ATS CV guide: how to make an ATS-friendly CV

What an applicant tracking system does with your CV

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software an employer or agency uses to run its hiring: it posts the advert, collects every application in one place and lets the recruiter move people from "applied" to "interview" to "offer". When you upload a CV, the system does two things with it. It stores the file, so a person can open it later exactly as you sent it. And it pulls the text out of the file and sorts it into fields: name, email, phone, job titles, employers, dates, qualifications and skills. That second step is called parsing, and it is the part your formatting can break.

Once your details are in fields, the recruiter can search and filter. A typical search is a job title, a skill or a qualification, sometimes combined with a location. Some systems also score or rank applications against the words in the job description, and many adverts start with screening questions ("Do you have the right to work in the UK?", "Do you hold a full driving licence?") that can end an application before anyone reads the CV. The government JobHelp service describes the core of it plainly: the software scans each CV for key words and selects the ones that best match the job description.

What an ATS usually does not do is reject you on its own for a font or a missing keyword. A person sets the filters, reads the shortlist and makes the decision. The risk is quieter than outright rejection: if your job titles land in the wrong field, your dates are lost or your skills sit inside an image, you do not appear when the recruiter searches, and nobody ever knows you applied.

The formatting rules, and why each one matters

Every rule below exists because of how parsing works. Text is read in order, from top to bottom and left to right, and the parser guesses what each line is from the words around it. Anything that scrambles that order or hides text from it causes errors.

Use one column

A parser reading a two-column page may read straight across both columns, line by line, so a skill from the sidebar ends up in the middle of a job description. Others read one column and then the other, which is fine until a date in the sidebar is meant to belong to a job on the right. A single column removes the guesswork. If you like a sidebar design, keep one plain version of your CV for online applications.

Use headings the software expects

The parser looks for familiar labels to decide where one section ends and the next begins. "Work experience", "Employment history", "Education", "Skills", "Qualifications" and "Personal profile" all work. "Where I have been" or "My journey" do not, and the jobs underneath may be read as free text. The National Careers Service lists the same standard sections for a UK CV, so the labels that suit the software also suit the reader.

Keep text as text

Skills shown as star ratings or bars, a logo instead of your name, or a heading made into an image all carry no text for the parser to read. The same goes for a scanned PDF, which is a picture of a page. JobHelp advises against pictures, tables and diagrams for this reason. If a design element carries meaning, write that meaning in words.

Avoid tables, text boxes and the page header

Tables and text boxes are read in an order you cannot predict, and some systems skip them. Word's header and footer areas are often ignored completely, which is why a name and phone number placed there can disappear. Put your name, phone, email and town as ordinary lines at the top of the page body.

Write dates and job lines the same way every time

Pick one date format, such as "March 2022 to June 2024" or "03/2022 to 06/2024", and use it for every entry. Put the job title, employer, place and dates in the same order under each job. Consistency is what lets the parser work out how long you held each role, and a recruiter filtering for "two years' experience" relies on those calculated figures.

Keep fonts and bullets ordinary

Common fonts such as Arial, Calibri or Georgia and plain round bullets are read reliably. Decorative symbols used as bullets can come out as stray characters, and an unusual font embedded in a PDF sometimes extracts as nonsense. Bold and italics are fine. Colour is fine too, as long as the text is still text.

Send the file type the advert asks for

If the application page names a format, use it. If it does not, JobHelp suggests a Word document (.docx) as usually the easiest for an ATS to read. A PDF created from Word or a CV builder keeps its text and is widely accepted; a PDF made by scanning or photographing a printed CV is not readable. Name the file with your name, for example "Amara-Okafor-CV.pdf", not "CV final v3".

Keywords: use the advert's words, honestly

Recruiters search for the words that matter in the job, and those words are in the advert. Read it and mark three kinds of term: the job title, the hard skills and tools ("Xero", "safeguarding", "SQL", "NVQ Level 3"), and the qualifications or registrations it lists as essential. Then check that each one you genuinely have appears on your CV in the same form. If the advert says "stakeholder management" and your CV says "working with partners", a search will not connect the two.

Put keywords where they describe real work: in your personal profile, in your job bullets and in the skills section. Write out an abbreviation once in full, as in "Customer Relationship Management (CRM)", because a recruiter may search either form. JobHelp adds a detail that is easy to forget: check the spelling, since a misspelt keyword may not be picked up at all.

Do not paste the advert into your CV, hide keywords in white text or list skills you do not have. Recruiters read the CV in full once it is found, many systems show the extracted text on screen, and a claim you cannot talk about at interview costs you the job anyway.

A before and after example

Here is one job entry for a customer service applicant, first as it often appears in a designed two-column template and then rewritten for an ATS, for an advert asking for "complaint handling", "CRM systems" and "first contact resolution".

The second version reads in order, carries a title, employer, place and dates the parser can find, and uses the advert's three terms in sentences that are true. It is also better for the human reader, which is the point: an ATS-friendly CV and a good CV are almost always the same document.

ATS CV checklist

Run through this before every online application. It takes five minutes and catches most problems.

• One column, with no tables, text boxes, images, icons or charts carrying information.
• Name, phone, email and town at the top of the page body, not in the header or footer.
• Standard section headings: Personal profile, Work experience, Education, Skills.
• Each job gives the title, employer, place and dates in the same order and date format.
• Plain round bullets and a common font; no text in images.
• The job title, key skills and essential qualifications from the advert appear, where true, in the same words.
• Abbreviations written out once in full.
• Spelling checked, especially keywords and job titles.
• The file type the advert asks for, or Word if it does not say; never a scanned PDF.
• A clear file name with your name in it.
• Two pages of A4 or less for most jobs; longer only for academic or medical posts.

What our free ATS CV checker tests

The SimpleCVBuilder ATS CV checker is free and needs no account. You upload your CV as a PDF or Word file, or paste the text. It first runs the parsing checks that decide whether software can read the file at all: whether the text can be extracted or the file is a scan, whether the layout has more than one column, whether an email address and phone number can be found, whether it recognises at least three standard section headings, whether you use bullet points, and whether the CV runs past three pages or is too short to make a case.

If the file reads cleanly, it then looks at the content: how strongly your bullets start, how many achievements carry a number, passive phrasing and generic claims such as "hard-working team player". If you paste the job advert as well, it shows which of the advert's important terms your CV already covers and which are missing. You get a score and the three fixes worth making first. The score is a guide to what to change, not a prediction of what any employer's system will do.

Mistakes that stop an ATS reading your CV

• A two-column or sidebar template sent to a large employer's online portal.
• Contact details typed into the Word header, where many parsers never look.
• Skills shown only as rating bars or icons.
• Creative section names that the parser does not recognise.
• Jobs with no dates, or dates written three different ways.
• A scanned or photographed CV saved as a PDF.
• One generic CV for every advert, so the right words are never there.