When you apply through a company’s careers page or a job portal, your resume usually lands in an applicant tracking system (ATS) such as Workday, Greenhouse, SAP SuccessFactors, Teamtailor or Personio before a person sees it. There is a lot of fear around these systems, and a lot of nonsense. They are not robots that secretly reject 75% of applicants. But they can make your resume look bad, or hard to find, if it is built the wrong way.
What an ATS actually does
Two things matter.
First, it parses your file. It pulls out your name, contact details, job titles, employers, dates, education and skills and puts them into fields in its database. If parsing goes wrong, the recruiter sees a profile with your phone number in the “City” field and half your experience missing. That’s the real danger.
Second, recruiters search and filter. They type “SAP” or “forklift” or “German C1” into the system, or let it rank applicants against the job description. If your resume doesn’t contain the words they search for, you don’t show up, even if you’re qualified.
Some systems do auto-reject on knockout questions (work permit, required licence, minimum years), but those are the questions on the application form, not your resume layout.
One more thing to ignore: the “ATS score out of 100” that some free checkers show. No real ATS gives your resume a single 0–100 score that decides your fate. Those numbers are usually keyword-overlap estimates. Useful as a hint, nothing more.
Formatting that breaks parsing
Most problems come from design choices that look nice to humans and confuse software.
- Text inside images. If your name or skills are part of a graphic, the ATS sees nothing.
- Scanned PDFs or “print to image” exports. Same issue: no real text.
- Important information in the page header or footer. Some parsers skip these areas entirely, so keep your contact details in the main body.
- Skill bars and star ratings as the only indication of level. The system reads “Excel” and ignores the five little circles.
- Icons instead of words (a phone icon with no “Phone” label is usually fine; an icon instead of the section heading is not).
- Creative section names. “My story” or “Where I’ve been” instead of “Experience”. Stick to the standard headings: Profile, Work experience, Education, Skills, Languages, Certifications.
- Unusual date formats. “Spring ’22” is ambiguous. Use “03/2022” or “Mar 2022”.
What about two-column layouts? Older advice says to avoid them completely. In our experience a clean two-column PDF with real text is read fine by the major systems today. The risk is complex tables and text boxes layered on top of each other, which is how many Word and Canva templates are built. If you are unsure, a single-column template is the safest choice.
PDF or Word?
A text-based PDF is the best choice for almost every application. It keeps your layout intact and every mainstream ATS reads it. Send a .docx only when the advert asks for it (some agencies and older public-sector systems do). To check your PDF is text-based, open it and try to select and copy a sentence. If you can, the ATS can too.
Keywords without stuffing
Open the job advert and highlight the hard requirements: tools, certifications, methods, languages, job titles. (Our list of skills to put on a resume shows the typical ones for 12 common jobs.) Then make sure each one you genuinely have appears in your resume, using the same wording.
Wording matters more than people expect. If the advert says “accounts payable” and you wrote “supplier invoices”, a recruiter’s search may not find you. If it says “Microsoft Dynamics 365”, write that, not “Dynamics”. For acronyms, use both forms once: “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)”.
Put keywords where they make sense, ideally in your work experience bullets, because many systems weigh skills that appear alongside a job more than a bare list. “Processed 1,200 supplier invoices a month in SAP S/4HANA” does more work than “SAP” on its own in a skills box.
Don’t hide keywords in white text or paste the whole job description at the bottom. It’s an old trick, modern systems flag it, and if a recruiter notices, you’re out.
Job titles matter
Recruiters often search by title. If your company called you “Customer Happiness Hero” and the industry calls it “Customer Service Representative”, you can write “Customer Service Representative (Customer Happiness Hero)” so both humans and software understand. The same goes for the target title under your name: match the advert.
A quick ATS checklist
Before you submit, run through these:
- Can you select and copy all the text in your PDF?
- Are your name, email and phone in the body of the page, not only the header?
- Do sections use standard headings?
- Does every job have a title, employer, and start and end dates in a consistent format?
- Do the main requirements from the advert appear in your resume, in the same words?
- Is the file name sensible? “Maria_Ionescu_CV.pdf”, not “final_v3_NEW.pdf”.
If the portal lets you preview the parsed profile after uploading, look at it. Fix any field that came through wrong. It takes two minutes and many people never bother.
Write for the human too
Getting through the system only gets you in front of a recruiter, who then gives your resume a quick first scan. A resume stuffed with keywords and no real achievements won’t survive that. The goal is a resume that is easy to read for both: a clear reverse-chronological structure, standard headings, specific results with numbers.
All of our templates produce text-based PDFs with standard section names and contact details in the body of the page. If you show skill levels as bars or dots, make sure the skill names themselves match the advert, because the level graphic is for human readers only. If you want a starting point with the right keywords for your field, the resume examples are a good place to begin.
