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Resume guides

How to make an ATS-friendly resume

What applicant tracking systems actually struggle with, and the six formatting decisions that avoid it.

Applicant tracking systems are parsers, not judges. They fail on documents they cannot read, and they fail quietly — you never see the rejection.

The six decisions

  1. One column. Multi-column layouts get interleaved unpredictably during extraction.
  2. Standard section names: Summary, Experience, Education, Skills.
  3. Live text only. Text in images, icons or headers is invisible to most parsers.
  4. Consistent month/year dates so tenure can be calculated.
  5. Conventional fonts at 9.5pt or larger.
  6. A PDF with selectable text, unless Word is specifically requested.

What does not matter as much as people think

  • Keyword density. Relevance is judged on genuine coverage, not repetition.
  • Column widths, colours and typeface choices — inside reason.
  • Whether you use "CV" or "Resume" as the title.

What still matters more than formatting

Whether your experience answers the posting. An optimised layout around vague content still loses to specific evidence in a plain template.