How software reads your resume, and what that means for how you build it

Before a person reads your resume, there is often a program that has read it first. Companies use applicant tracking systems, and job portals do something similar, to store resumes and pull out details such as your name, your skills and your last job title so that recruiters can search them.

You do not need to be afraid of this. You do need to know the one thing that matters about it: the software reads text, in order, and it can only use what it can read.

What goes wrong

The usual problems are about layout, not about the quality of your career. A resume can look lovely on screen and still come out as a jumble when a program pulls the text out.

• Two or three columns and tables. A program may read straight across the page, so a skills column and an experience column get stitched into one confusing line.
• Text inside boxes, shapes and images. If your skills are drawn as pictures or bars, there may be no text to read at all.
• Contact details tucked into a header. Some systems skip the header area, so your phone number never reaches the recruiter's screen.
• Unusual section names. "My journey" or "Things I have done" is charming to a person. A program looking for "Experience" may not recognize it.
• Fancy symbols as bullets. Odd icons can turn into stray characters.

None of this means your resume must be plain and joyless. It means the information should live as real text, in a sensible order, under headings that say what they are.

What a safe resume looks like

Single column. Standard headings: Summary, Experience, Education, Projects, Skills. Dates written the same way throughout. Your name and contact details in the main body. A normal font. Selectable text rather than a screenshot.

A plain heading can feel flat when you write it, but the change is small and nothing else on the page has to move.

A few things people often ask about:

Should I use a PDF or a Word file? Follow the instructions in the application. If it does not say, a PDF made from a text-based file usually keeps your layout. Either way, make sure you can select and copy the text in it.

Should I stuff in keywords? Use the words from the job posting where they truthfully describe what you have done. Hiding keywords in white text or repeating them to fill a line is easy for a person to spot, and it does not help you.

Does one score decide everything? Be wary of anyone who says a single number predicts whether you will get a call. Systems differ, and plenty of companies have a recruiter search and read the resumes themselves. For the visual side, see formatting basics, and for layouts to avoid, two-column and designed templates.

What nobody outside a company can tell you

It is worth being honest here. Each company configures its own system, and nobody outside can see exactly what it does with your file. Any tool, ours included, can only show you how a reader like it sees your text. That is a useful guide to spotting obvious problems. It is not a guarantee about a particular employer's software.

Check your own resume in two minutes

You can try this without any tool. Open your PDF, select everything and paste it into a plain text editor. Then read what you get.

• Is your name at the top?
• Are your job titles, companies and dates still together?
• Is the order of the sections the same as on the page?
• Are there strange characters, or lines that run into each other?

If the pasted text is a mess, a program will probably see a mess too.

Avowly has a view called "How software reads it" that does this for you. It reads your saved resume back with the same reader the app uses when you import a file, and shows the sections it recognized and the text in the order it read it. If something comes out jumbled, you can fix the layout before you apply. The free ATS check is another way to test a file before you send it.

The short version

Build for a human reader first, then make sure the text underneath is clean. Single column, plain headings, real text, honest keywords. Most of the problems above disappear with those four habits.