How to make an ATS-friendly resume (CV)

An ATS-friendly resume is one that applicant tracking software can read into the right fields. That means one column, standard section headings, your contact details in the body rather than the header, no tables, text boxes or graphics, and a Word file or a text-based PDF. Then use the job posting’s own words wherever they’re true of you.

In the UK this document is called a CV, and every rule on this page applies to it unchanged.

What an applicant tracking system does with your resume

An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is the software employers use to collect and sort job applications. In a 2021 report by Harvard Business School and Accenture based on a survey of 2,275 executives, 75% of US employers said they use recruiting software of this kind (58% in the UK), and more than 90% of employers in the survey said they use it to filter or rank candidates at the first stage. The software does two jobs that matter to you.

• It reads your resume. Most systems parse the file, copying your name, contact details, job titles, dates and education into fields. Greenhouse, one widely used system, says formatting problems ‘may result in a partial resume parse that will need to be manually corrected and verified’. Your file stays attached, but someone has to retype whatever the system missed.
• It helps a recruiter find you. MIT’s career office describes most systems as working like a database, and says some also rate or score applicants against the posting. Format takes care of the first job, and keywords the second, which have their own guide.

ATS-friendly resume format: nine rules

1. One column, top to bottom. Greenhouse lists ‘Resumes that have a columned layout’ as a cause of failed parses, and MIT warns that columns can scramble the order of your text.
2. No tables, text boxes, graphics, icons or photos. Greenhouse also lists ‘graphics, photos, or word art’. Skill bars count as graphics.
3. Contact details in the body. Name, city, phone, email and LinkedIn URL go as plain lines at the top of the page, because Greenhouse names ‘the name and contact information in the header, footer, or text box’ as another cause.
4. Standard section headings, such as Work Experience, Education and Skills. Greenhouse lists ‘Resumes without clear sections’ too.
5. Full job titles. ‘Senior Account Executive’, not ‘Sr. Account Exec’, is Greenhouse’s own example, and MIT advises against abbreviating keywords.
6. One date format everywhere, such as ‘Mar 2021 to Present’. Greenhouse lists ‘differing formats throughout each section’ too.
7. A common font at 10 point or larger, such as Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Georgia, Helvetica or Times New Roman (MIT’s list).
8. Normal letter spacing. Greenhouse says the parser ‘won’t recognize the separate letters as a single word’.
9. A Word file or a text-based PDF. MIT calls either ‘usually fairly safe’ unless the posting says otherwise, and Greenhouse tells its candidates to ‘Upload a PDF for best results.’ Avoid scans, and follow the posting if it names a format.

ATS-friendly vs risky, side by side

Every example in this table and in the next section is invented for illustration.

Before and after: four fixes

Test it as plain text before you apply

MIT’s career office suggests a quick check: save your resume as a plain text (.txt) file, which strips the formatting and leaves only the words. Then look for:

• Missing text, which was probably in a text box, a table or the header.
• Text in the wrong order, usually a sign of columns or text boxes.
• Garbled characters where your icons or fancy bullets used to be.

Keywords: the other half of ATS-friendly

A clean format gets your resume read correctly, and keywords decide whether it comes up in a search. Use the posting’s exact words where they’re true of you, spell out each abbreviation once, and cut vague words such as ‘various’, which MIT says ‘might be masking some beneficial keywords you can use’. The ATS keywords guide works through a full posting.

Four ATS myths worth ignoring

• ‘Software throws out most resumes before a person sees them.’ You’ll often see a precise percentage attached to this, and we couldn’t find the research behind it. Greenhouse says its matching tool ‘does not automatically advance or reject candidates’. Where automatic rejection happens, it usually comes from screening questions the employer sets, covered in the keywords guide.
• ‘Never send a PDF.’ Greenhouse recommends PDF to its candidates; a scanned PDF is the problem, not a text-based one.
• ‘Hide keywords in white text.’ Hidden words show up the moment anyone selects the text, and a block of repeated terms reads as padding to the person who reviews it next.
• ‘You need a special ATS template.’ Any single-column document from a word processor that follows the nine rules does the job.

Getting through the software only gets you to a reader, so spend the time you saved on design on results and real numbers in your bullet points. Common resume mistakes covers what to fix next.

From the founder

Next steps

• Build it from the resume you have: the free resume builder rewrites it for the role you want next, as a Word document in your account with standard section names and no tables or graphics. Every employer, date and number comes from what you give it, and it never applies to jobs for you.
• Get the keywords right: how to find ATS keywords in a job description.
• Check the length: how long should a resume be?
• Applying in the UK and the US? CV vs resume explains which word and which document to use where.