How to Create an ATS-Friendly Resume That Gets Read

The problem is likely not your experience if you apply to dozens of jobs and are hearing nothing back, even for positions that you were clearly qualified for. Your CV may have never even made it to a person. When you apply for a job, especially at larger companies, that application likely travels through an applicant tracking system (ATS) before it ever reaches human eyes and ears: A small startup's or massive corporation's first line of defense against the millions (okay, slight exaggeration) of applications they get regularly. Long before a recruiter ever gets to look at your resume, it was scanned and scored by software, who determined whether it warrant a human's time.

It isn't some conspiracy to filter out the good candidates. Not much more than a reaction to volume. One job advert might receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of applications, and no hiring team could realistically read each and every one manually. The applicant tracking system, or ATS for short, is the software which helps keep that number in check. This loses a lot of genuinely qualified people not because they do not have the qualifications but due to the way their resume was constructed which could not be read properly by the program.

Knowing the inner workings of these systems and customizing your resume to compensate for this can mean the difference between an application that gets sucked into a black hole and one that actually finds its way under the nose of a hiring manager.

What an ATS Actually Does

Applicant Tracking System (ATS): An ATS is a software that works as a hub for collecting, sorting and filtering job applications. Your resume is not being sent immediately to a real human when you submit it online. It enters the system, where it is parsed (the software breaks your resume into pieces and then categorises them: your work experience, your job titles, your skills, your education, your contact details).

From there, your resume is often scored or ranked by how closely it aligns with the job description. The recruiters can also find the pool of applicants just by entering keywords, filtering by years of experience, or sorting candidates based on match percentage. For many recruiters, their first real interaction is seeing a shortlist that the applicant tracking software has already pre-selected from the applicant pool.

This all boils down to two very big considerations: if the system can even read and parse your resume correctly in the first place, and if you have included exactly what that software is searching for.

Reason Why Many Qualified Candidates Get Filtered

There're one of a handful of fairly common reasons why the resume of a strong candidate is filtered out before it ever lands in front of another human being, most unrelated to actual qualifications at all.

The most common problem is formatting that confuses the parsing software. The system can misread or omit resumes that use complicated tables, columns, text boxes, headers and footers, graphics, or software such as those with unusual fonts. A recruiter reviewing that same resume visually may think it looks nice, but the software working behind the scenes could look at it as an incoherent sack of text in the wrong order or not see some sections at all.

A very common issue is language mismatch. If a job post requests "project management" experience and your resume says only, "managed initiatives," which doesn't include that phrase at all anymore, the system will have no idea you have described such because they are inherently the same skill. ATS software simply isn't that advanced. It can't really infer synonyms reliably. Usually matching on the same sentence and a similar sentence.anchor

File format: File format can also be an issue. Some systems have trouble with formats, mainly PDFs created through design software rather than standard word processing tools, especially on older systems.

Lastly, many candidates do not tweak their resume for each individual opportunity. A generic resume, no matter how good it is, will score poorly matching against a specific job description than one that has been adjusted to the resulting language in that posting.

Use a Clean, Simple Format

The single most impactful thing you can do to ensure an ATS is able to read your resume at all, is simplicity with formatting. This does not mean your CV needs to look dead in the water. That is to void structuring anything that may confuse your organization parsing software.

Stay away from text boxes and tables for content organization, as many systems misread these or skip them altogether. Avoid multicolumn resumes, because columns can trick software into reading left-to-right or right-to-left instead of top-down; such a jumbled layout will turn your work history into garbled text. Do not include your key information, such as your contact information, in headers and footers because many systems do not even scan those areas.

Avoid creative section titles like Where I've Been for Work Experience, What I Bring to the Table for Skills, and stick with standard headings such as Work Experience, Education. The software frequently hunts for conventional terminology to categorize your information properly, and unconventional headings can cause entire sections to be misinterpreted or dismissed.

Use standard, common fonts and do not embed text within images or graphics since that text is generally not readable by parsing software at all.

Store Your Resume in the Most Suitable File Format

These days, most applicant tracking systems can read a PDF or Word doc quite well, but there are some things you should know. And if a job posting specifically asks for one format versus another, adhere to the letter of this instruction, it's often informed by what their particular system best manages.

A Word document (.doc/ The safest option for compatibility across as wide a range of systems as humanly practicable is docx, although a properly-formatted PDF directly from the word processor rather than from scanned image or design tool usually works just fine. Never submit resumes as image files or scanned documents, because they are completely not parseable as text, no matter how good they look.

Also Tailor Your Language to the Job Description

This is probably the most underrated but also one of the best things you can do. When applying for a role pay attention to the exact terminology that is used in the job description such as skills, tools, certifications and responsibilities.

For example, if an employer's posting says "customer relationship management software," and you just put "CRM tools," then use both somewhere in your resume because you don't know what a scan is looking for. If the job description mentions a certain skill again and again, say, "cross-functional collaboration" or "data-driven decision making," include that same word in your resume (as long as you actually have this experience).

We are not talking about lying, pretending to have the skillset that you do not possess. Its about stating your actual experience in the language the employer is using, not hoping that a recruiter's software makes some guess, and assigns to you something with different phrasing means the same thing.

An easy way to do this is to open the job description next to your resume when you customize it and go back and forth between the two, checking off whether the keywords and requirements they mention are somewhere in your document.

Both Spelled Out Terms and Acronyms

Many industries employ the full term and an acronym synonymously, but you never know if the ATS is scanning for one or the other. Where relevant, include both. For example, write "Search Engine Optimization" instead of SEO, so the resume matches regardless of how that sort was made:

This is true for certifications, software names, and almost all technical skills in any field, from 'Certified Public Accountant (CPA)' to 'Customer Relationship Management (CRM)' to 'Search Engine Marketing (SEM).'

Use a Standard, Chronological Structure

By their nature, applicant tracking systems are designed to expect a relatively standard resume format: contact information first, followed by summary or objective statement, then work experience (in reverse chronological order), education and skills.

Sometimes parsing software becomes confused by creative resume formats that look great to a human but so would such things as a skills-based or "functional" resume which give less emphasis to chronological work history. Unless you have a specific, well-thought-out reason for breaking with a standard structure, then stick to the conventional format; this provides software the very best shot at reading your experience correctly.

For each job entry, write your title, the company you worked for, employment dates and a straightforward list of duties and accomplishments. Keep it consistent in how you format each entry, whether that be the dates or structuring them all the same way helps avoid parsing errors as well.

Don't Keyword Stuff

You may even know that matching the language of the job description is important, but there is a difference between naturally including relevant terms and keyword stuffing your resume in way that it awkwardly or dishonestly reads.

Other candidates will game the system by copying and pasting dozens of skills in a big block at the bottom of their resume without having demonstrated any one of those in any other part of their experience. This approach can backfire. More complex modern systems are smart enough to reject resumes that appear keyword-stuffed, and even if your document does get past the software gatekeeper, a human recruiter reading it subsequently would most likely notice when the list of keywords you peppered through your resume doesn't add up with what you've actually described as your experience.

A better way would be to include relevant keywords in your work experience bullet points, where you have a real context and examples of how you used them in practice, instead of running the risk of sprinting your information by putting it all in one separate list that isn't tied together.

Quantify Your Achievements

This is probably most important for the human reader who ends up looking at your resume, but it's also directly related to how well your resume performs as a whole. Achievements that are specific and measurable tend to have a specificity of language that works well for software as well as humans.

Do this: On the other hand, instead of writing "responsible for overseeing a sales team" write "oversaw eight sales reps and boosted quarterly revenue 15 percent. Quantifying your results (with numbers, percentages and concrete outcomes) not only makes your resume that much more compelling to a human reader, it also closely mirrors the kind of outcome-oriented language used in most job descriptions.

Test Your Resume Before Sending It

It's a good idea to perform a basic test firstly before broadly sending out your resume, to understand how well it is likely going to be parsed. One of the easiest ways is to copy your resume text/contents and paste it into a plain text document. If the information is sorted, disordered or entire groups are missing, that will not indicate good signs an ATS would also have difficulty working with it.

There are even online resume-scanning tools that will tell you how your resume stacks up against any particular job description and highlight any keywords or formatting errors you might have missed. These aren't foolproof, and no tool can predict how any individual company's system will perform under different usage conditions, but they can help surface most of the obvious issues before you hit submit on an important application.

What to Do If You Keep Getting Filtered Out

If you have done these things and are still not hearing back, may be a good idea to take some steps back and look over few things. Make sure that your resume is actually customized for each job and not just a one size fits all template you send everywhere. Ensure that your format is as clean and standard as possible, even minor formatting issues may lead to parsing problems. Open it on a compatible file format and check again the job description, in case there are important keywords or qualifications you have not described well.

Lastly, even the most optimized resume will not necessarily land you an interview by itself. The ATS is only the first line of defense, not all of it. Even if your resume makes it through, you still need to show the person who eventually reads it that you are a good fit for the role.

Final Thoughts

We aren’t trying to create hurdles for a qualified candidate through the applicant tracking system, but it does also mean that a resume designed specifically for a human reader (and not with thought to how software reads it) could easily disappear into the ether before anyone ever laid eyes on whatever skills you have. The adjustments involved aren't complicated. The right formatting, predictable section headers, experience that mirrors the job desc, and a standard structure goes a long way toward ensuring your resume is actually read as you hope it to be.

None of this substitutes for really good experience communicated clearly. However, it is ensuring that experience even gets a shot at being read in the first place through both the software that discards applications and also by the person who ultimately makes the call on who interviews.