The seven rules that decide whether an applicant tracking system can read your CV at all. With ATS-by-ATS behaviour, real before-and-after examples, and a free checker.
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97.8 percent of Fortune 500 companies use an applicant tracking system, according to the Jobscan 2025 ATS Usage Report. About 39 percent of them use Workday specifically, which acquired HiredScore in 2024 to layer AI-driven candidate grading on top of its parser.
The practical effect is this: the ATS does not read your CV. It parses it into a structured record (name, email, phone, list of past roles, list of skills, education entries, dates), and then a recruiter or an AI ranker searches that record. If your CV is formatted in a way the parser cannot read, your record is incomplete. You may exist in the system as a name with no experience and no skills, and a keyword search will skip you entirely.
The fix is not to add hidden keywords. It is to write a CV the parser can read, so the recruiter sees the actual you. That is what these seven rules do.
For the live tool that scores your CV against this exact rubric, see our free ATS resume checker.
Every rule below is a specific formatting decision that decides whether the parser reads your CV or scrambles it. Apply them and your score jumps before you change a word of content.
Workday, Taleo and the older enterprise parsers read top to bottom in one stream. A right column with dates or contact info gets pushed to the bottom of the parsed record or dropped entirely. Greenhouse and Lever handle two-column layouts around 80 percent of the time, but the other 20 percent scrambles the parse.
Parsers rely on familiar labels to know one section has ended and another has begun. Rename "Experience" to "My Journey" and iCIMS treats it as a biography block, ignoring every job title inside.
Bad
My Career Story
Good
Experience
Most ATS parsers skip the header and footer regions of a Word or PDF document. If your name, email and phone live in the document header, they are functionally invisible.
Profile photos, icon-prefixed contact lines and skill bars do not parse. They also trigger anti-bias filters under EEOC and the UK Equality Act in many enterprise pipelines. Replace each one with words.
Bad
Python ▮▮▮▮▯ (skill bar graphic)
Good
Python (Working knowledge, 4 years commercial)
Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, Cambria, Garamond. Decorative fonts can be rendered as glyph sequences in PDFs, which the parser reads as gibberish or skips entirely. The Jobshinobi 2026 parsing tests confirmed standard fonts parse most reliably across major systems.
A layout table containing your entire CV reads cell-by-cell as a flat run of fragments. Bullet lists parse cleanly because each bullet is a discrete paragraph in the document model.
Resumes with optimised keywords saw 35 percent higher callback rates in a 2025 LinkedIn analysis. Use the exact words the job posting uses for tools, methods and seniority. Avoid stuffing irrelevant terms into white space, modern parsers detect and penalise it.
Bad
Worked with cloud infrastructure tools
Good
AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda), Terraform, Datadog
The same CV can score very differently across systems. Aim for the strictest in the list and you pass them all.
| ATS | Share | Parser | Rule of thumb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workday | ~39% of Fortune 500 | Strict | Strict left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Single column or your CV will scramble. |
| Taleo | Legacy enterprise | Strict | The least forgiving major parser. Drop graphics, use DOCX, predictable dates. |
| iCIMS | Common enterprise | Mixed | Reasonable on standard layouts. Fails on creative section names. Use literal labels. |
| SmartRecruiters | Mid-market and global | Mixed | Strong on clean docs. Demote candidates without a dedicated Skills block near the top. |
| Greenhouse | Heavy in tech | Forgiving | Forgiving on layout, but still scrambles right columns roughly 1 in 5 attempts. |
| Lever | Heavy in tech | Forgiving | Similar to Greenhouse. Ranks rather than rejects, so a clean parse moves you up. |
| Ashby | Startups | Forgiving | Modern parser. Clean DOCX or PDF both work. Less penalty for design choices. |
Each mistake is fixable in minutes. Run your CV through the checker after each fix to see the score climb.
Beautiful templates often export PDFs where text is rendered as disconnected glyphs or as a flat image. The screen reads fine, the ATS sees gibberish or nothing.
Export from Word or Google Docs, or use a template you have verified by copy-pasting the PDF into Notepad. If the text does not paste back as words, the parser cannot read it. Then run it through our [free ATS checker](/hub/ats-resume-checker).
Many parsers ignore the Word or PDF header and footer regions entirely. Your contact info disappears before the recruiter sees it.
Put name, email, phone and city as plain text in the body, at the very top of page 1.
Visual ratings make sense to a designer but a parser cannot extract "intermediate" from a 60 percent filled bar. The skill effectively does not exist in the record.
Use a comma-separated skills list, optionally grouped by category. Add a proficiency word if you need one: Fluent, Native, Working knowledge.
Quarter notation (Q1 2024) or season ranges (Spring 2023) trip up date extractors. Some parsers treat them as missing and your work history loses years.
Stick to "Jan 2023 to Present" or "01/2023 to 12/2024". Predictable formats let the ATS calculate experience correctly.
Many parsers expect the company first, role second. Flipping the order can swap the two fields in the extracted record, leaving you with the title of "Acme Corp" at the company "Senior Engineer".
Match the order recruiters expect: Company Name, then Role Title underneath, then dates and location.
If "Python" only appears inside a bullet about a project, keyword search may miss it. ATS keyword search is often weighted by section, with the dedicated Skills block scored higher.
Maintain a Skills section near the top. List every tool, language and method you genuinely use, comma-separated. Include both spelled-out and acronym forms where relevant.
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