ATS-Friendly Resume Format: Complete Checklist for 2026

What the vendor documentation says

These pages are written for the employer's hiring team, not for candidates, and several say the settings can be changed by the employer. Read "accepted" below as "accepted by default".

Two things stand out. Every system that publishes a file list includes both Word and PDF. And the most detailed list of problems, Greenhouse's, is mostly about the parser failing to recognise what a piece of text is: a name sitting in the page header, an abbreviated job title, an employer without "Ltd".

The Workday detail matters too. Its parser does not fill in the Skills field, so on a Workday application you will often type your skills in yourself. The skills section of your CV is still read by the recruiter, but do not count on it filling that form for you.

Three popular rules the documentation does not support

"ATS can't read PDFs"

Every published file list above includes PDF. What does fail is an upload that is really a picture. Greenhouse lists resumes "uploaded as an image, rather than a document", and Oracle's Taleo Business Edition notes say an image resume will not be parsed. A PDF exported from Word or Google Docs contains real text; a scanned page or a phone photo of a printout does not.

The UK careers site Prospects still warns that "Not all ATS' are compatible with a PDF" and tells you to check which format the job needs, and that is sound. My rule: send what the advert asks for. If it says nothing, send .docx, because it is on every list. A text-based PDF is a reasonable second choice, not a mistake.

"Tables are always unreadable"

No vendor page says always. Greenhouse lists "complex resumes with tables, headers, and footers" among the causes of a failed or partial parse. Oracle's Taleo Enterprise documentation says its parser "can detect text in the header and footer" and that parsing "has no impact on the formatting of a text (bold, italics, bullets)". So the answer depends on the system, and often on the employer's settings.

You usually cannot find out which system, version or configuration sits behind an application form. A one-column CV with no tables or text boxes costs a human reader nothing, so I would drop them anyway. Not because they always break, but because nobody can promise you they won't.

"Most resumes are rejected by the ATS"

None of these vendor pages gives a rejection rate, and none describes a failed parse as a rejection. Greenhouse describes it as a data-entry problem: when a resume fails to parse, the recruiter will "need to manually input the candidate's details into the fields". That is about parsing only. Screening questions or filters that an employer sets up are a separate step that runs after a resume has been read, and an application can still be screened out there before a person looks at it; the guide to how an ATS works covers that step.

That does not make formatting harmless. A field left empty is a field nobody can search or filter on, and the Taleo Business Edition note about image resumes missing from keyword search is exactly that risk. What an employer then does with the data, including any screening questions or filters, depends on how it has set its system up, and candidates cannot see that. The safe assumption is that anything the parser misses may as well not be on your CV.

The format checklist

Each line traces to a documented cause of parsing problems. Where the vendors say nothing, as with fonts and margins, it follows UK careers guidance instead.

1. One column. Greenhouse lists "resumes that have a columned layout".
2. Name and contact details in the body of the page, not the document header, footer or a text box. Taleo Enterprise can read headers; Greenhouse lists contact details there as a problem. Put them where every system can find them.
3. Plain section headings with the same formatting under each: Profile, Experience, Education, Skills. Greenhouse lists resumes "without clear sections and differing formats throughout each section".
4. Job titles in full. Greenhouse's own example of an incomplete title is "Sr. Account Exec instead of Senior Account Executive".
5. Company names with their suffix where they have one, such as "Ltd". Greenhouse lists names without Inc., Co., LTD or LLC.
6. No letter-spaced headings like E X P E R I E N C E. Greenhouse says the parser "won't recognize the separate letters as a single word".
7. No photos, icons, skill-rating graphics or word art. Workday recommends resumes without images or image-based styles. A UK CV does not need a photo in any case.
8. A small file. Greenhouse gives high-quality images as the example of what pushes a resume past its 2.5MB parsing limit, and Taleo Enterprise's default is 100 kilobytes.
9. Ordinary fonts and margins. Prospects suggests Arial, Calibri or Times New Roman at 10 to 12 points, headings at 14 or 16, and 2.5 cm margins.
10. The file type the advert asks for, saved with a name that identifies you, such as Alex-Morgan-CV.docx.

Worked example: fixing a two-column CV

This is an invented example. The person, employer and figures are made up. Alex Morgan is a marketing manager in Leeds using a designed two-column template. The top of the CV looks like this:

[Word header]   ALEX MORGAN
                M A R K E T I N G   M A N A G E R

[Left sidebar, text box]        [Right column]
CONTACT                         EXPERIENCE
(phone icon) 07700 900456       Sr. Mktg Mgr, Brightlane
(email icon) [email protected] 2022 – now
                                • Paid search and SEO for three products
SKILLS                          • Budget owner
SEO         ●●●●○
Google Ads  ●●●○○

Checked against the documented problems, almost every element has one:

• Name in the Word header, contact details in a text box: both on Greenhouse's list.
• Letter-spaced job title: the parser does not read it as a word.
• Sidebar beside the main column: a columned layout.
• Icons and rating dots: graphics, and the dots carry nothing a parser can store. "Four out of five" at SEO means nothing to a recruiter either.
• "Sr. Mktg Mgr" and "Brightlane": an abbreviated title and a company name with no suffix.
• "2022 – now": no month. I would give month and year at both ends in one format throughout.

The same information, rebuilt:

Alex Morgan
Marketing Manager
Leeds | 07700 900456 | [email protected] | linkedin.com/in/alexmorgan-example

Profile
Marketing manager with six years in B2B software, running paid search and SEO with budget responsibility. Looking for a senior digital marketing role.

Experience
Senior Marketing Manager, Brightlane Software Ltd, Leeds
March 2022 – Present
• Run paid search and search engine optimisation (SEO) for three product lines
• Own a £40,000 quarterly advertising budget and report spend to the finance director

Skills
Search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Ads, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), HubSpot

It is plainer. It is also the version a recruiter reads more quickly on a laptop or a phone, and nothing on it depends on how a particular parser treats headers, text boxes or columns. The skills now appear as words rather than dots, with the abbreviation and the full term both written out, so a search for either finds them.

Test the file before you upload it

Open your CV, select all, and paste it into Notepad, or TextEdit in plain-text mode. Read it top to bottom. Your name should come first, then contact details, then each job with its dates in order. If lines from two columns alternate, or your phone number has vanished, fix the layout.

This is not a simulation of any particular system. Workday itself says parsing results "can vary based on resume format and order of words", and no free checker knows how an employer has configured its software. But the test catches most of the problems on Greenhouse's list, and it takes a minute.

The second test comes during the application. If the portal fills in a form from your upload, that form is the parse result in front of you. Check every field, correct the job titles and dates it got wrong, and add anything it skipped.

A readable file still has to match the job

Clean formatting gets your information into the right fields. Whether those fields match what the employer is looking for is a content question. Three habits help. Write abbreviations and their full forms together, as in "Customer Relationship Management (CRM)", so a search for either term finds you. Use one date format everywhere, including education. And proofread, because "managment" does not match a search for "management".

Then tailor. The ATS keywords guide covers which terms to take from an advert, and tailoring your CV to a job description covers rewriting the profile and bullets for each application. For the profile itself, see how to write a professional summary.

Sources

• Greenhouse Support: Unsuccessful resume parse
• Greenhouse Support: Supported formats for resumes, cover letters and other candidate uploads
• Oracle Taleo Enterprise, Using Legacy Recruiting: Candidate Management (resume parsing)
• Oracle Taleo Business Edition 24A: Resumes in Image Formats
• iCIMS Developer Resources: Binary Files (text extraction)
• Workday Administrator Guide: Concept: Resume Parsing
• Prospects: How to write a CV