10 ATS Resume Tips That Actually Get You Interviews

Over 90% of large companies use an Applicant Tracking System to screen resumes before a recruiter ever sees them. If your resume isn't ATS-friendly, it may be rejected automatically — no matter how qualified you are. These ten tips cover the changes that make the biggest difference, in order of impact.

1. Use a single-column layout

ATS parsers typically read a document left-to-right, top-to-bottom, across the full page width. A two- or three-column layout — common in visually striking templates — can interleave unrelated content from different columns into one scrambled block of text. Stick to a single column with a clear top-to-bottom flow: header, summary, experience, education, skills.

2. Use standard section headings

'Experience', 'Education', and 'Skills' are recognized instantly by parsing software because they match the patterns it was built to detect. Creative alternatives like 'My Journey' or 'What I Bring' may look distinctive to a human but are frequently missed entirely by automated section detection, meaning that content effectively becomes invisible to the system.

3. Avoid tables, text boxes, and graphics for key content

Tables and text boxes are often extracted out of order, or skipped completely, by ATS parsers. If your work history dates, job titles, or skills live inside a table cell, don't assume they'll be read correctly — or at all. The same applies to information rendered as an image, icon, or infographic-style skill bar.

4. Keep contact information in the main body

Headers and footers are commonly excluded from the text an ATS actually indexes. Put your name, email, phone number, and LinkedIn URL in the main body of the first page, not in a header/footer region, so they're reliably captured.

5. Mirror the job description's language

If a posting says 'stakeholder management,' use that exact phrase rather than a synonym like 'client coordination' — keyword matching still drives most ATS ranking, and exact-phrase matches score more reliably than paraphrases, even when the underlying skill is identical.

6. Keep multi-word technical terms whole

Skills like 'Project Management', 'CI/CD', or 'Machine Learning' should appear as complete phrases. Splitting or rewording them risks a parser — or a recruiter's keyword search — failing to recognize the match at all.

7. Quantify your achievements

'Reduced deployment time' is a claim; 'Reduced deployment time by 40%, saving 6 engineering hours per week' is evidence. Numbers, percentages, and dollar figures make your bullet points concrete and memorable to both software scoring and human readers.

8. Include all the sections an ATS expects

A professional summary, work experience, education, and skills section form the baseline most systems and recruiters look for. Depending on your field, add certifications, projects, or achievements — missing expected sections can cost you points even if the content elsewhere is strong.

9. Export to a real PDF or DOCX — never a scanned image

Always export from a text-based editor like Word or Google Docs. A scanned image of a resume, even saved as a PDF, contains no extractable text at all — an ATS (and this checker) will see it as entirely blank.

10. Test before you submit

The only way to be confident your resume survives the parsing stage is to test it the way an ATS would: extract the text, check the sections, measure keyword coverage against the job description, and flag formatting risks. Run your resume through our free checker to see exactly how an ATS reads it, with a scored breakdown and specific fixes for every weak area.