How do you make a CV ATS-friendly?

An ATS, or Applicant Tracking System, is the software a company uses to receive and manage applications. It takes your CV, extracts the text, tries to file it into fields — name, experience, skills, education — and then lets the recruiter filter candidates.

Contrary to a widespread belief, most ATS do not reject a candidate on their own. They rank and filter. The real risk is not being turned down by a machine, but never appearing in the list the recruiter looks at.

Extraction follows the order of the file, not the visual order. A two-column CV looks clear to the eye, but the software may read it in zigzag, mixing a line from the left column with one from the right.

The software then looks for landmarks: section headings it recognises, dates, company names. The more conventional your structure, the more faithful the extraction. Original layouts are paid for here.

• A CV exported as an image. A PDF that contains only a picture offers no text to extract. This is the most serious case, and the most common after exporting from a design tool.
• Details placed in the header or footer. Many extractors ignore them. A phone number put there may never be read.
• Tables and text boxes. They shift the reading order unpredictably.
• Invented headings. "My journey" instead of "Work experience" forces the software to guess.
• Icons instead of words. An envelope does not replace the word "email" for a machine.

A single column, explicit section headings, dates in the same format throughout, and a PDF containing real text. It is unspectacular, and it is exactly what works.

For each role: the title, the company, the dates, then a few lines of concrete results. Responsibilities describe a job, results describe a person — and it is the second kind that holds attention once the filter is passed.

An ATS matches the wording of the posting against the wording of the CV. If the advert says "requirements gathering" and your CV says "functional analysis", the match can fail even though you can do the thing.

The rule fits in one sentence: use the words of the posting for the skills you genuinely have. Piling up keywords with nothing behind them turns against you at the first interview.

Passing the filter and convincing someone are two different exercises. A CV that a machine reads perfectly can still be empty to a human. ATS optimisation is an entry condition, not an argument. Once the CV is readable, the work is about content: results, figures, and a clear link to the role.

A first check needs no tool: copy the text of your PDF and paste it into an empty editor. If the order is incomprehensible, or if nothing pastes at all, an ATS sees the same thing.

To go further, Flemmy compares your CV with a specific posting and scores five criteria: ATS readability, match with the posting, keywords, experience and relevance, content quality. The result tells you what is missing, not just a number.

Test my CV for freeThen tailor it to the posting

• Test your CV against a posting — the score and its breakdown.
• Tailor your CV to a posting — the logical next step.
• CV templates by occupation — structures already readable by an ATS.
• The AI job search assistant — everything Flemmy does.