How to optimise your resume for ATS

1. Measure before you touch anything

Start by looking at what a parser pulls out of your current resume. Without that baseline you will not know whether your edits improved anything or merely moved the problem somewhere else.

A free and immediate test: open your PDF, select all the text, copy it, and paste it into a plain-text editor. What you get is an honest approximation of what extraction will read. If the order is incoherent, if blocks are missing, if your name is not there, you have just found your main problem.

Check: does the pasted text read in the right order, top to bottom, with no interleaving? If not, step 3 is your priority.

2. Sort out the file itself

• Export a PDF with a real text layer, from your word processor. Do not print to PDF from a scan, and never photograph a paper resume.
• If you cannot verify the text layer, send a DOCX instead: it carries an explicit structure and extracts more reliably.
• Name the file legibly: firstname-lastname-role.pdf. That is a human detail rather than a machine one, but it costs nothing.
• Apply no password, no protection and no copy restriction: they can block text extraction outright.

Check: the copy-paste from step 1 returns text rather than nothing. Nothing means there is no text layer at all.

3. Bring the layout back to a single column

This is the fix that pays best, by a wide margin. One single column, top to bottom, removes interleaving, most ordering losses and mis-attached entries in one move.

• One column across the full height of the page.
• No tables, not even invisible ones. Many templates use borderless tables to align things: at extraction the grid disappears and the cells run together.
• No floating text boxes, no freely positioned panels.
• Nothing essential in the header or footer: name, email and phone move up into the body of the document, at the top.
• No text inside an image: no exported title banner, no skills chart, no logo containing your name.
• Standard bullets, not decorative symbols from an icon font.

Check: redo the copy-paste. The order should now follow the visual reading.

4. Name your sections the way they are expected

A parser recognises conventional headings; it does not guess them. This is the one place on a resume where originality costs more than it earns.

• Use Work experience, Education, Skills, Languages, Certifications.
• Give up My journey, What drives me, Toolbox: keep that voice for the cover letter, where a human will read it.
• One section per heading, and a single heading level. Decorative sub-sections blur the split.

Check: in the pasted text, each heading sits alone on its own line.

5. Keep each role in one block

Three facts have to sit next to each other for a role to be reconstituted: the job title, the employer, and the period. Apart, they dissolve.

• Put all three on the same line or on two consecutive lines, never in two distant areas of the page.
• Write dates out in full: March 2023 — June 2025 rather than a graphical timeline or a bare 23-25.
• Say Present or Current explicitly for an ongoing role.
• Describe the work in short bullets starting with an action verb, one idea per bullet.

Check: in the pasted text, each role forms one continuous block where the three facts follow each other.

6. Reuse the job ad's vocabulary, without lying

A recruiter searches the extracted record using their own terms. If the ad says project management and your resume says site coordination, the search does not find you — even though you did the thing.

• Reuse the ad's exact terms for the skills you genuinely have.
• Spell out acronyms alongside their expansion at least once: HRIS (human resources information system).
• Put those terms inside the body of your roles, where a fact backs them up, rather than in a free-floating list.
• Never add a skill you do not have. An unsupported keyword does not survive the first interview, and it shows.

Check: every term you reused points to a line of experience that justifies it.

7. Avoid the fixes that make things worse

Some very widespread advice does more harm than good. It shares one flaw: it tries to fool the machine instead of becoming legible to it.

• Do not stuff the resume with keywords in white text or in a tiny font. Extraction reads everything, including what is invisible on screen: those words come back in plain sight in the record, and what was meant to go unnoticed becomes the first thing anyone sees.
• Do not buy a template because it claims to be ATS-certified. No such certification exists. Many of those templates are two-column, which is to say the main defect itself.
• Do not strip all formatting as a precaution. A resume with no headings and no bullets is harder to segment, not easier: the parser needs landmarks, it just needs them to be conventional.
• Do not repeat a skill across four sections to raise its density. Repetition improves no search and weighs down the human reading that comes right after.
• Do not pad the resume to fit every term in an ad. A longer document dilutes the facts that actually qualify you.

The principle behind all of them: everything you write will be read by a human after the machine has read it. A trick that does not survive that second reading is not a trick.

8. Check again, then freeze a reference version

Redo the step 1 measurement on the corrected document and compare. That is the only proof the work paid off.

Then keep that document as your reference version, and stop rebuilding it for every application. What changes from one ad to the next is the vocabulary from step 6 and the order of emphasis — not the structure, which you have just paid for once.

That is exactly what the Master resume does in Passmatch: one validated base, from which each application derives a targeted version, built from your real facts and inventing none.