How do you make a resume that gets through the ATS? Start by ignoring the score

There's no pass mark and no score to hit. Making a resume "ATS friendly" comes down to two things: the text has to survive being pulled out of your file, and the words have to match what the ad actually asked for. The first one you can check yourself, for free, in about a minute.

If you want the background on what the software is and what it does with your file, start with what an applicant tracking system actually is. This piece is the practical half.

The score you're chasing mostly isn't switched on

Plenty of tools will give your resume a percentage and tell you to get it above 80. That number is the tool's invention. Employers don't share a scale, and there's no industry pass mark.

Real systems do offer something similar. In a November 2025 survey of 25 US recruiters, 44 per cent of the platforms they used offered an automated "fit score", and most of those recruiters either turned it off or treated it as a rough sort order. Ninety-two per cent said their systems don't automatically reject anyone on formatting, design, missing keywords or a low score.

So chase the score and you're optimising for a number the employer probably never sees.

What actually breaks, tested

We built four resumes with identical wording and changed one layout decision at a time, then pulled the text out of each and read what came back. Three things went wrong, and none of them is the thing people worry about.

• A skills sidebar beside your job history gets interleaved. Skills down the left, experience on the right, and the text comes out as one stream with a skill sitting between two of your jobs.
• A table holding your job history can disappear. One common way of reading a Word file returned both roles missing, while the contact line and skills line came through normally. Not scrambled. Absent.
• Contact details in a Word header depend on the file type. Reading the .docx, the email address wasn't there. The same file saved as a PDF and read again, and it was.

The eight decisions that matter

1. Single column, always.
2. Real headings the software recognises: Experience, Education, Skills. Skip the clever ones like Where I Have Made Impact.
3. Dates as Month Year, consistently, with Present for the current role.
4. Contact details in the body, never the header.
5. Send a .docx or a text-based PDF, never a scanned image.
6. No text boxes, and no tables carrying content.
7. Use the ad's own words honestly. If it says stakeholder engagement and you did it, write those words rather than a synonym you prefer.
8. Standard fonts at readable sizes.

The one-minute test

This is the only check we'd tell you to run, and it costs nothing. Save your resume as a PDF, select the whole thing, paste it into Notepad, and read what comes out.

You are now looking at roughly what the employer's database will hold. If the order is scrambled, a job is missing, or the characters come out mangled, you've found the problem before an employer did. If it reads cleanly, your formatting is fine and you can stop thinking about it.

Four things people worry about that don't matter much

• The file name. Call it something sensible for the human who saves it. It has no effect on the extraction.
• PDF against Word. Modern systems handle both. A PDF exported from Word is fine; a PDF that's really a scanned image is not, because there's no text in it to pull out.
• Keyword density. There's no target percentage. A term used naturally two or three times in context does the job, and stuffing is obvious to the person who eventually reads it.
• Length, for the software. Length matters to the human. The extraction doesn't care.

And one that does: white text stuffed with keywords is visible to anyone who selects the text, and it reads as an attempt to deceive. It's the single worst piece of advice still circulating.

The short version

• There's no pass mark. Tools that give you one invented it.
• Single column, plain headings, contact details in the body, Month Year dates, no tables or text boxes carrying content.
• Save as PDF, paste into Notepad, read it. That's the whole test.
• File name, PDF against Word, and keyword density are mostly noise.
• Match the ad's actual words where they're true of you. That's the part that does the work.

Want a second pair of eyes on it?

Honestly, this is the part we enjoy, and the checking costs you nothing. Run yours against our 24-point checklist, which is yours to keep whether or not you ever buy anything. Or send us the file and the job ad through the free review and a writer will pull the text out of it and tell you exactly what came back.

If you'd rather hand the whole thing over, here's what we do. We'd love to make you the shoo-in.