How to Make an ATS-Friendly CV

The four failures that actually matter

In practice, parsing goes wrong in a small number of specific ways:

• Multiple columns. A parser reads left to right across the page. With two columns it can interleave your job title from the left with a skill from the right, producing nonsense. This is the single most common cause of a badly parsed CV.
• Content in headers and footers. Many parsers discard these regions. Contact details in a header is the classic version of this mistake, and it means a recruiter cannot contact you.
• Text inside images, text boxes or graphics. A skills chart, a logo containing your name, a profile rendered as a graphic — all invisible to the parser and to a screen reader.
• Tables used for layout. Some parsers handle them, some flatten them into unreadable sequences. There is no way to know which system will receive your file.

Myths worth ignoring

• "You must use Arial or Times New Roman." Any embedded, standard font parses fine. What matters is that the PDF contains real text, not that the typeface is from 1995.
• "Never use a PDF." PDFs have parsed correctly for well over a decade. Send a PDF unless the application explicitly asks for a Word document.
• "Keyword stuffing in white text works." It is detected, and it is treated as deception when a human opens the file. Which they will.
• "You get scored out of 100 and rejected below a threshold." Some systems produce a match score for the recruiter. It is a sorting aid, not an automatic gate.
• "Never use bullet points." Standard bullet characters parse fine. Unusual glyphs and emoji sometimes do not.

What to do instead

1. Use a single column for the whole document.
2. Put your contact details in the body of the page, at the top, not in a header.
3. Use conventional section headings: "Work Experience", "Education", "Skills". A parser looks for these exact kinds of words. "Where I have been" is charming and unparseable.
4. Write dates in a consistent, unambiguous format — "March 2022 – Present" throughout, not a mix of formats.
5. Keep the job title, employer and dates on separate, clearly structured lines rather than run together in a sentence.
6. Export as a PDF with embedded fonts and selectable text. Open it afterwards and try to select the text with your cursor: if you cannot, neither can the parser.
7. Include the exact terms the advert uses, where they are true of you. If it says "stakeholder management", use that phrase rather than a synonym.

The selectable-text test

This takes ten seconds and catches most serious problems. Open your exported PDF, select all, and copy. Paste into a plain text editor.

If your name, phone number, job titles and dates all appear in a sensible order, your CV will parse. If the text comes out interleaved, in the wrong order, or missing entirely, you have found the problem before an employer did.

When a designed CV is fine

Not every application goes through a tracking system. Small companies, direct applications to a named hiring manager, referrals, agencies that work from email, and most creative roles never involve one.

Keeping two versions is a reasonable strategy: a strict single-column version for portals, and a designed version for direct applications. What is not reasonable is using a two-column design for a large employer's portal and hoping.