How applicant tracking systems read your resume
What an ATS actually does
An applicant tracking system turns your file into a database record: name, contact details, job titles, employers, dates, education and skills. Recruiters then search and filter those records by keyword, job title and years of experience.
Most ATS don’t reject resumes on their own. Knockout questions on the application form do that. The bigger risk is quieter: a resume that parses badly or misses the words a recruiter searches for simply never shows up in their results.
Formatting that breaks parsing
These are the patterns most likely to scramble or hide your content:
- Tables and text boxes used for layout, which some parsers read out of order or skip
- Contact details placed in the page header or footer
- Icons or images standing in for words, such as a phone icon with no “Phone” label, or skill bars instead of skill names
- Creative section names like “Where I’ve been” instead of “Experience”
- Scanned PDFs with no selectable text
Keywords, without stuffing
Use the exact wording from the job post wherever it’s true of you. If the post says “stakeholder management”, “worked with stakeholders” may not match. List core skills in a skills section and show them in context in your bullets, where they carry more weight with the person reading.
Don’t hide keywords in white text. Parsers pull it out as plain text, and the recruiter sees it in their system.
A 60-second self-check
Open your PDF, select all, and paste it into a plain text editor. If the sections come out in the wrong order, the dates drift away from their jobs, or text is missing, an ATS will struggle with it too. NovaCV’s templates are built to pass this test: real selectable text in a standard reading order.