How to Write an ATS Resume

What an ATS actually does

Start here, because most advice about ATS resumes is written as if the software were a gatekeeper looking for reasons to reject you. That framing is largely wrong, and it leads people to do strange things to their resumes.

An applicant tracking system is primarily a database and a workflow tool. When you apply, it parses your document into structured fields — name, employers, dates, titles, skills — and stores the result alongside every other applicant. Recruiters then search and filter that database, much the way you would search any other list of records.

The practical consequence is that your goal is not to defeat a filter. Your goal is to be parsed accurately and to be findable when a recruiter searches for someone like you. Those are different objectives, and the second one is far more achievable.

Some systems do apply automatic knockout rules, usually on explicit questions rather than resume prose — work authorisation, a required certification, a minimum qualification. Those are answered in the application form, not inferred from your bullet points.

This also explains why "hidden keyword" tricks — white text, keywords crammed into margins — are a bad idea. They do not fool the parser in any useful way, and when a human opens the document, which happens, they read as dishonest.

The structure that parses cleanly

Parsers look for familiar landmarks. Give them the landmarks they expect and the rest takes care of itself. A reliable order:

1. Contact details. Name, phone, email, city, and one relevant link. In the body of the document — text placed in a header or footer is frequently missed entirely, which means a perfect resume arrives with no way to contact you.
2. Professional summary. Two to three sentences establishing your role, your level, and your target. Optional, but useful when your recent title does not obviously match the job you want.
3. Work experience. Reverse chronological. Each entry: job title, employer, location, and dates, on their own lines, followed by bullets.
4. Education. Qualification, institution, and year. Move this above experience only if you are a recent graduate.
5. Skills. A plain list of concrete, checkable skills.
6. Anything else that earns its place. Certifications, languages, publications, significant volunteer work — each under its own conventional heading.

Use the ordinary names for these sections. Creative headings cost you nothing in personality and can genuinely confuse a parser trying to work out where your job history begins.

Writing experience bullets that work

This is where a resume is won or lost. The parser will happily store weak bullets; the recruiter reading them afterwards will not be moved by them.

A dependable pattern is action, object, result: what you did, what you did it to, and what changed as a consequence.

• Weak: "Responsible for social media accounts."
• Better: "Managed four social accounts, growing combined following from 12k to 30k in a year."
• Weak: "Worked on improving the checkout process."
• Better: "Rebuilt the checkout flow with two engineers, cutting abandonment by 18%."

When you do not have numbers

Not every role produces clean metrics, and inventing them is both dishonest and easy to expose at interview. Where you cannot quantify an outcome, quantify the scope instead: how many people, how many clients, how large a budget, how often, how long. "Supported 40 staff across three sites" tells a reader more than "provided IT support" without claiming a result you cannot back up.

How many bullets per role

Three to five for your current and most recent role, dropping to one or two for jobs more than about ten years old. A role from fifteen years ago rarely needs more than a line confirming it happened.

The summary, done properly

Most professional summaries are three sentences of adjectives that would fit any candidate in any industry. "Motivated team player with excellent communication skills" describes nobody, and a recruiter has read it several hundred times.

A useful summary is specific and factual: your discipline, your years in it, your two most relevant strengths, and what you are aiming at. Write it after the rest of the resume exists, when you can see what the document actually demonstrates.

Adjust it for each application. It is three sentences, it sits at the top where it is read first, and it is the cheapest possible place to signal that you have read the advert.

Skills: concrete, not aspirational

Your skills list is the section recruiters search against most directly, so it should contain the real, nameable things you can do.

Favour specifics over abstractions. "Python", "SQL", "Salesforce", "German (fluent)", "AS9100 auditing" are checkable. "Problem solving", "hard working", "detail-oriented" are not — and every applicant claims them, so they carry no information.

Only list what you would be comfortable being asked about. A skills section is an invitation to question you on its contents.

Tailoring for each application

Sending one identical resume to forty employers is the single most common reason capable candidates get no response. Tailoring does not mean rewriting from scratch — twenty minutes per application is usually enough.

1. Read the advert and mark the repeated terms. Anything mentioned more than once, or listed under "essential", is what this employer is actually screening for.
2. Use their vocabulary where it is genuinely yours. If they say "stakeholder management" and you wrote "client liaison" for the same work, adopt their phrasing. Do not adopt terms for work you have not done.
3. Reorder rather than rewrite. Move the most relevant bullets to the top of each role and the most relevant skills to the front of the list. Ordering is free and changes what gets read first.
4. Rewrite the summary. Three sentences, aimed at this role. This is the highest return on the smallest effort anywhere in the process.

Final checks before you send

• Open the exported PDF and try to select the text. If you cannot highlight it, it is an image and needs re-exporting.
• Confirm your phone number and email appear in the document body, not only in a header.
• Check that dates are consistent and that no role has a mysterious unexplained gap.
• Read it aloud once. Errors your eye skips, your ear catches.
• Name the file with your own name — "Alex Mensah Resume.pdf".

If you built the resume in an app, run these checks on the exported file rather than the in-app preview. The preview is a rendering; the PDF is what the employer receives.