The ATS Resume Checklist
Eighteen things worth checking before you send another application. Most advice on this topic is either obvious or wrong, so each item below says what to do and why it matters. Four of them are myths you can stop worrying about.
Structure
Parsers look for landmarks. Give them the ones they expect.
1. Use the section headers everyone else uses
Experience, Education, Skills, Summary. A parser matches on the words it knows. "Where I Have Made An Impact" is a nicer sentence and a worse header, because the section behind it stops being classifiable. Creative headers are the single most common self-inflicted wound.
2. One column, top to bottom
Two-column layouts read left-to-right across both columns in extracted text, which interleaves your job titles with your skills list. The result is unreadable to a machine and often to a recruiter looking at the parsed version rather than your PDF.
3. Keep contact details out of the header and footer
Some parsers ignore header and footer regions entirely. If your email lives there, you can be the strongest candidate in the pile and still be unreachable. Put contact details in the body of the first page.
4. Do not put content inside tables or text boxes
A table of skills looks tidy and extracts as a run of cell fragments with no reading order. Text boxes are worse: many parsers skip them outright. Use plain paragraphs and simple bullet lists.
5. Never put words in a graphic
A skills wheel, a rating chart, a logo containing your name. None of it is text, so none of it is read. If a piece of information matters, it has to exist as selectable characters somewhere.
The file itself
The document has to survive being opened by software that is not Word.
6. Check that your text is selectable
Open your PDF, try to select a sentence, and copy it. If nothing highlights, your resume is an image and contains no text at all. This happens to anyone who scanned a printout or exported from a design tool. It is the most catastrophic and most invisible problem on this list.
7. PDF unless the posting says otherwise
PDF preserves layout and is handled consistently. Use DOCX when the application form asks for it. Avoid .pages, .odt, and anything you exported from a browser.
8. Name the file like an adult
Jane-Okafor-Product-Manager.pdf. Not resume-final-v4-USE-THIS-ONE.pdf. It costs nothing and it is the first thing a human sees.
9. Remove the password
An encrypted PDF cannot be parsed. If you protected the file at any point, export a clean copy.
Words
This is where most of your score actually lives.
10. Mirror the exact terms from the posting
Matching is usually literal. If the posting says CI/CD and you wrote "continuous integration", that is a miss. Write both the acronym and the spelled-out form once: "CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery)". Only claim what is true.
11. Have a real Skills section
Not a wall of every technology you have touched. Twelve to twenty terms that are genuinely yours and genuinely relevant to the role you are applying for. Its absence is one of the heaviest penalties there is, because there is nowhere obvious to match against.
12. Put a number in most bullets
"Improved the deployment process" tells a reader nothing. "Cut deploy time from 40 minutes to 6" tells them what you can do. If you cannot find a number, name the scale: team size, user count, budget, how many countries.
13. Lead with the verb, not with "Responsible for"
"Responsible for managing the migration" describes a job description. "Migrated 4TB of customer data with no downtime" describes you. Duties are what the role required. Outcomes are what you did with it.
14. Use one date format throughout
Pick Jan 2023 – Mar 2024 and use it everywhere. Mixing 01/2023 with January 2023 makes your history harder to reconstruct, and a gap that is not really there looks like one that is.
15. Include a LinkedIn or portfolio URL
Write it out in full so it is unambiguous. A resume with no link at all reads as thinner than it is, and a recruiter who wants to check you out should not have to search.
Four things you can stop worrying about
Widely repeated, mostly wrong. Ignoring these frees up attention for the items above.
16. "White text keywords will beat the system"
This one circulates every few months and it is actively harmful. Hidden text is trivially visible to any human who selects the page or opens the parsed output, and being caught doing it ends the application immediately. It is not a clever hack. It is the only item on this page that can get you rejected on integrity rather than fit.
17. "One page or you are finished"
One page is good discipline early on. With ten years of relevant history, two pages is normal and expected. Nobody is counting pages. They are counting whether the first third earns the second.
18. "The ATS rejects you automatically"
Most systems rank and filter. They do not usually issue rejections on their own. The realistic failure is quieter: you are sorted below the people whose resumes matched better, and nobody ever opens yours. That is worth fixing precisely because it is invisible.
Bonus: "Fancy fonts and colour hurt your score"
Colour is not parsed and does not hurt anything. An unusual font only matters if it embeds badly and produces broken characters, which you can check yourself with the copy test in item 6. Design your resume however you like, as long as the text comes out clean.
The honest caveat. Every checker, ours included, reads extracted text rather than your rendered page. That means no tool can reliably tell you whether your columns interleave or whether something is hidden. Run item 6's copy test yourself. It takes ten seconds and it catches what software cannot.
Want this checked against your actual resume?
PassATS reads your file and tells you which of these apply to you, with the specific lines to change and what each fix is worth. One report, $2.99, no account, nothing stored.
Check My Resume. $2.99