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How to make an ATS-friendly resume

What an applicant tracking system actually does with your resume, the formatting that breaks it, and a 7-step checklist to make an ATS-friendly resume for free.

Updated 2 November 2026 · by Swayam Gupta

Open the free ATS resume builder

Quick steps

Use a single-column layout. Two columns are often read straight across, mixing lines from both sides.
Use standard section headings. Experience, Education, Projects, Skills. Creative headings like 'My Journey' are not recognised.
Export a text PDF. Never export as an image or a scanned file; the ATS needs selectable text.
Mirror the job description's keywords. Use the exact terms the JD uses, where they are true for you.
Keep contact details in the body. Some parsers skip headers and footers.
Write dates in one format. For example 'Jun 2024 – Present', the same everywhere.
Test it. Run the PDF through an ATS checker and read the extracted text.

What an ATS does with your resume

An applicant tracking system (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, iCIMS, Darwinbox and Naukri RMS are common in India) converts your PDF into plain text, splits it into fields like name, email, employer, title and dates, and stores it in a searchable database. Recruiters then search that database by keyword and filter by experience or location.

So an ATS rarely 'rejects' a resume by itself. The real risk is that it reads your resume badly: your title lands in the wrong field, two columns get merged into nonsense, or your skills are never extracted. Then you never show up in the recruiter's search.

Formatting that breaks ATS parsing

Two-column or sidebar layouts, read left to right across both columns.
Text inside tables, text boxes or shapes.
Icons for phone and email, which often extract as garbled characters.
Skill bars, star ratings and charts, which carry no text at all.
Headers and footers holding your contact details.
Uncommon fonts that embed without a proper character map.
Image-only PDFs exported from Canva or scanned on a phone.

Keywords: how to match a job description honestly

Read the job description and list the hard skills, tools and qualifications it repeats. If you have them, use the same words: 'Power BI', not just 'BI tools'; 'stakeholder management' if that is the phrase they use. Put the most important ones in your experience bullets, not only in the skills list, because recruiters search and then read context.

Do not paste the JD in white text or stuff keywords you cannot defend in an interview. Modern ATSs show recruiters the parsed text, so hidden text is visible, and it ends conversations quickly.

Does Canva or a two-column template pass ATS?

Sometimes. It depends on how the PDF was exported and how the parser reads columns. The safe test is to extract the text yourself. ResumeSutra's ATS X-Ray shows the exact text stream a parser receives, in your browser, without uploading the file.

Do it free on ResumeSutra. No sign-up and no watermark. Open the free ATS resume builder →

Frequently asked questions

What is an ATS-friendly resume?

A resume whose text an applicant tracking system can extract in the right order and split into the right fields: one column, standard headings, a text PDF, and the job's keywords.

Is PDF or Word better for ATS?

A text-based PDF is fine for almost every modern ATS. Use Word only if the job post asks for it.

What is a good ATS score?

Scores differ by tool. What matters is that your text extracts cleanly and that you cover the JD's core skills. ResumeSutra's JD Match shows which keywords are missing.

Are ATS-friendly resumes boring?

They are plain, not boring. Recruiters spend seconds per resume, and clean layouts are faster to read.