Why the ATS filters your resume, and what to change

An applicant tracking system is not an artificial intelligence sitting in judgement on your career. It is a database. It reads your file into text, tries to work out which part is a job title and which is a date, and hands a recruiter a searchable list. Most rejections at this stage are the database failing to read the file, not a person deciding against you.

Which is good news, because that part is entirely fixable.

What gets a resume filtered out

• Two column layouts. The text is read left to right across both columns and comes out interleaved and meaningless.
• Job titles or dates inside a header or footer, which many parsers never read.
• Text inside an image or a logo. It is invisible to the system.
• Tables used for layout, which scramble the order of everything inside them.
• Unusual section names. Call it Experience and Education, not Journey and Learnings.
• A file saved as an image PDF from a scan, which contains no text at all.

Check your resume

Keywords, without the nonsense

Keyword stuffing does not work and reads badly to the human who sees it next. What does work is using the same words the job description uses for the same things. If the posting says Accounts Receivable and your resume says AR throughout, a search for the full term will not find you.

Take the ten most specific terms from the posting, check which appear naturally in your resume, and add the ones you genuinely have experience of, in the bullet where you did that work.

Formatting that parses cleanly every time

1. One column, top to bottom.
2. Name and contact details in the body of the document, not in the header.
3. Standard section headings, in the order Experience, Education, Skills.
4. Dates in a consistent format, with the month and year.
5. A common font, 10 to 12 point.
6. Export as PDF from a word processor, never as a scan or a photograph.

Common questions

Is PDF or Word better for an ATS?

PDF, as long as it was exported rather than scanned. Every current system reads PDF text. Word files can shift layout between versions, which is its own risk.

How long should a resume be?

Two pages is normal in the United States for anyone past their first few years. One page is a convention, not a rule, and cutting a real achievement to obey it is a poor trade.

Does the file name matter?

It matters to the human. Firstname-Lastname-Role.pdf is easy to find in a folder of two hundred files called resume.pdf.