ATS-Friendly Resume Templates

Who an ATS-friendly resume suits

Choose an ATS-friendly layout whenever you apply through an online form: company career sites built on Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo or iCIMS, and job boards that forward your file. It matters most for high-volume roles, graduate schemes and large employers, where recruiters search the database by keyword before they read anyone.

How to lay out an ATS-friendly resume

Use standard headings (Summary, Experience, Education, Skills), put your contact details in the body of the page rather than in a header or footer, and give each job its title, employer and dates as plain text. Avoid tables, text boxes, columns built with tabs and images of text. Send a text-based PDF unless the posting asks for Word, and check that you can select and copy every line of it.

What to emphasise

• The exact job title from the posting, in your summary or most recent role, where it honestly fits.
• Hard skills and tools written the way the posting writes them, including both forms where they differ (Search Engine Optimization and SEO).
• Month-and-year dates for every role, so the system can calculate your experience.

Common mistakes

• Hiding keywords in white text. Recruiters see the parsed text, so it shows up and looks dishonest.
• Putting your name and email in the document header, which some parsers skip entirely.
• Uploading a scanned or flattened PDF that contains no real text at all.