How to write an ATS-friendly CV

An applicant tracking system, usually shortened to ATS, is the software a company uses to collect and sort job applications. When you apply through a careers page, your CV almost always lands in one of these systems first. A recruiter then searches and filters inside it. If your CV is formatted in a way the software cannot read, your experience may never be shown to the person deciding who gets an interview.

This does not mean a robot rejects you. That myth is common and mostly wrong. What actually happens is quieter: your CV gets parsed into fields, some fields come out empty or garbled, and you rank lower in the recruiter search results. Fixing the formatting is genuinely low effort and removes a failure mode you cannot see.

What breaks parsing

• Text inside images. Anything saved as a picture, including a CV exported as one big image, is invisible to the parser.
• Multi-column layouts. Two-column CVs often get read left to right across both columns, which scrambles your sentences.
• Text boxes and shapes. Many templates put contact details in a floating box, which is frequently skipped entirely.
• Headers and footers. Some parsers ignore them, so a phone number placed there can disappear.
• Tables used for layout. Simple tables are usually fine, nested ones often are not.
• Unusual section names. A parser looks for "Experience" and "Education". Creative labels like "My Journey" may not map to anything.

A format that reliably survives

• A single column, top to bottom.
• Your name and contact details as normal text in the body, not in the header area.
• Standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills.
• A common font at 10pt or larger.
• Dates in a consistent format, such as Jan 2024 to Mar 2026.
• Submitted as a PDF generated from a text document, not a scan or an export to image.

About keywords

Recruiters search these systems using terms from the job description. If a posting asks for "financial modelling" and your CV only says "built forecasts", you will not appear in that search. So the useful move is to describe your real work using the vocabulary of the posting you are applying to.

The line to be careful about is honesty. Adding a skill you do not have, or pasting the job description in white text at the bottom of the page, is a well-known trick and recruiters do check for it. It reads as dishonest and costs you the role. Match the wording of things you genuinely did. Do not invent things you did not.

A quick self-check

Open your CV, select all the text, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. What you see is roughly what the parser sees. If your job titles are jumbled, your contact details are missing, or whole sections vanished, that is the problem to fix. It is the fastest test available and it takes about thirty seconds.