An ATS-Friendly Resume Structure

Not a downloadable file. A structure, in the order parsers expect it, that you can rebuild your own resume around in about twenty minutes.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

The order

Contact details, then Summary, then Skills, then Experience, then Education. Anything else after that.

Skills sits high deliberately. It is the densest keyword block on the page and the section most likely to be read before a human decides whether to continue.

Experience before Education unless you graduated within the last year or the role explicitly asks for academic background.

Contact details

Full name, city and country, email, phone, one URL. In the body of the page, not in the header region.

Skip your full street address. It is a privacy exposure with no upside, and nobody is posting you anything.

Summary

Three lines. Your role, your years of relevant experience stated as a number, and the one thing you want remembered.

A summary that could sit on anyone else's resume is worse than no summary. If it does not name something specific, cut it and give the space to Experience.

Skills

Twelve to twenty terms, comma separated, in plain text. Not a table, not a grid, not a set of rating bars.

Group them if it helps a reader: languages, then frameworks, then tools. Keep the grouping labels short and ordinary.

Experience

For each role: job title, company, dates in one consistent format. Then three to five bullets.

Each bullet: what you did, and what changed because of it. "Migrated 4TB of customer data across 12 services with no downtime" rather than "Responsible for the data migration project".

Lead with the verb. Put a number in most of them. If you cannot find a number, name the scale — team size, user count, budget, how many countries.

Education

Degree, institution, year. That is usually enough.

Add coursework or a thesis only when you are early enough in your career that it is the strongest evidence you have.

What to leave out

A photograph, unless you are applying somewhere it is the local convention. In many markets it introduces bias risk and some systems strip it anyway.

Date of birth, marital status, nationality. Same reason.

"References available on request." Everyone knows. It is four words of nothing.

A skills rating out of five. Nobody agrees what four out of five means, including you.