Last month I got to sit in on a product demo at one of the bigger ATS companies operating in India. I will not name which one -- they asked me not to -- but they walked me through what happens on their end when you hit "Submit Application" on a job portal. It was genuinely eye-opening. And also a bit depressing, if I am being honest.
The sales rep shared his screen and uploaded a sample resume. Within about four seconds, the software had parsed the entire document into structured data fields. Name, email, phone number, work history, education, skills -- all neatly slotted into a database. He then showed me what happens when the parsing goes wrong. He uploaded a resume that used a two-column layout with icons next to each section header. The software grabbed the candidate's name correctly but listed their work experience as blank. Their skills section got merged with their education. The whole thing was a mess.
"This happens more than you'd think," he said. He was not bragging. He seemed a little embarrassed by it.
What ATS Software Actually Does (It Is Simpler Than You Think)
There is this idea floating around that ATS systems are these sophisticated AI-powered gatekeepers making intelligent decisions about who should get interviews. That is not quite right. Most ATS platforms -- at least the ones used widely in India by mid-to-large companies -- are essentially database management tools. Their primary job is to take unstructured information (your resume as a PDF or Word doc) and convert it into structured data that recruiters can search and filter.
Think of it like this. You know how Google Sheets has columns? The ATS wants to put your information into columns. Company name in one column. Job title in another. Dates in another. Skills in yet another. When your resume formatting makes this extraction difficult, it does not mean the ATS "rejects" you in some dramatic fashion. What happens is less dramatic but arguably worse -- your information just gets garbled, and when the recruiter searches the database later, you do not show up. Not because you were rejected. Because you were never properly indexed.
That distinction matters. You are not fighting an intelligent filter. You are fighting a parser that is honestly not that smart.
The Formatting Things That Actually Cause Problems
I have reviewed probably a thousand resumes over the past few years in my coaching work, and I have also talked to enough recruiters and ATS vendors to have a decent picture of what causes trouble. So let me walk through the formatting stuff, not as a checklist but as observations from watching these systems work.
Tables are the biggest issue. And this is ironic because so many resume templates on Canva and even Microsoft Word use tables to create those clean two-column layouts. The problem is that an ATS reads text linearly -- left to right, top to bottom. When you put information in a table, the parser sometimes reads across the rows instead of down the columns. So your job title from 2019 might get concatenated with an unrelated skill from the column next to it. I have seen resumes where the parsed output looks like "Senior Developer BSc Computer Science 2015 Python" all in one field. The recruiter sees gibberish.
Headers and footers are another quiet problem. A lot of people put their contact information in the document header. Makes sense visually -- it stays at the top of every page. But many ATS systems skip headers and footers entirely during parsing. Your phone number and email just vanish. I had a client who had been applying for three months before we figured out the ATS was not capturing her email address because it sat in the Word document header. Three months.
Images, logos, and graphics get ignored completely. That little headshot some people include? Gone. That progress bar showing you are "85% proficient in JavaScript"? The ATS sees nothing there. Not even the word JavaScript. If a skill only appears inside a graphic element, it does not exist as far as the software is concerned.
File format matters too, though less than people think. Most modern ATS platforms handle both .docx and .pdf reasonably well. The old advice of "always submit in Word" is outdated for most systems. That said, if a job posting specifically asks for a particular format, follow that instruction. Some older systems -- and there are still companies running ATS software from 2012 -- genuinely struggle with PDFs. When in doubt, .docx is the safer bet.
The Keyword Situation
This is where things get both simple and complicated at the same time.
The simple part: most ATS-based filtering works on keyword matching. The recruiter or hiring manager sets up the job posting with certain required qualifications, and the ATS checks incoming resumes for those terms. If the job requires "project management" and your resume does not contain that phrase, you might get filtered out before a human sees your application.
The complicated part: keyword matching is not always exact. Some systems use fuzzy matching, meaning "project management" and "managing projects" might both register. Others are more rigid. Some weight keywords found in recent job titles more heavily than keywords buried in a skills list. The behavior varies by platform, and candidates usually have no way of knowing which ATS a company uses.
So what do you do? You mirror the language of the job description. Not by stuffing keywords artificially -- that is a separate problem I will get to -- but by genuinely adopting the terminology the company uses. If the job posting says "stakeholder management," use that phrase somewhere in your resume. If it says "Agile methodology," do not just write "Scrum" and hope the system figures it out. Use both terms if you can.
Read the job description like it is a menu. It is telling you what to order. Your resume should feel like it is answering the job description point by point, using similar language.
Now, keyword stuffing. Some people have gotten clever and started pasting the entire job description in white text at the bottom of their resume. The idea is that the ATS reads it but the human does not see it. Two problems with this. First, most modern ATS platforms flag or strip hidden text. Second, even if it works past the ATS, when a recruiter actually opens your resume in the system, the hidden text often becomes visible. I have had recruiter friends forward me resumes where they could see three paragraphs of white text. It looks terrible. Do not do this.
Debunking Some Myths While I Am At It
There is a lot of bad advice circulating about ATS systems, and I want to clear up a few things I see repeated constantly on LinkedIn and YouTube.
Myth: Fancy fonts will get your resume rejected. Not exactly. The ATS does not care about your font choice in terms of aesthetics. What can happen is that unusual or decorative fonts sometimes cause character encoding issues during parsing. The letter "a" in a standard font is read as "a." The letter "a" in some downloaded decorative font might get read as a special character or just a blank space. This is rare with common fonts, though. Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, Garamond, Georgia -- all fine. That fancy script font you downloaded from a free fonts website? Maybe skip that one. But standard professional fonts are not going to cause problems.
Myth: You need to use exact section headings like "Work Experience" or the ATS will not understand your resume. This was more true five or six years ago. Modern ATS platforms are reasonably good at identifying sections even if you title them differently. "Professional Background" instead of "Work Experience" is usually fine. "Technical Proficiencies" instead of "Skills" will likely parse correctly. That said, there is no advantage to being creative with section headings. Keep them straightforward. Not because the ATS demands it, but because why take the risk for zero benefit?
Myth: ATS systems reject resumes longer than one page. This is just not true. The ATS does not have a page limit filter. A recruiter might prefer shorter resumes, but that is a human preference, not a software limitation. If you are a senior professional with 15 years of experience, a two-page resume parsed through an ATS will be indexed just fine.
Myth: PDFs always get rejected. Already covered this above, but it bears repeating. Most modern systems handle PDFs without issue. The exception is scanned PDFs -- if you print your resume, scan it back in, and submit that file, the ATS might struggle because it is now an image, not text. Always submit digitally created files.
Before and After: What Fixing a Resume Actually Looks Like
Let me give you a real example from a client I worked with recently. I have changed the details for privacy, but the structure is accurate.
Before: Her resume used a Canva template with a sidebar containing her skills represented as star ratings (three out of five stars for Excel, four out of five for Python, etc.). Her contact info was at the top inside a colored banner graphic. Her work experience was laid out in a two-column table -- company name and title on the left, dates and descriptions on the right. Visually, it looked polished. Professional, even.
When I ran it through an ATS simulator, here is what came back: name was captured. Email was missing (it was inside the banner graphic). Phone number was missing. Skills section was completely empty -- the star ratings were images, and the skill names next to them were part of the image too. Work experience showed only fragments. The parser had read across the table rows, so "Marketing Manager" was followed by "Jan 2020" then "Tata Consultancy" then "Led a team of" all in one line.
After: We rebuilt her resume in a single-column layout using a basic Word template. Contact info at the top as plain text. Section headings in bold. Skills listed as a comma-separated line of text. Work experience in reverse chronological order with company name, title, and dates on separate lines, followed by bullet points describing her responsibilities and achievements. The same information, the same career story. Just presented in a way the parser could actually read.
When I ran the updated version through the same ATS simulator, every field populated correctly. Every skill was captured. Every job was indexed with the right dates and titles. The recruiter searching for "marketing manager" with "Python" experience would now find her. Before, she was invisible.
She told me later she had been applying to jobs for four months with the Canva version. Within two weeks of switching to the reformatted resume, she got three interview calls. I am not saying the format was the only factor. But it sure seemed like it was a big one.
The Section Order and What the ATS Cares About
ATS systems generally do not care about section order the way humans do. Whether you put education before experience or after, the parser will sort it into the right database fields. However -- and this is a "however" that matters -- some systems do give more weight to content that appears earlier in the document. Not all. Some. And since you do not know which system you are dealing with, a reasonable approach is to put your strongest material near the top.
For most experienced professionals, that means leading with a brief professional summary (two to three lines, packed with relevant keywords from your target role), followed by work experience, then skills, then education. For fresh graduates, flip education and experience, especially if your degree is from a well-recognized institution.
The professional summary is also where you have the most freedom to naturally incorporate keywords. "Results-driven marketing professional with 7 years of experience in digital marketing, brand strategy, and stakeholder management across FMCG and technology sectors." That one sentence hits at least five searchable terms. And it reads like a normal sentence, not like keyword stuffing.
Dates, Gaps, and How the ATS Handles Them
ATS platforms parse dates to calculate tenure and identify career gaps. Most systems expect dates in a standard format -- "Jan 2020 - Mar 2023" or "2020 - 2023." If you write dates in unusual formats, like "First Quarter 2020 to Spring 2023," the parser might not calculate your tenure correctly. Stick with month and year. It is boring, but it works.
Career gaps are interesting. The ATS itself does not penalize gaps -- it just records the data. But recruiters using the ATS can filter by minimum years of experience, and if your dates are garbled, the system might calculate your total experience incorrectly. I worked with a candidate who had 8 years of experience but the ATS calculated only 3 because his dates used a format the parser did not understand. He kept getting filtered out of senior-level searches.
ATS Scoring: What It Is and What It Is Not
Some ATS platforms assign a match score or ranking to each resume based on how well it aligns with the job description. This is where a lot of anxiety comes from -- people imagine some cold algorithm giving them a 47 out of 100 and consigning them to the reject pile.
The reality is more nuanced. First, not all ATS platforms have scoring. Many just provide search and filter functionality, and it is up to the recruiter to decide who to call. Second, even when scoring exists, most recruiters I have spoken to do not use it as a hard cutoff. They might sort by score to look at the top candidates first, but they are not ignoring everyone below a certain threshold. At least, the good recruiters are not.
Third -- and this is something the ATS vendor admitted to me during that demo -- the scoring algorithms are not that sophisticated. They are mostly counting keyword matches and sometimes weighting by recency or section placement. A candidate who worked at Google for two years with moderate keyword alignment might score lower than a candidate with no relevant experience who happens to have used all the right buzzwords. The recruiter still has to apply judgment.
So yes, optimize your resume for keyword matching. But do not obsess over some imaginary score. The goal is not to trick the system. The goal is to make sure the system can read your resume accurately so that when a recruiter searches for someone with your qualifications, you actually show up.
A Few Practical Things to Do Right Now
If you are currently job hunting and worried about ATS compatibility, here are some things you can do today. Run your resume through a free ATS checker -- there are several online, like Jobscan or ResumeWorded. They are not perfect, but they will flag obvious parsing issues. Compare the output against your actual resume. If anything is missing or garbled, you know what to fix.
Strip out all graphics, images, and icons. Replace skill-rating visuals with plain text. Swap table-based layouts for single-column formats. Move contact information out of headers and footers into the main body of the document. Use standard section headings. Format dates consistently as month and year.
Then -- and this part people often skip -- tailor your resume for each application. I know that is annoying. I know it takes time. But the keyword matching piece is real, and a generic resume will always perform worse than one that mirrors the specific language of the job posting. You do not need to rewrite the whole thing. Usually it is the summary section and maybe a few bullet points that need adjusting per application.
The Uncomfortable Truth About This Whole System
I want to be honest about something. Having seen the ATS from the inside, I find the whole system kind of broken. We have built this infrastructure where talented people get filtered out because they used the wrong font or put their email in a header. Where someone with ten years of great work gets scored lower than someone who happens to be better at resume keyword games. Where the technology that was supposed to make hiring more efficient has instead created an entire cottage industry of ATS optimization consultants (I say this with some self-awareness, being one of them).
The ATS exists because companies receive too many applications to review manually. That is a real problem -- I get it. A job posting on Naukri can generate 500 applications in a day. Someone needs to sort through that. But the solution we have landed on rewards format compliance over actual competence. It rewards people who know the system over people who just know their craft.
I do not have a better answer. I wish I did. The honest advice I can give is: learn the rules of the system, play by them, and do not let the frustration stop you from applying. The ATS is a gatekeeper, yes. But it is a gatekeeper with a fairly predictable set of preferences. Once you understand what it wants, getting past it is not that hard. It is just annoying that you have to think about it at all.
I keep hoping that ATS technology will get better at parsing creative formats, at understanding context, at evaluating candidates on substance rather than structure. Maybe it will. Some newer platforms are making progress on this front. But for now, in 2024, the plain-formatted, keyword-aligned, single-column resume is still your safest bet. And honestly, that is probably going to remain true for a while.
Comments