ATS-Friendly Resume Format: What to Do and What to Avoid

What "ATS-friendly" actually means

A parser reads your file as text, then decides which text is a job title, which is a date, and so on. Anything that makes the text come out in a strange order, or not come out at all, causes errors. Greenhouse's support documentation lists the usual suspects: columned layouts, tables, headers and footers, contact details in a header or text box, graphics and photos, image-only files, letters with spaces between them, unclear sections and abbreviated titles (Greenhouse Support). The rules below are those problems turned around. For how the systems work in general, see the ATS guide.

Eight format rules

1. One column, top to bottom. Reading order is the most fragile part of parsing. We tested it on our own templates; the result is in two-column resumes and ATS.
2. Standard section headings. Use names a parser expects: Summary, Experience (or Work Experience), Education, Skills, Projects, Certifications.
3. Contact details in the body. Put your name, email, phone and location at the top of the page, not in the page header or a text box.
4. Full job titles and company names. Write "Senior Account Executive", not "Sr. Acct Exec", and include the company's full name.
5. One date format, in the same place. For example "Mar 2023 – Present" everywhere, next to the role it belongs to.
6. Plain bullets and common fonts. Standard round bullets and fonts such as Arial, Calibri or Times are safe. Decorative symbols can turn into stray characters.
7. Text, not images. No resume uploaded as a picture, no text inside graphics, no skill-rating bars. Photos are a risk on upload forms.
8. A small, text-based file. Keep it under 2.5 MB (the size above which Greenhouse says it can't parse) and export from Word, Google Docs or a resume builder as a text-based PDF or DOCX. See PDF or DOCX.

Do and avoid at a glance

Section order and what to call things

For most people the order is: contact, summary (optional), experience, education, skills, then projects and certifications if they help. Early-career applicants can move education and projects up. Whatever you choose, use headings with their ordinary names. A parser that sees "Experience" knows what follows; "Adventures in Analytics" tells it nothing.

Dates and titles: the quiet source of errors

Dates and titles are the fields that go wrong most often, because they sit visually apart from the text they belong to. When we exported our own single-column template and read it back with four open-source text extractors (they are not ATS systems), the section order was correct in every one. But in two of the four, the right-aligned dates were output away from their role line: in one tool, 12 lines later at the end of the document. The details are in the two-column experiment. Two practical takeaways:

• If you are writing your own file, put the date on the same line as the job title (for example after an en dash or a separator), rather than relying on right alignment.
• Always check the text order yourself with the test below, since a file can look perfect and extract badly.

A two-minute test you can run yourself

1. Open your PDF or DOCX and select all the text (Ctrl+A on Windows, Cmd+A on Mac). If nothing highlights in a PDF, the file is an image and needs re-exporting.
2. Copy it and paste it into a plain text editor such as Notepad.
3. Read it top to bottom. Is your name first? Does each date sit next to its job? Are the sections in order, with no sidebar text in the middle of a sentence?
4. Fix anything out of place in the original, re-export and test again.

Choosing a template

Our resume builder offers ten templates. Five are single-column with plain headings (Modern ATS, Professional, Executive, Developer and Minimal), the layout least likely to cause parsing problems. The other five are two-column and more design-led, which suits sending a resume to a person rather than uploading it to a form. Browse them on the templates page.