Blog / ATS & Formatting

How to Beat the ATS: What Actually Matters

Published June 2, 2026 · 6 min read

"Beat the ATS" gets thrown around like applicant tracking systems are a boss fight with a trick. They're not. An ATS is mostly a database with a search bar — it stores your resume, lets a recruiter search and filter, and in some cases assigns a rough match score against a job's keywords. Once you understand that, most of the internet's ATS advice either makes sense or falls apart.

What ATS software actually struggles with

Parsing errors are real, but they cluster around a few specific culprits:

• Tables and multi-column layouts. Many parsers read left to right, top to bottom, in a straight line. A two-column resume can get read as one garbled sentence, with your 2023 job title merging into your 2019 skills list.
• Text inside images or graphics. If your name is a stylized logo graphic, or your skills are icons instead of text, some parsers won't read them at all.
• Headers and footers. Contact info placed in a document header is sometimes skipped entirely by parsers that only read the body.
• Unusual section titles. A parser looking for "Experience" may not recognize "Where I've Made an Impact." Creative headers cost you the section-detection step.

What doesn't actually matter as much as people think

A few common fears are overstated:

• Font choice. Any standard, non-decorative font (Arial, Calibri, Georgia) parses fine. You don't need to avoid a font because of a forum post.
• Length in a vague sense. "One page vs. two" isn't an ATS parsing issue — it's a human-reader preference. The ATS doesn't care about page count; it cares whether the text is extractable.
• Keyword stuffing. Repeating a keyword 15 times doesn't raise your score proportionally, and it reads badly to the human who eventually opens the file. Use a term where it's true, in context.

What genuinely helps

1. Use standard section headers — Experience, Education, Skills, Summary — so both parsers and humans find what they're looking for immediately.
2. Match the language of the job posting where it's honestly true of your background. If they say "stakeholder management" and you've done that under a different label, use their term.
3. Keep contact info in the body, not a header/footer, and make sure it's plain text, not an image.
4. Avoid tables for layout. Use simple vertical sections instead.
5. Save as the format the posting asks for — usually PDF or .docx — and check that it opens cleanly, not corrupted, before submitting.

None of this is exotic. It's mostly "write clearly, structure predictably, use their words when true" — advice that also happens to make your resume better for the human who reads it after the parser does.