How to write an ATS-friendly CV

An applicant tracking system is a database with a CV parser attached. When you upload a file, it tries to pull your name, contact details, employers, dates and education into fields. Everything people believe about ATS beyond that is mostly folklore.

Things that are not true

• It does not silently reject you for a low keyword score. Most systems rank; a person still decides.
• It does not need a plain black-and-white document. Colour and rules parse fine.
• It does not read white text hidden behind the margin, and putting it there is a good way to be withdrawn from a process.

Things that genuinely break parsing

• Contact details inside a header or footer. Some parsers never look there. Put them in the body of the page.
• Text inside an image. If your name is a logo, your name is not in the database.
• Multi-column layouts, sometimes. A parser reading left to right across two columns can interleave your job titles with your skills list.
• Tables used for layout. Same problem, less predictable.
• Invented section headings. "Where I have been" will not be recognised as work experience. Use the ordinary words.
• Dates written only as text, like "last spring". Use month and year.

Keywords, honestly

Ranking usually works on whether the words in the job advert appear in your CV. So use the advert’s vocabulary where it is genuinely true of you — if they say "stakeholder management" and you wrote "worked with clients", change it. Do not paste the advert into your skills section. A recruiter reading a skills list that exactly mirrors their own advert knows precisely what happened.

File format

PDF, unless the form explicitly asks for a Word document. A PDF exported from a text layout keeps its text selectable, which is all a parser needs. A PDF exported as an image does not — if you cannot select the text in your own CV, neither can the system.