How to make your CV ATS-friendly

An ATS-friendly CV is one that parsing software can turn into an accurate candidate record, and that still reads well to the person who opens it. It comes down to layout, clear labels and honest wording.

Answers checked 11 November 2026 by the ATSJudo team at Wolfe Labs.

What makes a CV ATS-friendly?

An ATS-friendly CV uses one column, standard section headings, real text rather than images or text boxes, one date format, and a common file type such as .docx or a text-based PDF. It names your skills and tools in the same words the posting uses, wherever your experience genuinely supports them.

Which section headings should a CV use?

Use the headings parsers and recruiters expect: Summary, Experience or Work experience, Education and Skills, plus optional ones such as Certifications, Projects, Publications or Languages. Under Experience, give each job its title, employer, location and dates, followed by short bullet points that say what you did and what changed.

Put the job title and the employer on their own lines rather than in one long sentence, and keep the dates next to them. Parsers look for that pattern, and so do people skimming a pile of CVs.

How do you use keywords from the job description?

Read the posting and list the skills, tools, qualifications and duties it repeats. For each one you can honestly claim, use the posting's exact term at least once, ideally inside a bullet that shows where you used it. Spell out acronyms once, as in search engine optimisation (SEO). Leave out anything you cannot back up.

• Match the form of the term: if the posting says 'stakeholder management', that phrase is easier to find than 'managed stakeholders'.
• Put keywords in context. 'Built weekly revenue dashboards in Looker' is stronger than Looker in a list.
• Never hide keywords in white text or a tiny font. They show up in the parsed text a recruiter sees, and they read as an attempt to game the system.

Choosing which experience to lead with for each role is covered in how to tailor a CV to a job description.

Should you send a PDF or a Word file?

Follow the posting or the application form first. If it gives no preference, a .docx file or a PDF exported from a word processor are both widely accepted. The PDF must contain real text: if you cannot select the words with your cursor, it is an image, and the ATS may read nothing at all.

Name the file plainly, for example firstname-lastname-cv.pdf, so it is easy to find once it has been downloaded.

How can you test whether your CV is ATS-friendly?

Copy all the text from your file and paste it into a plain text editor. Check that the order makes sense, the dates sit next to the right jobs, and nothing is missing or merged. Then upload it to a form that fills in fields from your CV, and see what it gets wrong. Fix the layout, never the facts.

A short checklist before you send:

• Your name, email and phone number are in the body text, not the header.
• Every heading is a standard one.
• Every job has a title, an employer and dates in the same format.
• The posting's main requirements appear in your words where they are true for you.
• The paste test shows clean, ordered text.

How does ATSJudo help with an ATS-friendly CV?

ATSJudo builds each tailored CV in a single-column, ATS-ready structure with standard headings, and shows which of the posting's keywords your CV can back up and which it cannot. It never adds a missing skill to make the match look better. It marks it as missing, so you decide what to do about it.

If you are new to these systems, start with what an applicant tracking system is and how it reads a CV.

What else do people ask about ATS-friendly CVs?