ATS-Friendly CV Format: How to Write a CV That Passes Applicant Tracking Systems

An ATS such as Greenhouse, Lever, Workday or iCIMS does three things with every application:

• Parses the file into plain text and tries to fill fields like name, email, job titles, employers, dates and skills.
• Lets recruiters search and filter candidates, for example by a skill, a degree or years of experience.
• Often ranks or highlights candidates whose CV matches the words in the job description.

That means two things decide whether you are seen: the CV must parse cleanly, and it must contain the skills and job titles the recruiter searches for. Design matters far less than you think.

• One column. Two-column layouts are often read across both columns line by line, which scrambles your experience.
• No tables, text boxes, icons or skill bars. Put skills as plain words.
• Standard section headings: Summary, Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications, Projects.
• Contact details in the body of the page, not in the header or footer area.
• A common font (Calibri, Arial, Inter, Georgia) at 10.5 to 12 pt.
• Dates in one consistent format, for example Jan 2023 – Present.
• Save as a text-based PDF or .docx. Never a scanned image or a photo of your CV.

Quick test: open your PDF, press Ctrl+A and copy everything into Notepad. If the text comes out in the right order, an ATS can read it.

1. Name and contact: phone with country code, professional email, city and country, LinkedIn URL.
2. Professional summary: 2 to 3 lines with your target role, years of experience and two or three strongest skills.
3. Experience: job title, company, city, dates, then 3 to 6 bullet points per role that start with an action verb and show a result.
4. Skills: the tools, languages and methods named in the job description that you genuinely have.
5. Education: degree, institution, year. Add CGPA only if it helps.
6. Certifications, projects or volunteer work if they are relevant to the job.

Recruiters search for the exact skills in the job post. If the post says "Customer Success" and your CV says "client handling", a keyword search may miss you. Read the description, note the tools, skills and job titles it repeats, and use the same words wherever they are true for you.

• Mirror the job title in your summary if you have done that work.
• Write a skill in full once with its short form, for example Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Do not paste a list of keywords in white text. Modern ATS and recruiters spot it and it looks dishonest.

Each bullet should show what you did and what changed because of it. A simple pattern is: action verb + task + result with a number.

• Weak: Responsible for social media.
• Strong: Grew the company Facebook page from 8,000 to 41,000 followers in 10 months with a weekly content calendar.
• Weak: Worked on the backend.
• Strong: Built a Node.js payments API handling 12,000 bKash transactions a day with 99.9% uptime.

• Single column, no tables, icons or images
• Standard headings
• Text-based PDF or DOCX, file name like Firstname_Lastname_CV.pdf
• Contact details in the page body
• Skills and titles from the job description, where true
• Every bullet starts with a verb and most have a number
• One to two pages