Most medium and large employers, and nearly every job portal, put applications into an applicant tracking system (ATS) before a person reads them. The software turns your CV into text, files it under the job, and lets recruiters search and filter candidates by skills, job titles and experience. If it reads your CV wrongly, or your CV doesn't use the words recruiters search for, you can be a strong candidate and still never appear in their results. This guide shows the format that ATS software reads correctly, how to match the keywords in a job advert, and how to build an ATS-friendly CV for free.
The quick answer
- Use a single-column layout with real, selectable text.
- Use standard headings: Summary, Experience, Education, Skills.
- Put your name and contact details in the body of the page, not in the header or footer.
- Write each job as title, company, dates, then 3 to 6 bullet points that start with a verb and include numbers.
- Copy the advert's exact wording for skills and tools you really have.
- Send a PDF with selectable text or a Word file, whichever the advert asks for.
The free AI CV Builder does all of this for you: five of its six templates are single-column ATS layouts, and its ATS check scores your CV and lists exactly what to fix.
How an ATS reads your CV
An ATS doesn't look at your CV the way a person does. It pulls the text out of the file, in the order it's stored, and tries to recognise the parts: your name, email and phone, each job with its dates, your education and your skills. Recruiters then search that text, often for a job title plus two or three skills, and read the CVs that come up.
So two things matter. First, the text must come out complete and in the right order. Second, it must contain the words a recruiter will search for. You may have read that bots reject most CVs before a human sees them; that figure has no reliable source. In practice the risk is quieter: a CV that is read wrongly, or that never matches a search, simply doesn't get opened.
The ATS-friendly CV format
Layout
- One column. Two-column designs can be read straight across, mixing your skills sidebar into the middle of your job history.
- No tables or text boxes for content. Some systems skip them or read the cells out of order.
- Nothing important in the page header or footer. Some parsers ignore those areas, which is where many templates put the name and phone number.
- No text inside images, skill bars or icons. "Excel ★★★★☆" is a picture; "Excel (advanced)" is text.
Headings
Use the names systems are trained to recognise: Summary (or Profile), Experience (or Work Experience), Education, Skills, Certifications, Languages. Creative headings like "Where I've Been" or "My Toolbox" can leave a section unrecognised.
Jobs and dates
- Put each job's title, company and city together, with dates in one format throughout, for example "Mar 2021 – Present" or "03/2021 – Present".
- List jobs newest first.
- Give every job a start date and either an end date or "Present". A missing date can confuse the system's total of your years of experience.
Fonts and file type
- Any clear font works if the text is real text: Calibri, Arial, Lato, Georgia, Times New Roman. Body text at 10 to 12 points.
- Save as PDF with selectable text or .docx. To check a PDF, open it and try to highlight a line. If you can't, it's a picture: rebuild it instead of scanning it.
- Keep the file small; many portals cap uploads. If yours is too big, the PDF Compressor can shrink it to a set size.
Keywords: match the job advert
Recruiters search with the words from their own advert. If the advert says "financial reporting" and your CV only says "prepared accounts", you may not come up, even though it's the same work.
- Read the advert for nouns: job titles, tools, software, methods, qualifications and licences. Words repeated two or three times matter most.
- Mark the ones that are true for you. Only those.
- Use the advert's exact phrase at least once, in your skills list and, better, in a bullet point that shows you using it.
- Include both forms of common abbreviations once: "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)", "International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)".
The ATS check in the CV Builder does the reading for you: paste the advert and it lists the advert's main keywords, marks the ones your CV already has, and lets you add a missing one to your skills with a click. Its AI can also reword your summary or bullet points in the advert's language, using only the facts you gave it.
Write bullet points that get read
Once a recruiter opens your CV, the bullet points do the work. A strong bullet says what you did and what changed because of it:
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| Responsible for monthly accounts | Prepared monthly accounts for 3 factories, closing the books in 6 days instead of 10 |
| Handled customer complaints | Resolved 40+ customer complaints a week, keeping repeat complaints under 5% |
| Worked on the website | Rebuilt the product pages in React, cutting load time from 4 s to 1.5 s |
- Start with a verb: Led, Built, Reduced, Increased, Prepared, Trained.
- Add a number wherever you honestly can: money, time, people, volume or percentage.
- Leave out "I" and "my", and keep each bullet to one or two lines.
- 3 to 6 bullets per job, more for recent roles and fewer for old ones.
Common mistakes
- Hiding keywords in white text. Modern systems and recruiters spot it, and it can get an application rejected outright.
- One CV for every job. Ten minutes adjusting your summary and skills to each advert matters more than any template.
- A CV that's a scan or a photo. It may look fine, but there's no text for the system to read.
- Long paragraphs instead of bullet points.
- Going over two pages without a reason. Keep the last 10 years in detail and summarise older roles.
Build an ATS-friendly CV for free
- Open the AI CV Builder. Import your old CV (PDF or Word), or describe your work in your own words and let the AI draft the sections.
- Check every section. The AI writes only from what you give it and marks missing figures like [X%] for you to fill in.
- Pick a template: Classic for banking, law and government; Modern or Compact for corporate and technical jobs; Professional with photo where photos are expected.
- Open ATS check, fix what it flags, and paste the job advert to match its keywords.
- Download as PDF or Word. Your CV, contact details and photo stay in your browser.