Most advice about “beating the ATS” is either wrong or years out of date. It was written when ATS meant simple keyword-matching tools. Modern systems — Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, iCIMS — are meaningfully more sophisticated, and the advice that circulates about them often describes problems that have been solved or introduces fixes that don’t help and sometimes hurt.
What is still true: your resume needs to be readable by both the software and the human who sees it afterwards. Those two requirements point in the same direction, and optimising for one typically serves the other.
What Modern ATS Actually Does
Applicant tracking systems in 2026 primarily do three things:
Parse your resume into structured fields. Name, contact details, work history (employer, title, dates), education, skills. This is where formatting problems cause real damage — if the parser can’t identify where your work experience starts and ends, your profile gets corrupted or incomplete.
Store and surface candidates for recruiter review. The recruiter searches the database (“show me candidates with ‘Salesforce’ and ‘enterprise sales’ who applied to this role”), and your profile either surfaces or it doesn’t.
Score or rank candidates against a job description. This is more variable — some systems do it, some don’t, and the scoring is based on keyword presence and job-relevance signals rather than a binary pass/fail. The ranking helps recruiters triage large applicant pools; it doesn’t automatically reject anyone.
What ATS doesn’t do: make hiring decisions independently. A human recruiter still reviews the shortlist. The system is a filtering and sorting tool, not a gatekeeper with final authority.
The Formatting Rules That Actually Matter
Use a clean single-column layout. Multi-column layouts — skills on the left, experience on the right — are a common culprit for parsing errors. The ATS reads left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and columns often merge in unpredictable ways. A single-column document is parsed cleanly every time.
Avoid headers, footers, and text boxes. Content in headers and footers is frequently skipped by parsers entirely. Text boxes in Word documents are parsed as floating objects, not inline text, and often get dropped. Keep everything in the main body.
Use standard section headings. “Professional Experience” or “Work Experience” — not “My Journey” or “Where I’ve Made an Impact.” Parsers are trained on conventional patterns. Creative headings save nothing and cost you accurate parsing.
Save as .docx or PDF, not both. Many job applications ask for a specific format. If they don’t specify, a modern PDF from Word or Google Docs parses cleanly. Scanned PDFs (image-based rather than text-based) are unreadable by ATS — avoid these entirely.
Dates in a consistent, unambiguous format. “Jan 2022 – Mar 2024” or “01/2022 – 03/2024” both work. “Early 2022 to Spring 2024” does not. Month-year format is better than year-only because it allows for gap calculation, which parsers often flag.
Keywords: What You Should and Shouldn’t Do
The advice to “stuff your resume with keywords” is outdated and counterproductive. Here’s the more precise version:
Use the language of the job description. If the role says “project management” and you say “project oversight,” a keyword-matching system may not equate them. This isn’t about gaming the system — it’s about speaking the same language. If you have the skill, use the same terminology they use.
Include the tools, platforms, and methodologies they’ve named. Specific named tools (Salesforce, Jira, Figma, dbt, AWS) are high-signal keywords. They’re searchable, unambiguous, and validate competency in a specific area. If you have experience with these tools, they should be in your skills section and mentioned in context in your experience bullets.
Don’t hide keywords in white text or make the font invisible. This was a workaround years ago; modern systems flag it, and any human reviewer will find it. It’s a way to have your application rejected rather than passed.
Don’t pad. Adding every keyword from the job description regardless of whether you actually have the skill is a bad strategy — it may help you clear a filter but it creates expectations the interview will expose. Only include what you can speak to.
Experience Section: The Bullets That Get You Shortlisted
Keyword matching gets you into the database. Bullet quality gets you onto the shortlist.
Every bullet should answer “so what?” “Managed social media accounts” has no information a recruiter can act on. “Grew organic Instagram following from 12k to 85k over 18 months by shifting to short-form video and weekly engagement analysis” has a specific result, a timeframe, and a method.
Lead with the outcome where possible. “Reduced customer onboarding time by 40% by restructuring the training sequence” is stronger than “Restructured training sequence, reducing customer onboarding time by 40%” — not because of magic, but because reviewers skim from the front and the outcome is the most differentiating part.
Quantify where you can, describe precisely where you can’t. Not every role produces neat metrics. “Led the migration of three legacy systems to a modern CRM over a 14-month period, coordinating with five internal teams” is specific and informative even without a percentage outcome.
Scope matters. “Managed a team” and “Managed a team of 12 across three regions with a £2M budget” are not the same signal. Context about the scale and complexity of your work changes the recruiter’s assessment entirely.
What Your Resume Should Look Like in Practice
Length: Two pages for anyone with more than 5 years of experience. One page is appropriate for recent graduates. Three pages is almost never justified for non-academic CVs.
Work history: Reverse chronological within each position is standard. Include company name, your title, and dates. Brief company descriptor if it’s not well-known: “Finlay & Associates (75-person boutique consultancy specialising in financial services clients)” — this helps the parser and the human reader.
Skills section: A concise list of tools, platforms, and hard skills. Not soft skills (“strong communicator”, “detail-oriented”) — these are universally claimed and mean nothing. A skills section should be scannable in 5 seconds and contain only things that are specific and verifiable.
Education: Degree, institution, year. If you graduated more than 7–8 years ago, education goes below your experience. If you graduated less than 3 years ago, it can lead. Don’t include secondary school unless you have no tertiary education.
The Test Before You Submit
Before submitting any application, run a quick self-check:
-
Copy the job description’s required skills and key phrases. Check that your resume contains each one explicitly, provided you actually have that experience.
-
Paste your resume text into a plain text editor (Notepad, TextEdit). If the formatting collapses in confusing ways, a parser will struggle. Everything important should still be readable without the formatting.
-
Read your experience bullets out loud. Anything that sounds vague, generic, or that you’d have trouble explaining in an interview needs to be either sharpened or removed.
FAQ
Do I really need to tailor my resume for every application? Not a complete rewrite, but targeted adjustment. The experience section stays mostly stable. What changes is the ordering and emphasis of skills, the specific tools you highlight in your skills section, and occasionally the language in your summary if you have one. A 15-minute tailoring pass on each application is realistic and meaningfully better than sending an identical document everywhere.
Should I include a summary/objective at the top? A summary can be useful if it’s specific. “Results-driven professional with a passion for excellence” wastes space. “Customer success manager with 8 years in SaaS, specialising in enterprise accounts over £500k ARR” tells a recruiter something real in ten seconds. Include it only if it adds information not visible from the rest of the document.
What about resume templates with graphic elements, progress bars for skills, and icons? Avoid them. Visual elements like skill bars (“Python ███████░░░ 7/10”) are meaningless to parsers and misleading to humans. They take up space that could contain actual information.
Does a one-page resume help or hurt my application? It depends on your experience level. For someone with 10 years of experience, a one-page resume suggests either that you’ve omitted important context or that you haven’t learned to articulate your work well. Two pages at that stage is not a negative.
Is it worth paying for an ATS checker tool? The basic self-checks above cover most of what paid tools offer. Tools that score “keyword match percentages” can be helpful for surfacing gaps in your language, but don’t optimise for the score itself — optimise for whether your resume accurately describes your fit for the role.
Next step for your job search
Pick one guide and keep momentum.
Jobiety Editorial Team
Our editorial team researches and tests every piece of career advice we publish. We draw on real hiring data, interviews with recruiters, and hands-on experience to give you guidance that works.
