How to make an ATS-friendly resume

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software companies use to collect applications. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, SuccessFactors and Naukri RMS are common ones. When you apply, the ATS reads your resume and fills fields like name, email, job titles, dates, education and skills. Recruiters then search and filter those fields, and many systems rank applicants against the job.

Most of the time, an ATS does not reject resumes on its own. Rejections usually come from knockout questions on the application form (location, notice period, years of experience) or from a recruiter who never finds you in a search. So the goal has two parts: a resume the ATS reads correctly, and one that matches the words a recruiter searches for.

• Use one column. Many parsers read straight across the page, so two columns can come out as lines from both sides mixed together.
• Use standard headings: Education, Experience, Projects, Skills. Clever names like "My Journey" may not be recognised as a section.
• Keep contact details in the main body, not in the page header or footer, which some systems skip.
• Avoid text in images, icons and text boxes. A phone icon with no number written next to it reads as nothing, or as a stray character.
• Avoid tables for important content. A simple education table usually parses fine; a full layout built from tables often does not.

Modern ATS software reads PDFs well, as long as the text is real text. Check by opening your PDF and trying to select a line. If you cannot, it was scanned or exported as an image, and the ATS will see an empty page. Export again from Word, Google Docs or LaTeX. Send a Word file only when the job post asks for one.

Recruiters search the ATS for skills and job titles. Read the job description and make sure the must-have skills it lists appear in your resume, in the same words, wherever they are true for you. If the post says "PostgreSQL", write PostgreSQL, not just "SQL databases".

• Write both forms of common acronyms once: "Machine Learning (ML)".
• Put skills in the bullets where you used them, not only in a skills list.
• Never paste the job description in white text or stuff keywords. Recruiters read the result, and it costs you more than it gains.

Tailoring every application by hand is slow. Shortlist does it in one click: paste the job description and review each suggested change before you accept it. Any change that adds something it can't find in your resume or profile is flagged and left unchecked for you to decide.

• One date format throughout ("Jun 2024 to Present"), so the ATS can work out your experience.
• Standard fonts, and no letter-spaced names like "A A R A V".
• Write links in full or in short form (linkedin.com/in/aarav), not only as an icon.
• Plain bullets, not emoji or custom symbols.

• "ATS software can't read PDFs." It could not, a long time ago. Text-based PDFs are fine today.
• "75% of resumes are rejected by the ATS." This figure has no real source. Most filtering is done by people and by the questions on the application form.
• "You need a perfect ATS score." There is no universal score; every company sets up its system differently. A checker tells you what to fix, not whether you will be hired.

The free ATS resume checker reads your PDF the way a parser does and shows what comes through, what breaks and how to fix it. No signup needed. If you are starting fresh, every Shortlist template marked ATS-friendly follows these rules.