ATS-Friendly Resume: How These Systems Actually Work, and How to Format for Them

What does "ATS-friendly" actually mean?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software employers use to collect, store and search job applications; on its own it is not a gatekeeper that automatically rejects most of what arrives. To format a resume for one, use a single-column layout, real selectable text rather than images or tables, standard section headings such as "Work Experience" and "Skills", and export a text-based PDF or a Word document, matching whatever format the employer's own application page actually asks for.

The rest of this guide covers what these systems do with a resume from the moment it is submitted, the vendors most job seekers actually meet, what their parsers can and cannot read, where the famous "75% of resumes never reach a human" claim came from and why it does not hold up, and what recent research — clearly labelled by who ran it and why — actually measures instead.

One boundary before any of that: no one outside the company that bought a given ATS knows exactly how that installation is configured, and configurations vary by employer even on the same software. This is general information about how these systems are documented and reported to work, not a promise about how any specific employer's setup behaves. Where a claim matters, the source is linked so you can read it yourself.

What an applicant tracking system is, and who makes them

An ATS is a workflow tool: it takes in applications, stores them against a job requisition, lets a recruiter search and filter the pool, and tracks each candidate through stages such as "Applied", "Phone screen" and "Offer". It is closer to a filing and search system than to a single yes/no decision-maker, though some of the filters recruiters configure inside it can and do remove candidates before a person sees them, which is a different thing from the software rejecting resumes on its own initiative.

A handful of vendors cover most of the large-employer market: Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Oracle Taleo and SAP SuccessFactors are among the names job seekers run into most often, alongside others such as Bullhorn, BambooHR, Teamtailor and Phenom. Jobscan, a company that sells resume-optimisation software, tracks this at the very top of the market: reverse-engineering the career pages of every Fortune 500 company, it found a detectable ATS behind 97.4% of them (487 of 500) as of its report released 3 June 2026, a figure that has sat between 97.4% and 98.8% every year since 2018. That is a vendor study of large employers specifically, not a claim about every company; a small business hiring a handful of people a year very often screens applications from a shared inbox or a spreadsheet with no ATS at all, because the software is built and priced for volume.

The main systems by name

• Workday — a large HR suite with recruiting built in; commonly paired with an add-on called HiredScore for AI-assisted screening and "smart resume" parsing.
• Greenhouse — recruiting-focused software widely used by tech and mid-size companies, with its own published list of accepted upload formats.
• Lever — recruiting software aimed at growing companies, built around a candidate-relationship model as well as tracking.
• iCIMS — an enterprise talent platform with its own resume text-extraction engine, documented for developers.
• Oracle Taleo — one of the older enterprise systems, still common at large, long-established employers.
• SAP SuccessFactors — part of SAP's broader HR software suite, used by many large multinational employers.

Knowing the name behind a career site rarely changes what you should do with your resume: every one of these systems is trying to extract the same handful of fields, and the formatting advice later in this guide applies across all of them. The name matters mainly if you want to check that vendor's own help documentation for its accepted upload formats, which is covered in its own section below.

What happens to a resume after you click "Submit"

The path from your upload to a recruiter's screen has the same rough shape across systems, even though the exact screens differ.

The stage most resumes actually fail at is parsing, not some hidden scoring stage: if the parser cannot find your most recent job title because it was inside a text box, the profile it builds is wrong or incomplete before a recruiter or a keyword search ever gets involved. The next section covers exactly what a parser is trying to read and what defeats it.

The one stage that genuinely does auto-remove applications without a person looking is the knockout question — a specific, employer-written eligibility question, not a general resume score. In a 2025 study of 25 US recruiters across nine ATS platforms, resume-building company Enhancv (a vendor with a direct commercial interest in this topic, so read its finding as vendor research) reported that all 25 of the recruiters interviewed used knockout questions for eligibility screening — things like work authorisation, a required license, or willingness to work on-site — while only 2 of the 25 (8%) had configured their system to auto-reject based on resume content such as a keyword match score. The rest, 92%, said a human made every content-based rejection decision.

What a parser extracts, and what breaks it

Parsing engines are built to pull out the same short list of fields regardless of vendor: your contact information, your work history (job titles, employers and the start and end date of each), your education, and a list of skills, often matched against a controlled vocabulary the vendor maintains. Everything else on the page — your professional summary, the wording of your bullet points, a cover letter — is stored as the original file and as extracted body text, but it is the structured fields that populate search results and filters.

Parsers read left to right, top to bottom, following the order the file's underlying text actually runs in — which is not always the order a human eye follows on a nicely designed page. That mismatch is where almost every parsing failure comes from.

• Multi-column layouts — a parser reading in document order often reads across both columns line by line rather than down one column and then the other, interleaving your job titles with your skills list.
• Tables — used for a skills grid or a two-column date/description layout, tables can be read cell by cell in an order that scrambles the sentence.
• Text boxes — content placed in a text box or a design "frame" is sometimes stored outside the main text flow and skipped by the parser entirely.
• Headers and footers holding contact details — a name, email or phone number placed in the document header or footer is commonly stripped out during text extraction and never reaches the parsed profile.
• Icons and images used in place of words — a phone icon next to a number, or a small graphic instead of a heading, carries no text a parser can read.
• Images of text, including scanned PDFs — a resume that is really a picture of a page, with no underlying text layer, returns nothing (or a wall of garbage characters if it was run through poor OCR) to a text parser.
• Unusual section headings — a heading such as "My Journey" or "What I Bring" in place of "Work Experience" or "Skills" is not recognised as that section, even though a person reads it instantly.
• Odd date formats — dates written inconsistently, spelled out unusually, or given as a single word like "Present-day" instead of "Present" can break the start/end-date fields a parser is trying to populate.
• Fancy bullets and ligatures — decorative bullet characters, or special typographic ligatures (a single glyph standing in for two letters, common in some fonts), can appear as odd or missing characters once text is extracted.

Where the "75% of resumes are rejected by ATS" claim actually comes from

This is the single most repeated statistic in resume advice, and it is worth tracing carefully, because the trail is short and the number turns out to rest on nothing.

A Fortune article from 22 August 2014 names the figure's source directly: "That 75% rejection rate your friend cited probably came from a study by a job search services firm called Preptel," whose CEO, Jon Ciampi, was "an alumnus of ATS maker SumTotal Systems." Preptel was a resume-optimisation vendor, and the figure was marketed around 2012 as part of its sales pitch — the same kind of company, doing the same kind of thing, that repeats the statistic to this day.

Preptel itself did not last: it shut down in August 2013, "and never published a study, a dataset, or a method behind the number," as a career-advice site's investigation into the claim's origin puts it. An independent write-up reaches the same conclusion from a different angle, citing career consultant Christine Assaf's own investigation, which found the statistic was "created without any study, survey, or context." Neither piece can find an underlying dataset anywhere in the citation chain — every retelling eventually points back to the same defunct vendor, with no data underneath. It is worth noticing, too, that the number itself is not stable: it circulates as 70%, 75% and 88% depending on which article you read, which is what happens to a claim that never had a single original source to check against.

What recent research actually measures

Two more recent pieces of research get cited in the same conversation, and both deserve to be read for exactly what they measured — no more.

Jobscan's ATS-usage tracking (vendor research — Jobscan sells resume-optimisation software) measures adoption, not rejection: it checks how many large employers have a detectable ATS behind their career page, arriving at 97.4% of Fortune 500 companies for its 2026 release. It says nothing about how many resumes any of those systems reject, only that the software is present.

Enhancv's 2025 study (also vendor research — Enhancv also sells resume-building software) took the opposite approach: instead of scanning career pages, it interviewed 25 US-based recruiters and talent-acquisition professionals, across industries from tech to healthcare to manufacturing and company sizes from under 100 to over 50,000 employees, working across nine different ATS platforms including Workday, iCIMS, Greenhouse and Lever. Its finding was that 92% of those recruiters (23 of 25) do not configure their system to auto-reject resumes based on content, formatting or a low match score — the decision to reject is made by a person — while every one of the 25 used knockout questions to screen for hard eligibility requirements. Asked where the 75% figure came from, the recruiters themselves mostly pointed to social media and recycled career advice rather than any study.

A third piece of research measures something different again, and is not a vendor study: "Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent," published in September 2021 by Harvard Business School's Managing the Future of Work project (led by professors Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman) together with the consultancy Accenture. This is an academic-and-consultancy report built from two large surveys — 2,275 executives and 2,275 employers across the US, UK and Germany surveyed in January–February 2020, and 8,720 workers (split between people currently locked out of full employment and people who had been but were not any more) surveyed in May–June 2020. Its central estimate is that more than 27 million people in the US alone are "hidden workers" — willing and able to work more than their current situation allows, but effectively screened out of the search. On the software specifically, the report finds that 63% of all employers surveyed use a recruiting/applicant-tracking system to filter or rank candidates (rising to 75% among US employers and 69% among the largest firms), and that 88% of those employers agreed their own process vets out qualified high-skills candidates who do not match a job description's exact wording (94% for middle-skills roles) — including, by the report's own account, screening out almost any resume with an employment gap longer than six months, regardless of the reason for that gap.

That is a genuinely different claim from "75% of resumes are auto-rejected," and it is important not to blur the two. The Hidden Workers report is about employers' own self-reported filtering criteria and how narrowly those criteria are written — a policy and hiring-practice finding, based on what employers say they do — not a technical measurement of how many individual resumes any piece of software discards. Read that way, it lines up with the more mundane, better-supported picture from Enhancv's interviews: real, employer-configured filters exist and can genuinely exclude a qualified person, but they are eligibility rules and criteria matching, decided by people, not a mysterious algorithm silently binning three-quarters of all applicants.

PDF or Word: what the vendors' own documentation says

The honest first answer is: follow the instructions on the actual application page in front of you. Some employer career sites explicitly ask for one format; when they do, that instruction overrides anything general written here. Where there is no instruction, the following is what each vendor's own public documentation says, where that documentation could be found and read directly.

Put together, the practical pattern across every system that could be checked directly is the same: common office formats are accepted, image-only files are not usefully parsed even when the upload itself succeeds, and file size limits exist but are generous (Greenhouse allows up to 100 MB, for instance, far more than any real resume needs).

The practical rule

• If the application portal states a format, use that format. It is the one instruction that beats every general rule below.
• A text-based PDF — one exported from Word, Google Docs or a similar tool, where the text can still be selected and copied — is widely and reliably parsed across the systems checked above.
• Use a Word document (.docx) when a portal specifically asks for one, or when you have no other information about which system you are dealing with and want the most conservative choice.
• Never submit a scanned image or a photograph of your resume as a PDF. It may upload successfully and still contain no text a parser, or a keyword search, can find.

A formatting checklist

• Single-column layout for the whole document, top to bottom.
• Standard, widely available fonts — Arial, Calibri, Georgia and Times New Roman are all safe choices — at roughly 10–12pt for body text and 14–16pt for headings.
• No content-bearing text inside a header or footer: keep your name, email and phone number in the main body of the first page.
• Standard section headings: "Work Experience", "Education", "Skills", "Certifications" rather than invented alternatives.
• Standard, simple bullet characters (a plain dot, dash or square) rather than custom icons, checkmarks or arrows.
• No tables, text boxes, columns, charts, icons or images used to carry information — a logo image in a corner that carries no text is harmless; the same image used to display your phone number is not.
• Consistent Month Year date formatting for every role and every degree, with "Present" spelled out in full for your current role.
• A text-based PDF, or a .docx file if the portal asks for one — never an image or a scan.
• A plain, professional file name for the document itself, such as your name and the word résumé, rather than a generic name like "final3" or "scan.pdf".

If you are trying to judge whether a resume has drifted too long once you have trimmed the formatting, the word counter calculator gives a quick word count and an estimated reading time, which is a reasonable proxy for length even though no ATS scores a resume on word count directly.

Safe, risky and avoid-entirely: formatting choices side by side

Section headings a parser recognises, and ones it misses

Parsers match section headings against a list of expected terms to decide where one part of your resume ends and the next begins. A heading outside that list does not stop your text being read — it just does not get filed under the right field, which can mean a whole section is treated as an extension of the one before it.

Pulling keywords from the job advert, and placing them honestly

A parser and a recruiter's search box both work on the words actually present in the text they extracted, so the words you use matter as much as where you use them. Read the job advert closely and note the specific tools, skills, qualifications and certifications it names, in the exact phrasing it uses — "Google Analytics" rather than just "analytics", "PMP certification" rather than "project management experience" if that is genuinely what you hold.

• Add the skill or tool to your dedicated skills section, in the same wording the advert uses, if it is genuinely true of you.
• Work the same term into at least one bullet point under the relevant role, in context, rather than only listing it once.
• Mention it once in your summary near the top if it is central to the role, since that is often the first text a recruiter reads.
• Give both the acronym and the spelled-out form at least once — "search engine optimisation (SEO)" — since different recruiters and different searches use either form.

There is no fixed number of keywords a resume should carry. The reasonable target is coverage of the advert's core, named requirements — the specific tools, certifications and skills it lists as required or strongly preferred — placed truthfully in your skills section and woven into your actual experience, not a count to hit.

How this site's resume builder relates to all of this

The resume builder on this site defaults to a single-column layout with real, selectable text and standard section headings, for the reasons set out above. It exports either a text-based PDF or a .docx file built from genuine Word paragraph styles and list formatting, not a picture of a page, so both downloads keep an underlying text layer a parser can read. Full formatting guidance for the tool itself is at how to make a resume ATS-friendly.

One of the templates in the tool, the Sidebar layout, is labelled inside the tool as less safe for older ATS parsers, precisely because a sidebar is a column, and a column is the layout choice most likely to be read out of order by an older or stricter parsing engine. If you know or suspect the employer is using an older system, or you simply do not know, the single-column default is the safer starting point; keep the Sidebar layout for applications you send directly to a person rather than through a portal.

The tool's job-description match feature is a word match against the text you paste in, meant to help you see which of the advert's terms are missing from your draft so you can add any that are genuinely true of you. It is not, and does not claim to be, an ATS score: nobody outside the employer that owns a given system knows exactly how that system's internal search and ranking actually weighs a resume, so no external tool — this one included — can honestly promise to predict a real outcome inside somebody else's software. Use the match check as a checklist for coverage and honest wording, not as a pass/fail grade.

If you are starting from a blank page rather than reformatting an existing document, how to write a resume goes through building the content itself — what to put in a summary, how to write an accomplishment bullet, and how to order your sections — before this guide's formatting advice is applied on top of it. More career guides sit under the career hub.

Sources

• Fortune, "How To Keep Your Resume From Getting Lost In Cyberspace" (22 August 2014), naming Preptel and its CEO Jon Ciampi as the source of the 75% figure: https://fortune.com/2014/08/22/how-to-keep-your-resume-from-getting-lost-in-cyberspace/
• Uncharted Career, tracing the "75% auto-rejected" claim to Preptel's 2012 marketing and its 2013 shutdown with no published methodology: https://unchartedcareer.com/blog/the-75-of-resumes-are-auto-rejected-myth-traced-to-its-source
• The Interview Guys, an independent investigation reaching the same conclusion and citing career consultant Christine Assaf's research: https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/ats-resume-rejection-myth/
• Enhancv, 2025 interview study of 25 US recruiters across nine ATS platforms on auto-rejection and knockout questions (vendor research): https://enhancv.com/blog/does-ats-reject-resumes/
• Jobscan, 2026 report on ATS adoption among Fortune 500 companies, 97.4% detected (vendor research): https://www.jobscan.co/blog/fortune-500-use-applicant-tracking-systems/
• Jobscan, formatting checklist referenced for fonts, headings and file-format advice (vendor content): https://www.jobscan.co/blog/20-ats-friendly-resume-templates/
• Harvard Business School (Managing the Future of Work) and Accenture, "Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent" (September 2021), the full report PDF with survey methodology and figures: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/hiddenworkers09032021_Fuller_white_paper_33a2047f-41dd-47b1-9a8d-bd08cf3bfa94.pdf
• Greenhouse Support, supported file formats for resume and cover letter uploads: https://support.greenhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/360052218132-Supported-formats-for-resumes-cover-letters-and-other-candidate-uploads
• iCIMS Developer Resources, binary file and resume text-extraction formats: https://developer-community.icims.com/applications/applicant-tracking/binary-files
• Workday (HiredScore) documentation, supported resume attachment file types: https://doc.workday.com/hiredscore/en-us/workday-hiredscore/recruiter-productivity-/concept--candidate-profiles.html

Where to go next

If the content of your resume needs work before formatting matters, how to write a resume is the place to start. Once the content is right, this guide's checklist and the resume builder cover the formatting. More guides on job applications, interviews and career documents are collected under the career hub.

Common questions