How an ATS reads your resume

An applicant tracking system doesn't read your resume the way a person does. It pulls the plain text out of your file, tries to work out which part is a job title, a date, a skill or an employer, and stores the result as fields in a database. A recruiter then searches that database. Nobody rejects you: you simply don't come back in the search.

That is the whole game. Everything below follows from it.

What the machine actually stores

Open your resume, select everything, and paste it into a plain text editor. Whatever survives is roughly what the system keeps: no colours, no columns, no icons, no logos. Our ATS score shows you exactly this, under “What an ATS reads from your file”, including anything the parser had to drop.

Four things commonly go missing:

• Text in a page header or footer. Word repeats it on every page, so it looks safe. Most parsers read only the document body, so a phone number up there can disappear entirely.
• Text inside a text box, shape or table used for layout. It is a drawing object, not a paragraph, and plenty of parsers skip it.
• Anything inside an image. A designed header saved as a picture, or a scanned page, reads as nothing at all.
• Two columns. The text is read top to bottom in one stream, so a job title from the left column can end up joined to a skill from the right.

Why your score and a recruiter's search are different things

A score tells you whether the file can be read and whether it carries the words the job uses. The search is what decides whether a human ever sees you. A resume can be perfectly readable and still never appear, because it never uses the job's own words: the posting says Amazon Web Services, your resume says AWS, and a literal keyword search finds nothing.

So aim at two things, in this order: be readable, then be findable. Our job match tells you which of the job's keywords are missing, and which ones you wrote differently from the posting.

What a parser likes

• One column, top to bottom.
• Ordinary section headings: Summary, Skills, Experience, Education. “My journey” and “Toolkit” are charming and unparseable.
• Contact details in the first lines of the page itself.
• One date format everywhere. Jan 2022 - Mar 2023 parses reliably; mixing 2019-01, January '19 and Jan 2019 in one file makes systems miscount your total experience.
• Real bullet characters, and text you can select with the mouse.

Word or PDF?

Both work when the PDF was exported from a word processor and its text can be selected. Word (.docx) is the safer default because it parses consistently everywhere, and because it's the format we can reword inside without touching your design. Keep a .docx master, and send a PDF when the application asks for one.

What not to do

Don't paste the job description into your resume in white text, or at 1pt, or behind an image. It doesn't raise a score built on rules, it is increasingly detected, and a recruiter who finds it treats it as cheating. We wrote up what we measured in invisible text in resumes.

Check your own resume against everything on this page: the ATS score is free and instant, and a job match shows which of a job's keywords you already have. 3 free uploads a day, no sign-up.