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ATS CV format: laying out a CV that recruitment software can read

7 minute read · Updated 2026-08-27

An ATS CV format is simply a CV built so that recruitment software can lift your details out of the file without scrambling them. Applicant tracking systems sit behind a large share of UK vacancies, especially at bigger employers, NHS trusts, councils and recruitment agencies, and they read your document before any human does. Getting the format right is not about tricking software. It is about removing the design decisions that stop your experience being read properly in the first place.

What an applicant tracking system actually does

When you apply, the system opens your file and tries to break it into fields: name, contact details, each employer, each job title, start and end dates, education, qualifications. Those fields go into a database that the recruiter searches. If your dates sit in a text box the parser ignores, your ten years of experience can come through as blank.

The idea that a robot reads your CV and rejects you is mostly a myth. What really happens is more ordinary and more damaging: a recruiter searches the pile for forklift or SMSTS or AAT Level 3, and you do not appear because the word is inside an image, an unusual abbreviation or a column the software could not follow. Nobody rejected you. You were never in the results.

Plenty of employers use nothing of the kind. A garage in Wigan with four staff opens the email and reads the attachment. On this site an application goes straight to the named employer who advertised the role, so the same document has to satisfy both a parser and a busy person reading on a phone. Fortunately the same choices help both.

The ATS CV format that parses cleanly

  • One column, top to bottom. Two column designs with a sidebar are the single most common cause of jumbled parsing.
  • Contact details in the body of the first page, not in the header or footer of the document. Many parsers skip headers and footers entirely.
  • Ordinary section headings: Personal Statement, Key Skills, Employment History, Education and Qualifications, Licences and Tickets. Creative headings such as Where I Have Made My Mark mean nothing to a parser and little to a reader.
  • No tables, no text boxes, no charts, no logos, no headshot, no skill rating bars. Anything that is an image is invisible.
  • Reverse chronological employment history with the employer, the job title, the location and the dates on separate lines.
  • Dates written the same way every time, such as Mar 2021 to Aug 2024. Mixing formats confuses both software and readers.
  • Standard fonts at 10 to 12 point, plain round bullets, bold for emphasis rather than colour.

File type, file name and a two minute test

Unless the advert says otherwise, a Word document (.docx) or a PDF exported from a word processor are both safe. Avoid PDFs produced by scanning a printed page, because they are pictures of text and contain no readable characters. Never send an Apple Pages file or a link to a document in your own cloud storage, because a hiring manager without access simply moves on.

Name the file so it makes sense in a folder of eighty attachments: Joanne Price CV Warehouse Team Leader.pdf is better than cv final v3 new.docx.

To test the layout, open your CV, select everything, copy it and paste it into a plain text editor such as Notepad. What you see is roughly what the software sees. If the job titles have merged into the dates, or whole sections have vanished, rebuild that part in ordinary paragraphs and bullet points.

Keywords without keyword stuffing

Recruiters search for the words in their own advert, so those words need to appear naturally in yours. Use the exact job title from the advert somewhere in your personal statement, and use both the abbreviation and the full term for anything technical: CSCS (Construction Skills Certification Scheme), Driver CPC (Certificate of Professional Competence), SIA, NMC, DBS, NVQ, CIPD. Include licence categories in the form employers search on, such as C+E rather than only Class 1.

What does not work is a block of forty comma separated words at the end of the CV, or white text hidden on the page. Recruiters spot both immediately, and hidden text is treated as an attempt to mislead. Our guide to the CV skills section covers how to choose the terms that are worth including.

Where format matters less than you think

A tidy, parsable CV gets you into the search results. It does not get you the interview on its own. Once a person is reading, they want evidence: what you were responsible for, at what scale, and what changed because you were there. A perfectly formatted list of duties still loses to a plainer CV that shows results.

So spend twenty minutes on the layout, once, and then leave it alone. After that, the only thing you should change between applications is the personal statement and the order of your key skills, both of which take five minutes. The structure itself can stay exactly as it is, which is the whole point of building it properly. If you have not set the underlying structure yet, start with our guide on how to write a CV.

Next step: rebuild your CV as a single column document, run the copy and paste test, then open our current vacancies and tailor the top of page one to a live advert before you apply.