ATS-friendly resume format

ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System. It is the software an employer uses to collect job applications in one place. When you apply on a company’s careers page or through some job portals, your resume usually lands in an ATS first.

Most systems do three things with your resume:

1. Store it with your application, so recruiters can find it later.
2. Read it into fields — name, phone, email, job titles, employers, dates, degrees, skills. This step is called parsing.
3. Let recruiters search and filter — for example, everyone who mentions “Tally” and “GST”, or everyone with a B.Tech.

In most companies a person still reads the resumes and decides who to call. The software matters because if it cannot read your resume properly, your details may be stored wrongly or not show up when the recruiter searches. An ATS-friendly format is about being read correctly, not about tricking anyone.

1. 1

   Use one column

   Software reads left to right, top to bottom. In two-column layouts, lines from the left and right columns can get mixed together, so your skills end up inside a job description. One column avoids this.

2. 2

   Use standard English headings

   “Experience” (or “Work Experience”), “Education”, “Skills”, “Projects”, “Certifications”. Creative headings like “My Journey” or “What I Bring” may not be recognised as sections.

3. 3

   Keep all text as real text

   If you can select and copy a word in your PDF, software can read it. Text inside images, logos, scanned pages or decorative graphics cannot be read.

4. 4

   No tables, text boxes, icons or skill bars

   These often break the reading order or lose their content. A phone icon instead of the word “Phone” is fine for people but means nothing to software. A skill bar tells nobody what “80% Excel” means.

5. 5

   No photo

   A photo is not needed to shortlist you for most jobs, can confuse parsing, and takes space. Add one only when the job notice asks for it.

6. 6

   Contact details in the main body

   Put your name, phone and email at the top of the page as normal text — not only in a header or footer area, which some systems skip.

7. 7

   Consistent dates

   Use one style throughout, such as “Jan 2023 – Present”. Systems use dates to work out how much experience you have.

8. 8

   A common font and simple bullets

   Any standard font at a readable size. Round bullets or hyphens; avoid arrows, emojis and special symbols.

Recruiters search the ATS using words from their own job post. If the post asks for “accounts payable” and your resume only says “handled vendor bills”, a search may miss you. So, for each application:

1. Copy the job post into a notes app and underline the skills, tools, qualifications and duties it mentions.
2. For every one that is true for you, use the same word or phrase somewhere in your resume — in your skills list, and ideally in a bullet that shows you using it.
3. Write both the short and long form once if the job post uses an abbreviation: “Goods and Services Tax (GST)”, “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)”.
4. Put the job title from the post in your headline if it matches what you do.

Both samples use one column, standard headings, real text and consistent dates. In the builder they open in the plain single-column layout.

Use English for anything you upload to a careers page or job portal. Applicant tracking systems are built mainly around English resumes, and Devanagari text is not reliably read or searched by them. Even a perfect Hindi resume may come out garbled at the other end.

A Hindi resume still has its place: when you hand it to a local employer, apply for a role where the job notice is in Hindi, or the interviewer will read it on paper. meracvresume.com lets you switch section labels between English and Hindi, so you can keep both versions. For help deciding, read English or Hindi resume.

• “ATS can’t read PDFs.” Text-based PDFs, like the ones meracvresume.com creates, are widely accepted and readable. Problems come from scanned or image-only PDFs. If an employer specifically asks for a Word file, send Word — meracvresume.com also downloads an ATS-friendly Word (.docx) file with real headings and bullets. See resume format in Word.
• “The ATS rejects most resumes automatically.” Systems mostly store and sort applications; rules vary by employer. Application forms may include screening questions (such as notice period or location), but that is separate from your resume’s format.
• “You need a special ATS template.” You need a simple, single-column resume with clear headings. That is all an “ATS template” really is.
• “A high ATS score means you’ll get the job.” A score from an outside checker is an estimate of how well your resume matches some text. Recruiters still decide.

For the full section-by-section layout, see the simple resume format. For skill words by role, see skills for resume.