Do small companies use ATS systems?

Companies with fewer than 25 employees often don't, but most companies with 50+ employees use some form of ATS. Even free tools like Google Hire or LinkedIn's recruiter tools do basic keyword filtering.

Does ATS rank resumes or just filter them?

Modern ATS systems like Workday, Taleo, and Greenhouse do both. They assign a match score (often shown as a percentage) based on keyword overlap with the job description, then surface the highest-scoring resumes to human reviewers first.

Will ATS reject me if I use a creative resume design?

Very likely yes — for the common ATS platforms. Columns, text boxes, headers/footers, tables, and infographics cause parsing errors. The ATS sees garbled text or empty sections. Use a single-column, clean format for any application going through ATS.

How ATS Systems Work and How to Write a Resume That Beats Them

What an ATS Actually Does to Your Resume

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) does two things when it receives your resume:

Parse your resume into fields — It extracts your name, contact info, work history (employer, title, dates), education, and skills into a structured database record.
Score your resume against the job description — It compares the text of your resume to the text of the job posting and produces a match score.

If the parse fails (because of formatting issues), your resume appears as a jumble of text in the recruiter's database — or sometimes as empty fields. If your score is below the recruiter's threshold, your resume may never surface to a human reviewer.

Understanding both of these processes is how you beat ATS.

The Parse Problem: Why Resume Format Matters More Than You Think

Every ATS uses a parsing engine (Textkernel, Sovren, and custom-built parsers are common). These engines expect text in a linear, sequential format. They are trained on millions of traditional resumes and work best with standard section names and a single-column layout.

The following elements break or confuse ATS parsing:

Two-column layouts — the parser often reads columns left-to-right across, mixing content from both
Text boxes and shapes — content is often invisible to the parser
Tables — cells may be read out of order
Headers and footers — content placed in Word's header/footer is invisible to most parsers
Images and graphics — completely invisible to text parsers
Infographic elements — skill bars, timeline graphics, circular meters
Non-standard fonts — may fail to render as text
Saved as .pages or .odt — submit as .pdf or .docx unless the application system specifies otherwise

The fix: Use a single-column, text-only resume with standard section headers for any application going through an online portal. Save as .pdf (for most systems) or .docx if the ATS instructions specify Word.

The Scoring Problem: Keyword Matching

ATS scoring is essentially keyword matching. The system identifies important terms in the job description and then checks how many of those terms appear in your resume.

Modern systems do some semantic understanding (they know "JavaScript" and "JS" are related), but they are far more reliable at exact matching. This is why you should use the exact phrase from the job description rather than paraphrasing.

Example: If the job says "proficiency in Microsoft Excel including pivot tables and VLOOKUP," your resume should say "Microsoft Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP)" not just "spreadsheet software" or "advanced Excel." The exact noun phrases match; the paraphrase does not.

How to Extract Keywords from a Job Description

Use this process for each application:

Copy the full job description text into a document
Identify all technical skills, certifications, systems, and tools listed — these are your hard keywords
Note the titles of similar roles used (multiple ways a job might be named)
Identify "required" vs. "preferred" sections — required keywords are your first priority
Find 3–5 phrases that appear multiple times in the description — these are the most-weighted terms
Compare your resume against this list and add any missing terms where you genuinely have that experience

You are not fabricating experience — you are ensuring that your genuine experience is described in the same language the employer uses. "Managed cross-functional teams" and "led interdepartmental project groups" might describe the same experience, but one of them matches the job description's language.

Section Headers: Use Standard Names

ATS parsers are trained to recognize specific section header names. Creative names confuse the parser about what type of content follows. Use these standard headers:

Work Experience (not "Career History" or "My Story")
Education (not "Academic Background")
Skills (not "Things I'm Good At")
Certifications (not "Credentials" or "Training")
Summary or Professional Summary (not "Profile" or "About Me")

The Keyword Density Balance

More keywords are not always better. ATS systems have been updated to detect keyword stuffing, and human reviewers immediately spot resumes that read like keyword lists rather than coherent career narratives.

The goal is natural integration: your keywords should appear in context within bullet points that describe real accomplishments, not as a standalone list at the bottom of the resume.

A "Skills" section at the bottom of your resume reinforces keywords found in your work experience — it should not be your primary keyword vehicle.

Testing Your Resume Against ATS

Before submitting any application, compare your resume to the job description using Talory's AI or a simple manual review:

Does your resume contain the job title exactly as stated in the posting?
Do the required technical skills appear by exact name?
Are your certifications listed with the issuing body's name?
Is the file format appropriate (PDF for most, Word if specified)?
Does your resume use a single-column, table-free layout?

Five "yes" answers here gets you to a human reviewer. What happens after that is about the quality of your experience and how you've presented it — which is a separate, equally important challenge.