How to Make Your Resume ATS-Friendly (Checklist)

Once you understand what an ATS actually does, making your resume compatible with it comes down to a fairly short, practical checklist. Here's exactly what to check.

Formatting Checklist

✔ Use a single-column layout. Multi-column resumes, especially ones with a sidebar for skills or contact details, are the most common cause of ATS parsing errors — the system can read across columns instead of down them, scrambling the order of your information.

✔ Avoid tables for layout. Tables used to structure your resume (rather than to display genuinely tabular data) can cause content to be merged, dropped, or reordered depending on how the specific ATS reads cell boundaries.

✔ Skip text boxes and headers/footers for important content. Contact details or section content placed inside a header, footer, or floating text box are sometimes skipped entirely by parsing software — keep this information in the main body of the document.

✔ Use standard, recognisable section headings. "Work Experience," "Education," "Skills," and "Professional Summary" are widely recognised. Creative alternatives look nice to a human reader but risk not being categorised correctly by an ATS.

✔ Choose a standard, readable font. Common fonts like Arial, Calibri, or Georgia parse reliably. Highly decorative or unusual fonts can sometimes cause character recognition issues.

✔ Avoid embedding text inside images or icons. If your contact details, a skills summary, or any other content is part of an image (rather than actual text), an ATS generally can't read it at all.

✔ Use standard bullet points. Simple round or square bullets parse reliably; unusual custom bullet characters occasionally cause display or parsing quirks in some systems.

Content Checklist

✔ Match the terminology of the job ad where accurate. If the role calls for "customer relationship management" and that's genuinely what you've done, use that phrase rather than a close synonym — see our guide on finding the right resume keywords.

✔ Spell out acronyms at least once. If you use an industry acronym, include the full term at least once as well, since an ATS search might use either version.

✔ Include both hard and soft skills where genuinely relevant, but avoid an unfocused, overlong skills list — a wall of generic keywords reads as padding rather than genuine expertise.

✔ Keep contact details in the main body, not in a header or footer, so they're reliably captured.

File Format

A well-formatted PDF is generally the safest default for modern ATS platforms and has the advantage of preserving your layout exactly, regardless of the device or software used to open it. If a specific job ad requests a Word document (.docx), follow that instruction — some organisations, particularly government agencies, still prefer or require it.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Over-optimising to the point of reading badly. Repeating keywords unnaturally or stuffing your resume with terms that don't reflect your actual experience is usually easy for a human reader to spot, and can work against you once a person reviews the shortlist.

Assuming ATS-friendly means boring. You can still have a clean, well-designed resume with thoughtful use of colour, spacing, and typography — ATS-friendly formatting is about layout structure, not visual style.

Forgetting to proofread after formatting changes. If you've copied content between templates or tools, check that spacing, bullet points, and headings are all still consistent — inconsistent formatting can itself cause parsing issues.

Getting Started

Every template in our AI resume builder follows ATS-safe formatting by default — clean single-column layouts, standard headings, and no embedded images or tables — so you can focus on the content itself. See our full explainer on what an ATS is and how it works for the reasoning behind each of these rules.