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Written and reviewed by the Resumarc team · Last reviewed 24 August 2026How we write our guidance
What does an ATS actually do?
It stores applications and makes them searchable. Your document is read as text and mapped into fields such as name, employer, dates, and skills, so a recruiter can filter and search across everyone who applied. Most systems reject nobody on their own. The real risk is being filed with your experience missing.
It helps to picture the software as a filing cabinet rather than a judge. Nothing about your page is scored out of a hundred, and no threshold sits between you and a human. What happens is duller and more consequential: your document is turned into records, and a recruiter searches those records.
That reframing settles most of the advice you will read elsewhere. A resume is not trying to beat the system; it is trying to survive being converted by it, so that the version a recruiter searches still says what you meant.
Which formatting breaks parsing?
Anything that keeps words away from a text extractor. Text inside images, content in headers and footers, multi-column layouts that scramble the reading order, and tables used for structure are the common four. Unusual section headings cause a quieter failure of their own: the text is found, but filed under nothing.
- Text inside a logo, a banner, or a skills graphic — a parser reads no words from an image
- Anything in the page header or footer, which some extractors discard entirely
- Two columns that interleave when flattened, so a job title lands inside another role's dates
- Tables used to lay out dates and employers, which can collapse into one run-on line
- Headings such as “Where I've Been” instead of “Work Experience”, which map to no field
- Rating bars and star graphics, which carry no value a parser can extract
None of this means a plain document is the only safe one. A sidebar is fine when the reading order still makes sense flattened, which is exactly what the resume templates here are built to do. The test is not how the page looks but what is left when the formatting is stripped away.
Which file format should you send?
PDF unless the advert asks for something else. It renders identically everywhere and current systems read it without trouble. Send DOCX when an employer or agency asks, since recruiters often edit the file before passing it on. Never send a page exported as an image, and never send a link in place of a document.
The old advice that applicant tracking systems cannot read PDFs comes from a genuine problem that has largely gone: PDFs produced by scanning or by design tools sometimes contained no text layer at all. A PDF exported from a word processor or a resume builder does, and you can check yours in seconds by opening it and trying to select a sentence.
If the text will not highlight, the file is a picture of a resume. That is the one file that reliably fails everywhere, because there is nothing in it to read.
How should you use keywords?
Take them from the advert and place them where they are true. A skill the job description names should appear in your skills list and, better still, in the bullet that shows you used it. Match the advert's phrasing rather than your own, and give an acronym both of its forms once.
Recruiters search the way anyone searches, with the words in front of them. If the advert says “stakeholder management” and your resume says “working with the business”, you describe the same work in terms that will not match.
The skills guide covers the phrasing rules in more detail, and the per-occupation resume examples list the terms most often reported for a role, which is a useful cross-check when an advert is vaguely written.
Why does keyword stuffing backfire?
Because a person reads the file next. Blocks of terms with no work behind them, white text hidden on the page, and the same phrase repeated in every bullet are all plainly visible to the recruiter who opens it. Passing the search only matters if the document then survives being read.
The hidden-white-text trick deserves its own mention, because it still circulates. It does not work: the text is stripped along with its colour when the file is parsed, so the recruiter sees the keywords in the plain-text view they read from, sitting there in an obvious block. It reads exactly as it is.
A resume with every advert term crammed in is also harder to search well, not easier. The recruiter filtering for one skill now finds a page where nothing is emphasised, and no line explains what you actually did with any of it.
FAQs
Key takeaways
- The software files your resume; it does not score it.
- Anything a text extractor cannot reach is effectively not on the page.
- Send a PDF you can select text in, or DOCX when asked.
- Use the advert's exact wording, in the places where it is true.
- Stuffing passes the search and then fails the person reading.
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Where to go next
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