ATS-friendly resume: the formatting rules that matter

Most advice about ATS-friendly resumes is a pile of rules with no reasons attached, and a good share of them are folklore. This guide gives you the rules that have a reason behind them, explains each reason, and separates them from the myths, so you can fix a resume once and stop worrying about it.

By the end you will know what to change in a resume built in a design tool, a word processor or an online builder, how to test the result in two minutes, and which popular rules you can ignore. If you want the background on what the software does first, read what is an ATS.

What ATS-friendly actually means

Nothing certifies a resume as ATS-friendly, and there is no single product to be friendly to. Employers use many different systems and set them up differently. The phrase is shorthand for four things being true of your file.

1. 1

   It opens

   A normal PDF or Word file with real text, in a type the form accepts.
2. 2

   It reads in order

   Copied or extracted, the text runs top to bottom the way you wrote it.
3. 3

   It sorts into fields

   Name, contact details, jobs, dates, education and skills land where a parser expects them.
4. 4

   It is easy to find

   The words a recruiter would search for are on the page, in true statements about your work.

The first three are what this guide covers. The fourth is about content, and how to find the keywords in a job description covers it. You need both. A perfectly formatted file with nothing relevant in it goes nowhere, and a strong resume locked in a broken file may never be found.

Everything below also helps the human reader. A single-column page with plain headings is easier to scan for a tired person at the end of a long day, which is a good reason to follow the rules even if you are unsure what any given system does.

Real text, and the PDF or Word question

Real text, not a picture of text

The most damaging problem is also the simplest. If your resume is an image, software sees no words. It happens more often than you would expect: a PDF made by photographing or scanning a printout, a file saved from a design tool as a picture, or a template whose page is a flat background with text laid on top in a way that exports as pixels.

The test takes ten seconds. Open your PDF and try to drag-select a line of text with your cursor. Then use the find command (Ctrl+F on Windows, Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for the name of your last employer. If the line will not select, or the search finds nothing, the file has no real text. Rebuild the resume in a word processor and export it again.

PDF or Word?

Sources disagree on this, and there is no universal answer, so be wary of anyone who gives one. What can be said is below.

Two rules cover nearly every case. Do what the application says. And whichever type you choose, run the paste test on the exact file you upload. Use the program's own export or save-as-PDF option rather than a screenshot, and check the result.

One more detail belongs here: the file name. A recruiter's download folder may hold dozens of files called resume.pdf. Use a name a person can place at a glance, such as Dana-Okafor-Resume.pdf, and skip suffixes like final or v7.

One column, and what to do about sidebars

Software that reads a PDF gets text as a sequence. In a single column the sequence is the order you wrote it. In two columns the sequence depends on how the file was built. Some systems read the left column and then the right. Some read across the page line by line, which interleaves a sidebar's skills with the middle of a job description. To your eyes the page looks identical in all three cases.

Many well-made two-column files extract correctly, and some systems handle them well. Others do not. A resume sent through a form is read by whichever system the employer chose, which you cannot see. If you send your resume directly to a person, a two-column PDF is fine. If you upload it to a portal, one column removes a variable.

If you want to keep a sidebar anyway, give it a narrow, forgiving job.

• Put only short items there: contact details, a skills list, languages.
• Keep job titles, employers and dates in the main column, because those are the fields that matter most.
• Run the paste test, and read the result line by line.

Tables used for layout fall under the same advice. A date range pushed to the right edge with a tab is a normal pattern and reads as part of the same line. If a template builds the same look with an invisible table, check that the text still comes out in order.

Contact details and the header

Word processors have a header area at the top of every page. Putting your name and phone number there looks tidy, and some systems skip header and footer areas altogether. Details placed there can come out missing, so a record may have no name or email in it. Put your name and contact details in the main body, at the top of the first page.

Header

Header

Maya Torres

Summary

Skills

Experience

Education

• 1Your name as the first line of the body, in plain text, a little larger than the rest.
• 2Phone, email and city on the next line, separated by commas or a vertical bar.
• 3Any profile or portfolio link written out as text, so it is readable on paper and in a parsed record.

A few small habits make this block work harder.

• Use the name you will use in interviews, spelled the same way on every application and in your email address.
• Use an email address that is yours and sounds professional, and a phone number you answer.
• A city and state or region is enough. Whether to give a street address is a privacy choice, and many people leave it out.
• Write link addresses out as text. A linked word such as Portfolio hides the address in a tag that printouts and some systems lose.

Headings, dates and job entries

Standard headings

Many parsers look for common section names, because the name helps decide what the text below it is. A heading they do not recognize can leave a block of jobs unlabelled.

Personality belongs in the wording under the heading. If you want a warmer label, choose one that still contains the standard word, such as Professional experience or Teaching experience.

A steady pattern for each job

For every job, use the same order every time: title, employer, place, dates. Which of title and employer comes first matters less than doing it identically in each entry. Dates are where resumes drift most, and an approximate date is a field the software cannot place on a timeline.

Date formats vary in how safely they read.

Pick one format and use it throughout. Consistency matters more than which one you choose.

Bullets, characters and fonts

Ordinary round bullets or hyphens from your word processor's own list tool are fine. Decorative symbols used as bullets, such as arrows or stars, are the risk, because some extract as boxes or stray characters. Bold and italics are ordinary formatting and read as normal text. Long strings in capital letters are harder for people to read, which is a better reason to avoid them than anything about software.

Special characters follow one rule: if a symbol turns into a box, a question mark or a letter you did not type in the paste test, replace it with plain text.

Fonts matter more for the human reader than for software. These four are safe, widely installed choices with different personalities.

Body text between 10 and 12 points is a common range, with the name and headings a little larger. Margins around half an inch to an inch are typical. Those are rules of thumb. More guidance, with specimens and size ranges, is in best font for a resume.

A PDF embeds its fonts, so your reader's computer does not need to have them, which is why the layout looks the same everywhere. The text still has to export as real characters. Some decorative and symbol fonts map letters to unusual character codes, which can come out as gibberish when the text is extracted. That is rare with ordinary fonts, and it is one more reason to run the test.

Accents, symbols and other languages

Names and words with accents, such as José, Müller or Łukasz, are ordinary text and normally survive export. If one turns into a box or a different letter in the paste test, the font is the likely cause, so switch fonts and test again. If you keep resumes in more than one language, run the test on each version. SnugCV can produce resumes in Spanish, German, French, Polish and Serbian, which how to make a resume in Spanish, German, French, Polish or Serbian covers.

Graphics, icons, photos and skill bars

Software reads text. Anything meaningful that lives only in a shape, an image or a color is invisible to it. People who read the file often find these elements unhelpful as well. A skill bar claims a precision that nobody can check.

Whether a photo belongs on a resume depends on where you are applying. Conventions differ by country and by industry, so see CV vs resume for how regional norms differ.

The words: easy to find without stuffing

Clean formatting makes the text readable. The words in it decide whether a search, or a person skimming, recognizes you. A few habits do most of the work.

• Keep your real job title, and use the posting's term in the first bullet where it describes what you did. A title of Guest Experience Lead stays that way, and a bullet can say you supervised the front desk team.
• Write an abbreviation and its long form together once, as in Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) or search engine optimization (SEO), so a search for either finds you.
• Put each term where it is true and in context. A skills line is a fine place to list tools. A bullet is the best place to show one in use, because it carries proof with it.

A block of fifty terms at the bottom of the page, or a list that repeats one word, helps nobody. A person sees padding, and a search gains nothing it did not already have. Resume keywords: examples by field shows what a natural set looks like for different kinds of work.

A worked makeover

Here is a made-up resume for a warehouse supervisor, Dana Okafor, built in a design tool because the template looked good. Eight things were wrong with it, and none of them was a problem with the work history.

The rebuilt top of the first page looks like this.

After: the top of the rebuilt resume (made up)

Dana Okafor

Warehouse supervisor. Reno, NV | 555-0148 | dana.okafor@example.com

Summary

Second-shift supervisor with eight years in receiving, picking and outbound loading. Forklift certified. Experienced in weekly inventory counts and in training new hires on safety procedures.

Work experience

Shift Supervisor, Highline Distribution, Reno, NV. March 2018 to present

• Led a team of 14 across receiving, picking and outbound loading on second shift
• Ran weekly cycle counts and resolved discrepancies with the inventory control team
• Trained new hires on lift equipment safety and scanner use

Certifications

Forklift operator certification (sit-down and reach truck)

Nothing about the content changed. A recruiter who opens it sees the same career, and a parser sees fields where it saw fragments.

Templates and design tools

Template sites and design tools make attractive resumes quickly. Some export a clean document, some turn each text box into its own block, and some export the whole page as a picture. You cannot judge which from the screen. Judge from the exported file with the paste test.

A workable rule: if a template relies on text boxes, columns, icons or an image for its look, test it twice. If it was made in a word processor from ordinary paragraphs and bullet lists, it is more likely to read cleanly. Check the exported file from any online resume builder, since the preview shows only how the page is drawn. The order objects were added to a page can differ from the order you see them in, and that is the order software may follow.

The same rules in different fields

The rules do not change by field. What differs is which details need to be plain text.

Rules you will read that are myths

Some rules circulate because they sound technical, and many are repeated with no reason attached.

Where credible guidance disagrees, as with PDF against Word and two columns against one, the sensible response is to reduce variables. Follow the application's instructions, choose the plainer layout and test.

Common mistakes and a final checklist

The two-minute test

1. Open the PDF. Try to select a line, then search for a distinctive word such as your last employer's name.
2. Select all, copy, and paste into a plain text window, such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit in plain text mode on a Mac.
3. Read it as a stranger. Check that the order is right, that your name and contact details are present, that each job keeps its title, employer and dates together, and that no odd characters appear.

The full ten-minute version, with an annotated example of what extracted text can look like when something goes wrong, is in how to check your resume for ATS problems in 10 minutes.

Or upload the PDF to the free ATS resume checker below. It runs the same kind of checks on the text inside your file and shows you what it read.

ATS resume checkerFree

Upload a PDF resume to see whether its text can be read cleanly, and optionally how many of a posting's terms it contains. One free run, no account.

Resume (PDF, up to 4 MB)

Choose a PDF or drop it here

Read in memory and discarded. It is not stored.

Job posting (optional, adds a keyword match)

0 of 15,000 characters

Use an example posting

Leave this field empty

Check my resume

A text check cannot see everything, and no tool can tell you how an employer's system will treat your file. If you add a posting, its text is sent to an AI service to be read and is not stored by SnugCV. The run is counted with a hashed IP address and a cookie.

ATS-friendly resume checklist

• The PDF has real, selectable text and the file name includes my name
• One column, or a narrow sidebar holding only short items, tested
• Name and contact details in the body of page one, links written out
• Standard section headings
• Every job in the same order, with month and year dates and Present for the current role
• Ordinary round bullets, no decorative symbols
• An ordinary font between 10 and 12 points for body text
• Skills, certifications and languages written as text, not shown as bars or badges
• The posting's terms used where they are true of my work
• Pasted into a plain text window and read top to bottom

0 of 10 done

Where SnugCV fits

SnugCV's two templates, Classic and Modern, are both single column with real, selectable text, and you can change the font and the order of sections in Settings. When you tailor a resume to a posting, the summary, skills order and bullets are rewritten in the posting's own words while employers, titles, dates and education are copied unchanged, and each change comes with a plain-language note. You can read how those settings work in how to choose your resume template, font and section order.

Run the paste test on any PDF you send, whichever tool made it.

Keep going

The next step is the habit of checking: how to check your resume for ATS problems in 10 minutes. For the words that go into a clean file, read resume keywords: examples by field, and for how the page should be laid out as a whole, resume formats: chronological, functional or combination.