How to Make an ATS-Friendly Resume

1. What an ATS does with your resume

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software employers use to collect and manage applications. When you upload a resume, it typically extracts the text and tries to split it into fields such as contact details, work history and education, so recruiters can search and filter. Employers use different systems with different settings, and how much they automate beyond that varies, so there is no single “ATS score” to optimize for.

What you control is simpler: the text must come out in the right order, and it must show evidence for what the role asks for. Both also help the person who reads your resume next.

2. The two-minute plain-text parse test

Before worrying about keywords, check that your file can be read:

1. Open the exact file you plan to upload: the exported PDF or the DOCX, not your design file.
2. Select all, copy, and paste into a plain-text editor such as Notepad, or TextEdit in plain-text mode.
3. Read it top to bottom. Your name and contact details should come first, each job title should sit next to its employer and dates, and every bullet should appear under the right job.
4. Look for what is missing: text inside images or icons, skill bars, and anything placed in a header, footer or text box.
5. If sections are interleaved (common with two-column layouts) or characters come out garbled, simplify the layout and test again.

The usual culprits are contact details in a table or an image, icons in place of labels (a phone symbol instead of “Phone”), and heavily designed two-column templates.

InterviewWare’s resume review shows you the same thing. After upload, open “Extracted text” to see the first 2,000 characters exactly as the parser read them. If that preview looks wrong, the AI review is working from the wrong text too, so fix the file before reading any score.

3. PDF or DOCX?

Follow the application form first: if it asks for a format, use it. If both are accepted, either is usually fine as long as it passes the parse test. What breaks parsing is layout, not the file extension.

A text-based PDF looks the same on every screen. A scanned PDF or a photo of a printout has no text layer at all, so a parser reads nothing. A DOCX is easy for software to turn into text, but it can look different on another computer, and some readers skip parts of the document.

As one concrete example, here is what InterviewWare’s own resume reader does. It describes our parser only, not any employer’s system:

• It accepts PDF and DOCX files up to 5 MB, and checks that each file really is the format its name claims.
• PDF: it reads the text layer. Scanned pages can’t be read, so export a text-based PDF instead.
• DOCX: it reads the body text, including tables. Text in Word headers and footers is not read, and text-box content is moved after the paragraph that contains the box.
• It needs at least 40 characters of text, and it stores only the extracted text, not your file.

The takeaway holds for any system: keep your name and contact details in the body of the page rather than a header, and don’t put anything important in a text box. Some application forms also ask you to type your history into fields as well as uploading a file; keep the two consistent, because mismatched dates and titles look careless.

4. Match the job description with evidence, not keyword stuffing

Recruiters search and read for the skills a role asks for, so it helps when your resume uses the same words for the same things. The mistake is copying terms you can’t support: a keyword with no evidence behind it doesn’t survive the first interview question about it. A better method:

1. Copy the job description and highlight the requirements (tools, skills and responsibilities), not the company boilerplate.
2. For each requirement, write down where your resume proves it: a bullet, a project or a course. Leave it blank if nothing does.
3. Where you have the evidence but different words, use the employer’s term if it accurately describes your work, for example “A/B testing” if that is what your “comparison experiments” were.
4. Where you have no evidence, don’t add the keyword. Either add a real example you left out, or treat it as a gap to prepare for the interview.
5. Put the most relevant evidence first, both within each job and in the order of your projects.

Early-career resumes are especially prone to a long skills line copied from the job ad. A skill named inside a project bullet, with what you did with it, carries more weight than the same word in a list.

In InterviewWare’s resume review, the optional job-description field adds a comparison with that role: an estimated match plus matching and missing skills. The bullet-tailoring step then rewrites up to twelve of your existing bullets toward the job, using only facts already in your resume. Where a stronger bullet needs a number you didn’t provide, it inserts a placeholder such as [metric] for you to replace with a real figure or delete. Requirements your resume doesn’t evidence come back as prompts (“if you have …, add a bullet that shows it”), never as claims.

5. Before and after: rewriting resume bullets

A strong bullet says what you did, the scope and what changed. These rewrites use no invented numbers; where a figure would help, a placeholder marks where a real one belongs.

6. What an ATS score can and can’t tell you

Resume tools, InterviewWare included, show a number labeled as an ATS score. Ours is an AI estimate of readability from 0 to 100, based on the extracted text. It is not a run through any employer’s actual system, and no tool can know how a particular employer has configured theirs. People make the decisions.

Use the score to compare versions of your own resume, not as a pass mark. If it rises after you fix a garbled section or add evidence for a requirement, that is useful. If it rises because you added words you can’t back up, the resume got worse.

7. Pre-submit checklist

Run through this before every application, not just the first one:

• The file passes the plain-text parse test: everything is there, in the right order.
• Name, email and phone number are in the body of the page, not in a header, footer, image or text box.
• Section headings are standard: Experience, Education, Skills, Projects.
• Dates use one format throughout, and every job has a title, an employer and dates.
• The file format and name follow the application’s instructions; something like FirstName-LastName-Resume.pdf is easy for a recruiter to find.
• Every requirement you claim to meet is backed by a bullet, project or course, and you could talk for five minutes about every skill you list.
• You can explain every number, and every [placeholder] has been replaced or removed.
• Links work, and any online form matches the uploaded resume. If you submit versions in two languages, the jobs and dates match exactly.
• Read it once as a recruiter would: in under a minute, is it clear which role you want and why you fit?

The last check is out loud, because every line on your resume is a possible interview question. You can attach the resume to an AI mock interview, and the interviewer will ask about what is on it.