How to Optimize Your Resume for ATS: A Practical Checklist

Applicant tracking systems are software employers use to collect, store and search applications. Which system an employer runs, how it is configured and whether it filters or simply files applications are all decisions made inside that company. You cannot see any of them from the application form.

That leaves two problems you can actually work on, and a well-meaning piece of advice often blurs them together.

If you came here asking what to fix first on a resume, that is the answer, and it is also the reason this guide is ordered the way it is. The two problems need different work: a layout that extracts badly cannot be rescued by better wording, and a resume that says nothing about the advert was never a layout problem.

Fix readability first, relevance second. A perfect keyword match inside an unreadable file is still invisible.

Work through these in order, and resist the urge to start at step four — keyword edits made before the structure is sound are usually redone twice.

1. 1

   Read the advert and write down its requirements

   One advert, pen in hand. Split what you find into essentials, desirable extras and context. This list is the standard everything else is measured against; without it, ‘optimising’ means guessing.

2. 2

   Audit the structure of the document

   Check the things that decide whether the text survives extraction: one reading column, conventional headings for each section, contact details as ordinary lines in the body, one consistent date format, and bullets that are real text rather than images.

3. 3

   Rewrite the bullets that describe duties

   Go through work experience and mark every line that says what you were responsible for rather than what changed. Rewrite the top three or four of those with a result, a scale or a specific outcome.

4. 4

   Check keyword coverage against the advert

   Now, and not before, compare your wording to the advert's. Where the employer's term genuinely describes your work, use their term. Where it does not, leave it out or describe the adjacent thing you actually did.

5. 5

   Export the file and test the text yourself

   Produce the final-format file, then copy its text into a plain-text editor. Read it as a stranger would: name, contact details, titles, employers and dates all present, in a sensible order, with nothing important living only in a graphic.

6. 6

   Re-scan the exported file and compare

   Run the exported file through a scanner, make the two or three corrections the report justifies, export again and re-scan. Comparing two reports on the same document is more useful than chasing a number.

Two of those steps have a guide of their own, because each is deep enough to deserve one: the keyword research method for a single advert sits behind step four, and the build and formatting rules sit behind step two. This page is the order of operations; those pages are the detail.

The most common reason a readable resume still gets no response is that it describes a job rather than a person doing it. Compare these pairs: nothing has been added that the writer did not already do — the change is what the sentence emphasises.

This is the pass that decides whether the other five steps are visible at all. It is quick, and none of it requires design skill.

• One column, read top to bottom. Sidebars and two-column layouts can change the order in which text is extracted.
• Standard headings: Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications, Projects. Creative labels risk being left unclassified.
• Contact details as ordinary lines in the body of the first page — not in a page header, footer or text box.
• One date format throughout, written out: 03/2022 – 07/2024, with “Present” for the current role.
• Bullets as real characters, not images, icons or a custom symbol font.
• Selectable text: if you cannot highlight the words with the mouse, a parser may not see them either.
• The file the employer asked for. Where the advert specifies Word or PDF, that instruction outranks every general rule.

The two claims worth being sceptical about are worth naming. “No ATS can read a PDF” is not true of modern systems, and “a table guarantees rejection” is not true either — what matters is whether the text comes out in a readable order, which you can test in a minute. If you are choosing a layout from scratch, the format comparison covers which structure suits which work history, the structural rules for parsing cover columns, headings and file type, and the parsing checks list the layout choices that cause the most extraction problems.

Keyword work at this stage is a comparison, not a brainstorm. You are not looking for clever terms: you are checking whether the wording an employer will recognise appears where it is true.

1. 1

   List the advert's essential terms

   Tools, methods, qualifications, and the exact job title. Mark anything the advert repeats.

2. 2

   Mark what your resume already says

   Go through your own document and tick each term you can evidence. Anything unticked is either a gap or a wording problem — the two need different responses.

3. 3

   Fix the wording problems first

   If you did the work but described it in your own vocabulary — “looked after the rota” when the advert says “workforce planning” — use a phrasing that carries both meanings honestly.

4. 4

   Leave the genuine gaps visible

   A gap is information. It tells you whether to apply anyway, whether to foreground an adjacent skill, or whether to be ready to discuss it. Do not paper over it with a term you cannot support.

A scanner report is a prioritised list of observations about the text of one file, produced by rules you did not write. It is genuinely useful for two things: catching text-layer problems you would not otherwise notice, and showing you where the document is thin. It is not a hiring forecast — so knowing how to read an ATS scanner report, rather than how to raise its number, is the skill worth having.

Once the resume is exported, run this list in order. It is short on purpose: everything on it is something that has cost a real application a real read.

If you want the deeper material behind this workflow, the keyword guide covers reading a job description in detail, how to make an ATS resume walks through the build from a blank page, and how to pass ATS screening collects the parsing and formatting rules in one place. Start with the one that matches the problem you actually have.