How do you make an ATS-friendly resume?
Use a plain, one-column layout with standard section headings, real text instead of images, and common fonts. An applicant tracking system (ATS) mainly needs to read your resume correctly, and most of the damage comes from layouts that confuse the parser.
Published October 2026
What an ATS does
An ATS stores applications and lets recruiters search and filter them. Many do not automatically reject people on a score; recruiters often search by keywords and job titles, so your resume has to be read correctly and contain the words a recruiter would search for.
A checklist that works
- One column. Avoid tables, text boxes and side columns for important content.
- Standard headings: Summary, Experience, Education, Skills.
- Put contact details in the body of the page, not in the header or footer, which some parsers skip.
- Use a common font and normal bullet characters.
- Send a Word file or a PDF made from text, not a scan or an image of text.
- Use job titles, dates and employers in plain lines, in a consistent order.
- Spell out terms and add the acronym once, for example Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), so both versions can be found.
Keywords
Use the words the posting uses for skills and tools you really have. Do not paste a list of keywords you cannot discuss; a person will read the resume after the software does.
Test it
Copy all the text from your resume and paste it into a plain text editor. If the order is jumbled or parts are missing, a parser will likely see the same thing.
How Riseply helps
Riseply generates resumes in a plain one-column layout so they read cleanly in applicant tracking systems, and it can attach the tailored file to the application form for you. The content comes only from your own resume.