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What is an ATS, and how do you make an ATS-friendly CV?

By CVTidy · Updated 1 November 2026 · 6 min read

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software employers use to collect applications. When you upload your CV, the ATS turns it into plain text, files your details into fields such as name, job titles and skills, and lets recruiters search and filter candidates. If the software can’t read your CV properly, a recruiter may never see your experience.

How an ATS reads your CV

Most systems read a document from top to bottom and left to right, the way a simple text reader would. They then look for familiar section headings and for the words a recruiter searches for, usually the skills and job titles in the job ad.

That works well for a clean, one-column CV. It goes wrong when the layout puts text in places the software doesn’t expect.

Formatting that causes problems

• Two or three columns. Lines from different columns can be merged, so your job titles end up mixed with your skills.
• Tables and text boxes. Some systems skip their contents entirely.
• Headers and footers. Contact details placed there are sometimes ignored.
• Icons, logos, photos and skill bars. Software can’t read a five-star rating or a phone icon.
• Images of text. A scanned CV, or a design exported as a picture, contains no readable text at all.
• Unusual headings. “My journey” instead of “Work Experience” makes it harder for the system to file your history.

A checklist for an ATS-friendly CV

1. One column from top to bottom.
2. Standard headings: Professional Summary, Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications.
3. Contact details in the main body of the page.
4. A common font, with real bullet points rather than symbols or images.
5. Dates written the same way throughout, for example “Jan 2023 – Present”.
6. The skills and job titles from the job ad, written the same way, where they are true for you.
7. A PDF or Word file that contains real, selectable text.

Keywords: use them honestly

Recruiters often search the ATS for specific skills, so it helps to use the same words as the job ad. If the ad says “stakeholder management” and you have done it, say “stakeholder management” rather than “working with different teams”. Don’t paste in keywords you can’t back up: a person reads your CV after the software does, and an interview will expose anything you can’t talk about.

Is there a perfect “ATS score”?

No public tool can reproduce exactly how each employer’s ATS ranks candidates, because every system and every recruiter’s search is different. What you can control is that your CV is readable and that it clearly shows the skills the job asks for. That covers most of the problem.

Check your own CV

Upload your current CV to the free ATS Check. It shows the plain text a simple parser extracts, and flags missing headings, missing contact details and signs of a scrambled layout. If the text comes out jumbled, rebuild your CV in the CV builder, which always produces a single-column, ATS-friendly file.

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