How to Make an ATS-Friendly Resume
Most medium and large employers collect applications through an applicant tracking system (ATS) such as Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo or SuccessFactors. Before a recruiter sees your resume, the ATS turns it into plain text and stores it in a searchable database. An ATS-friendly resume is simply one that survives that conversion intact.
What an ATS actually does
An ATS does three things with your resume:
- Parses it. It extracts the text and tries to sort it into fields: name, contact details, job titles, employers, dates, education, skills.
- Stores it against your application and often in a talent pool for future roles.
- Makes it searchable. Recruiters filter and search candidates by job title, skills, location or keywords, and many systems show a match score against the job description.
It is a common myth that a robot reads and rejects most resumes on formatting alone. In practice, automatic rejections usually come from the application form's knockout questions. The real risk of poor formatting is quieter: if the parser scrambles your dates or misses your skills, you rank lower in searches and the recruiter sees a messy profile.
Formatting rules that matter
Use one reading column, or at most a narrow side column for short items.
Put your work history in tables, text boxes or multiple columns.
Use standard headings: Summary, Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications.
Use clever headings ("Where I've been", "My toolbox") or emoji instead of words.
Keep your name and contact details in the body of the page, near the top.
Put contact details only in a document header/footer or inside an image.
Write dates the same way everywhere: "Mar 2022 – Present".
Rely on skill bars, star ratings or charts. Parsers ignore them; only the words count.
Fonts matter less than people think as long as the text is real text. Any common font is fine.
PDF or Word?
Follow the job advert first. If it asks for .docx, send .docx. If it says PDF or says nothing, a text-based PDF is a good choice: it looks the same on every screen and modern systems parse it well. The PDF to avoid is one that contains a picture of your resume instead of text, such as a scan, a phone photo, or a design exported as an image. You can tell by trying to select a word in it.
The resume format guide covers file type, paper size and length in more detail.
Keywords without stuffing
Recruiters search for the words in their job description. To be found:
- Mirror the advert's exact wording for skills you really have ("Salesforce", "financial modelling", "IELTS teaching").
- Spell out acronyms once: "Search engine optimisation (SEO)".
- Use the job title from the advert as your professional title if it honestly describes you.
- Prove keywords in context. A skill listed under Skills and shown in an experience line ("Built monthly forecasts in Excel and Power BI") is stronger than a bare list.
Don't paste the job description in white text or copy whole paragraphs from it. Recruiters see the parsed text, and many systems flag it. It also puts claims on your resume you will be asked about in an interview.
How to test your resume for free
- The select test. Open your PDF and try to highlight a sentence. If you can't, it is an image and no ATS can read it.
- The paste test. Select all text (Ctrl/Cmd + A), copy, and paste it into a plain text editor. Read it top to bottom: is your name first, are dates next to the right jobs, is anything missing or jumbled?
- The keyword test. Pick the five most important skills in the advert and search your pasted text for each one.
Making an ATS PDF with MakeCV
MakeCV's preview step has two download buttons, and they are built for different readers:
| Download PDF | ATS PDF | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is made | The preview is rendered to an image and placed in an A4 PDF | Your browser prints the resume to PDF |
| Text selectable / parseable | No | Yes |
| Looks exactly like the preview | Yes | Yes, very close (keeps backgrounds and colours) |
| Use it for | Emailing a person, printing | Portals, job boards, any online application |
Steps: finish your resume → click ATS PDF → in the print dialog set the destination to Save as PDF (Chrome, Edge), PDF → Save as PDF (Safari on Mac) or Microsoft Print to PDF / Save to PDF (Firefox, Windows) → save. Then run the select test above.
For the template itself, Harvard, Classic and Compact, Student and Minimalist are single-column with standard headings and are the safest. Professional, Executive and Swiss are also reasonable. The others are designed mainly for human readers. See the full comparison of all 14 templates.
10-point ATS checklist
- Text-based file (PDF or .docx, as the advert asks).
- One reading column for experience and education.
- Standard section headings.
- Name, email, phone and city at the top of the page body.
- Job title, employer and dates on every role, in one consistent format.
- Skills written as words, matching the advert's wording.
- No text inside images, charts or icons.
- Acronyms spelled out once.
- File name with your name:
Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf. - Passed the select and paste tests.