How to Write a CV That Survives Automated Screening
Before a recruiter reads your CV, software usually reads it first. Applicant tracking systems — Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, Ashby and the rest — parse your document into structured fields and make it searchable. If the parsing goes badly, a strong candidate can disappear before any human is involved.
The good news is that these systems are far less mysterious than the internet suggests. They are not scoring your personality. They are extracting text.
What the software actually does
An ATS does three things with your CV:
- Parses it into fields: name, contact details, employers, job titles, dates, education, skills.
- Indexes the full text so recruiters can search it.
- Surfaces candidates when a recruiter searches for a skill or title.
Note what is missing: almost no mainstream ATS automatically rejects you for a low keyword score. The "75% of CVs are rejected by robots" claim you have seen is largely a myth. What really happens is quieter — your CV parses into a mess, or it never matches the search a recruiter runs, so nobody opens it.
Formatting that breaks parsers
Most damage is done by layout, not wording:
- Text inside images. A CV exported as an image is invisible to the parser. Always send a text-based PDF or .docx.
- Multi-column layouts. Two-column designs often get read straight across, interleaving your job titles with unrelated text.
- Headers and footers. Contact details placed in a document header are frequently dropped entirely. Put your email and phone in the body.
- Tables and text boxes. Both parse unpredictably. Use plain paragraphs and bullet lists.
- Creative section names. "Where I've Made An Impact" will not be recognised as work experience. Use Experience, Education, Skills.
A clean single-column CV in a standard font is not boring. It is legible — to software and to the tired human reading forty applications after lunch.
Dates and titles matter more than you think
Parsers key on consistent date formats. Use the same pattern throughout — Mar 2021 – Present works well — and avoid writing only years, which makes short stints ambiguous.
For job titles, lead with the recognisable version. If your official title was "Growth Ninja", write Digital Marketing Manager (internally: Growth Ninja). Nobody searches for ninjas.
Use the language of the advert
This is the kernel of truth in the keyword advice. A recruiter filling a role searches using the words in their own job description. If the advert says "PostgreSQL" and your CV says "Postgres", you may not appear.
The fix is not to stuff keywords into white text at the bottom of the page — that is visible in the parsed output and reads as dishonest. The fix is to describe your genuine experience using the same vocabulary as the advert:
Before: Responsible for the company's data pipelines.
After: Built and maintained ETL pipelines in Python and Airflow, loading ~2M records/day into PostgreSQL.
The second version is more specific, more searchable, and more convincing.
Quantify what you can
"Improved site performance" tells a reader nothing. "Cut median page load from 4.1s to 1.3s" tells them you measure your work. You do not need perfect metrics — approximate scale, team size, budget, volume or percentage change all help. If you genuinely cannot quantify something, describe the decision you made and why.
Tailor the top third
Rewriting your whole CV for every application is unsustainable. Rewriting the top third is not. The summary and your most recent role are what get read; make sure they speak directly to the job in front of you. Leave the rest stable.
A short checklist
- Single column, standard fonts, no text in images
- Contact details in the body, not the header
- Standard section headings
- Consistent date format
- Recognisable job titles
- Vocabulary borrowed from the advert, honestly applied
- Numbers wherever you have them
- Saved as a text-based PDF, named
Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf
Get those right and the software stops being a gatekeeper. It goes back to being what it is: a filing cabinet.