The Harshest Hiring Manager Ever: How To Optimize Your Resume for ATS

Is someone in your life still asking you why you don't just drop off your resume at local businesses to get a job? I would honestly love to still be that naive about the hiring process in the year 2025. Because as most of us know, it has progressed from just needing to apply online into a very specific and complicated set of online hoops to jump through. Failure to comply with these new resume rules may mean facing automatic rejection. If the constant need to re-enter all of your information (that is already in my resume, thank you very much) into another Workday application isn't an infuriating enough proposition than the experience of knowing you are perfect for a job and then being automatically rejected an hour later is a sanity losing one.

And companies are using ATS more than ever with 66% of large companies and 35% of small companies using the service. To make matters worse? 75% of resumes will never be read by a human. In a highly competitive job market like the one we are in currently it can feel hopeless to get your resume read and considered.

Hmmm... Pass

But there are some steps you can take to have your resume make it through a (overly in some cases) critical AI. Look ahead to see what you can be doing to optimize your resume to make it through the endless sea of applicants.

Keep it simple - Do not use images, graphics, tables, or crazy fonts

If you have ever extracted data with a PDF, you know that most systems require the information to be spaced evenly with nothing atypical breaking apart different sources of information. Same applies to how an ATS system will read your resume. Adding things such as graphics to the overall information confuses ATS about how to appropriately categorize each section of the data which can cause it to give you a lower score than it otherwise would have.

• Stick to the classic fonts - Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, Georgia, and Helvetica

• Don't use a PDF - primitive versions of ATS read these as blank documents. Use a Word, Numbers, or Google Doc if you can. Make sure files are saved as .doc or .txt

• No pictures - In addition to it being considered weird by a lot of recruiters, a photo of you can be interpreted as jumbled text as opposed to an image. If you have any other branding images or proof of projects, have a URL that links to that information.

• Single column, aligned to the left - this makes it easy for the system to group the different sections together

• Contact information in the body of the document - don't add this to the header or footer as the ATS might skip it and then there is no way to contact you

Bonus Tip: I suggest using the Harvard University Bullet Point Resume Template. The bulleting system is easy for most AI systems to group information together. Some common resume formats today include having your skills and certifications listed in a column to the left or right, which may make it harder for the ATS to align that information with the rest of the page. I personally found a much higher success rate going back to this format after trying out something like the second picture below. Newer isn’t always better!

Clear and concise sections are easier for ATS

This is a Microsoft Word standard template... and I would never use this

Talk like a robot

Ok so I don't mean this literally, but you do have to speak the AI's language. It's been taught that resumes will always include certain sections such as Experience, Skills, Certifications and that is what it is trying to group information in. If you send in "What Makes Me Stand Out" as the title to your Skills section, the AI doesn't know where that information is supposed to go. Just like above, keep it simple.

Tailor the resume to fit the keywords used in the job posting

Imagine you are looking at a job posting and you see that you have all of the skills necessary to apply for the job. You should just go ahead and apply right? Not so fast. While the experience itself may be a match, the way you have described your experience might not be. ATS is designed to search out specific key words that match what the position is looking for.

Ex. The position you are applying for details needing 3+ years of leading Scrum teams. You have this experience but instead of this phrasing you have "3+ years leading Agile teams". While a human would probably know that those things are equivalent, ATS is looking for the word "Scrum" and "3 or more" to flag it as a match. Not updating the phrasing might have you score lower on the AI's matching algorithm even when you have the experience it is looking for.

There are some good tools out there that can scan your resume to determine how well you have optimized your resume to match the job posting keywords.

Jobscan and Skillsyncer allow you to easily upload your resume and receive a score of how well your resume matches keywords. You are looking of a score of at least 75%-80% for best chance of a callback.

Bonus Tip: Ideally the keywords won't just be a in a list in a "Skills" section. Keywords have impact when they are included in your experience with definable metrics you have achieved. Just listing out your skills doesn't prove that you have them. Let your experience section illustrate all that you have accomplished while incorporating the keywords into that information.

Don't only use acronyms. Write the spelled-out term in addition to any abbreviation.

ATS is good at figuring out a degree or certification following a person's name, but if you start including abbreviations in your experience it might start thinking those are mis-spellings in your bullet points. The clearer the better here so it attributes your accomplishments in it's score.

No misspelled words

Edit your document very carefully. Unlike a human who can context read what a word was meant to be, ATS can't. If you misspell "Javascript" as "Javasrcipt" for example you just lost a lot of points in the algorithm for a job that requires that skill.

Remember: If all goes well, a human is going to look at this resume at some point in the process

There is a balance that needs to be struck when optimizing for ATS. If you read the above points and thought "Cool, I'll just post all the keywords to the resume and get through" then you need to think again. Do not forget that a human being with higher reasoning will be reading this resume at some point. Do not try and secretly hide keywords that make no sense into the resume by methods like "white font". Make sure that the information isn’t just bullet points but tells a story of your job experience.

With companies wanting to save as much money through automation as possible, ATS is unfortunately here to stay. Remember that you can take all of these steps above and still not get the job. Remember that this isn't always a reflection of you and your worth but of all of us trying to navigate a complicated and changing system. Good luck out there!