CV Advice

7 ATS CV Tips That Actually Work in 2026

Most CVs never reach a human recruiter. Here is how to make sure yours does.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are the bouncers of recruitment. Before a human ever reads your CV, software scans it for keywords, structure, and formatting. If your CV fails that scan, it is rejected automatically — often before a single human eye has seen it. Studies suggest that over 75% of CVs are rejected by ATS before reaching a recruiter.

The frustrating part: most of these rejections are preventable. The CV itself might be excellent, but the formatting or keyword choices are invisible to the system. Here are seven evidence-based tips to fix that.

01

Use standard section headings

ATS software is trained on standard vocabulary. If your section is called "Where I Have Been" instead of "Work Experience", the system may fail to parse it. Stick to the classics: Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications, Professional Summary. These are the headings every major ATS recognises. Creative headings are fine for designers building portfolios — not for CVs going through automated filters.

02

Match keywords from the job description

This is the single most impactful thing you can do. ATS systems are configured by recruiters to filter for specific keywords — usually pulled directly from the job description. Read the job posting carefully. Note every skill, technology, qualification, and phrase that appears more than once. Make sure those exact words appear in your CV. Not synonyms — the actual words. If the JD says "stakeholder management", your CV should say "stakeholder management", not "stakeholder engagement" or "managing stakeholders".

03

Avoid tables and columns

Two-column CV layouts look clean in Word or PDF. They are disasters for ATS parsing. Most ATS software reads left to right, line by line. A two-column layout causes the text from the left and right columns to be jumbled together, creating nonsense like "Product Manager Python JavaScript 2019-2022 London AWS". The ATS cannot make sense of it. Use single-column layouts for all ATS-targeted applications. Tables have the same problem — avoid them entirely.

04

Use standard fonts

Exotic fonts can cause ATS parsing failures. Some systems extract text differently depending on the font encoding used. Safe choices: Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, Georgia, Helvetica. These are universally supported. Avoid decorative fonts, script fonts, or any font that is not installed by default on Windows and Mac. Font size should be 10–12pt for body text. Anything smaller may be ignored by some parsers.

05

Save as DOCX, not PDF — for most ATS

This feels counterintuitive. PDF looks better. But many ATS systems parse DOCX more reliably than PDF, especially older enterprise systems. PDF text extraction can fail completely on certain PDF versions, image-based PDFs, or PDFs with complex formatting. DOCX is parsed as structured XML, which ATS software can read consistently. Check whether the job application portal specifies a format. If it does not, DOCX is generally the safer bet for ATS compatibility. You can always keep a PDF version for emailing to humans.

06

Keep contact info in the body, not headers or footers

Many ATS systems do not extract text from Word headers and footers. If your name, phone number, and email are in the page header, the system may process your CV without knowing who you are. Put all contact information in the main body of the document, right at the top. Name, job title, email, phone, LinkedIn URL — all in the body, not in a Word header/footer element.

07

Spell out acronyms at least once

ATS systems search for exact strings. If the job description says "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)" and your CV only says "SEO", you may miss the match depending on how the system is configured. Write the full term followed by the acronym in brackets on first use: "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)". After that, you can use the short form. This ensures you match both full-text and acronym searches. It also helps if the recruiter configured the system to search for the full phrase.

The faster way to fix this

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