, and how does it decide?

An ATS is the software companies use to receive, store and sort applications. When you upload your resume three things happen in sequence: the system tries to extract your information (name, contact details, experience, education, skills), structure it into fields, and then compare it against what the posting asks for.

The first step is the one that matters. If extraction goes wrong — because your experience sat inside a table, or your name lived in the document header — what reaches the comparison is an incomplete resume. You aren't rejected for being weak; you're rejected for being unreadable, which is far more frustrating and far easier to fix.

Is it true that 75% of resumes get discarded?

That figure is everywhere and deserves some scepticism: it gets repeated much more than it gets sourced. What is clearly true is simpler and more useful: most mid-sized and large companies use an ATS, that system ranks candidates by how well they match the posting, and whoever lands at the bottom of a list of two hundred rarely gets a human read.

Put differently: you don't need to believe a specific percentage for this to be worth doing properly. You only need to know there is a ranking, and that you can influence where you sit in it.

What formatting does an ATS read well?

There is really one underlying rule: if a human can't copy and paste your resume as plain text and still make sense of it, an ATS won't either. Everything else follows from that.

  • Do: a single column, top to bottom, in the order you want it read.
  • Do: standard, boring headings — "Experience", "Education", "Skills". "My journey" or "What I do" look lovely and confuse the automated reader, which is looking for the usual words.
  • Do: a common font and genuinely selectable text.
  • Don't: tables and multiple columns. When the text is extracted the cells interleave and your experience comes out as word salad.
  • Don't: text boxes. Many systems skip them entirely — and that's usually exactly where people put their professional summary.
  • Don't: important details in the document header or footer. It's where most resumes lose their phone number and email.
  • Don't: icons instead of text. A little envelope drawing is not your email address.
  • Don't: your experience inside an image. If you can't select it with your cursor, it doesn't exist.

PDF or Word?

PDF, unless the posting asks for something else. It's what guarantees your resume looks the same on whatever screen opens it. The one condition is that it must be a text PDF, not a scan or a design exported as artwork: open it and try selecting a paragraph with your mouse. If nothing selects, as far as the system is concerned your resume is blank.

If the posting asks for .docx, send .docx. And avoid unusual formats — web pages, ODT, images — however perfect they look to you.

Which sections should it have, and in what order?

The order that rarely fails is this one:

  1. Contact details in the body of the document: name, phone, email, city, and your profile link.
  2. Professional summary: three or four lines on who you are and what you're looking for. It's where the posting's keywords fit most naturally.
  3. Experience in reverse chronological order, most recent first.
  4. Education.
  5. Skills, written as text — not as level bars or star ratings.

If your situation calls for a different order — a career change, returning after a break — you can move things around, but do it deliberately and keep the headings standard.

How should dates and job titles be written?

Two small details that break a lot of extractions:

  • Consistent date formats, like 03/2021 – 06/2024 or March 2021 – June 2024, identical on every row. Mixing formats makes the system miscount your years of experience.
  • Recognisable job titles. If internally you were a "Growth Ninja", write the real market title and put the internal one in brackets if you like. Nobody is searching for ninjas.
  • One line per role: title, company, dates. Cram all three onto one line separated by slashes and they sometimes get read as a single field.

Keywords: the deciding factor

This is where your place in the ranking is won or lost. The system compares your resume against the job description, so read that description like an exam with the answers printed on it: the skills, tools and responsibilities the posting repeats are, literally, what it will look for.

Three rules for using them well:

  • Use the posting's own words. If it asks for "project management", write "project management"; "coordinated initiatives" means the same thing to a human and nothing at all to the filter.
  • Write both the acronym and the full form at least once: "SEO (search engine optimization)". You don't know which one is configured.
  • Only if it's true. That one isn't negotiable, and not for moral reasons: the interview takes you apart in two questions.

Does hiding keywords in white text work?

No. The trick of typing keywords in white on white, or at font size one, still circulates and is a bad idea today for two reasons. First, hidden text is easy to detect — the system reads text, it doesn't look at it — and many platforms flag it. Second, and worse: the moment someone spots it, they've stopped evaluating your experience and started evaluating whether you cheat. No role is worth that conversation.

Mistakes that cost interviews

  • One generic resume for every job. The most common mistake and the most expensive. Tailoring it to each posting raises your keyword match noticeably, and it doesn't mean rewriting the whole thing: usually it's reordering and adjusting the summary.
  • Achievements without numbers. "Improved sales" convinces less than "increased sales by 18% in six months". If you don't have exact figures, magnitudes work: how many people, how many clients, how much time.
  • Describing duties instead of results. "Responsible for customer support" is a job description; "cut response time from 48 hours to 6" is your work.
  • Inventing skills to fill space. The filter may pass you; the interview gives you away.
  • Careless file names. cv_final_v3_good.pdf is going to be seen by a person. Use First-Last-Resume.pdf.

A 60-second check before you send it

  1. Open the PDF and try to select a paragraph with your mouse. Does it select?
  2. Copy everything and paste it into a blank document. Does the order still make sense?
  3. Are your phone and email in the body, not in the header?
  4. Do the three or four words the posting repeats most appear in your resume?
  5. Does every role have at least one result with a number in it?

How to check it without guessing

You don't have to buy an ATS to test your resume. The resume optimizer simulates how different systems read it, shows your keyword match against the posting, and flags formatting risks before you apply. Starting from scratch? You can also build an ATS-optimized resume step by step.

Two things worth doing in parallel: bringing your LinkedIn profile up to date — the moment your resume clears the filter, looking you up there is the next thing they do — and keeping a record of what you applied to and with which version of your resume, because in two weeks you will not remember.

One last thing

None of this makes a mediocre resume look good. What it does is stop a good resume from getting lost over a badly placed table. It's an afternoon's work, you do it once, and after that you only touch the summary and the keywords for each application.