An applicant tracking system isn’t a judge. It’s a parser and a search index. Getting past one is mostly about making your CV machine-readable — then making sure the words a recruiter actually searches for are in it.
What an ATS actually does
It reads your file, tries to split it into fields — contact details, work history, education, skills — and stores the result so recruiters can search and filter it. It doesn’t score your personality or reject you for a career break. Most of the damage people blame on ATS software comes down to parsing failure: the system couldn’t read part of your CV, so that part simply doesn’t exist.
What breaks the parse
Multiple columns are the most common culprit, because the parser reads in an order your eye doesn’t follow. Text inside an image or a logo can’t be read at all. Contact details placed in a document header or footer are sometimes skipped entirely — which means a perfectly good CV with an unreachable phone number. Unusual section names cause orphaning: call it Career Narrative and the system may not recognise it as work history. Tables and text boxes are a coin flip.
What to do instead
Use a single column. Standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Contact details in the body of the document, not the header. A common font. Dates in a consistent format. Save as a PDF unless the advert asks for a Word file — and if it does, send the Word file. None of this makes your CV uglier to a human. It just removes the ways a machine can misread it.
Keywords, without the keyword stuffing
Recruiters search the database using terms from their own advert. If the advert says stakeholder management and your CV says managing relationships with partners, you won’t surface in that search — even though you did the work. The fix is to use the advert’s vocabulary where it’s genuinely true of you. What it isn’t is a block of white text at the bottom of the page. Systems flag it, recruiters see it when they open the file, and it reads as dishonesty.
How to check before you send
Save your CV as plain text and read what comes out. If the order is scrambled, a human reading the parsed version would be lost too. That’s roughly what the system sees.
The free CV checker returns an ATS note on every check, alongside a skills-and-keywords score, so you can see what is likely to survive the parse before you send it.