A colleague of mine spent three weeks applying for jobs at large companies last year. He had seven years of solid experience, a clean CV and was applying to roles where he genuinely met almost every listed requirement.
He heard back from almost nobody.
What made it stranger was that a friend of his with slightly less experience and a less polished background was applying to similar roles at smaller companies and getting callbacks regularly. Same job market, same time period, completely different results.
When we sat down and looked at what was different the answer was not the experience on the page. It was where the applications were going and what was happening to them before any human being actually read them.
The large companies my colleague was applying to were all using Applicant Tracking Systems to filter applications before a recruiter ever saw them. His CV was getting screened out automatically and he had no idea it was happening because the rejection emails, when they came at all, said nothing useful about why.
This is one of the most frustrating and least discussed realities of job searching right now. You can have the right experience, write a thoughtful cover letter and send a clean professional CV and still have it eliminated by software that never considers whether you are actually a good fit for the role.
Here is exactly how that happens and what you can do about it.
What an ATS Actually Is and Why It Exists
An Applicant Tracking System is software that companies use to receive, store and filter job applications before a human recruiter reviews them. It is not a recent development but its use has expanded significantly over the past decade as application volumes at larger companies have grown to levels that make manual review of every submission genuinely impractical.
A company posting a role on LinkedIn or Indeed might receive three hundred applications within the first 48 hours. A recruiter cannot meaningfully read three hundred CVs in that window. The ATS filters that pile down to a manageable number by scanning for specific criteria and ranking or eliminating applications based on what it finds.
The criteria it looks for are primarily keywords from the job description, formatting that the software can parse correctly, and specific structural elements it expects to find in a professional CV.
Applications that do not meet the threshold get eliminated before any human sees them. No second chance, no benefit of the doubt, no consideration of context.
Understanding this changes how you need to think about writing and formatting your CV for any role at a company that uses these systems which in practice means any medium to large employer and many smaller ones too.
The Keyword Problem Most People Do Not Know They Have
The most common reason a CV gets filtered out by an ATS is not that the candidate lacks the required experience. It is that the CV does not contain the specific words and phrases the system is looking for.
ATS software is not intelligent in the way a human reader is. It cannot infer that project coordination and project management describe related skills. It cannot understand that someone who spent three years as a digital marketing specialist has experience with SEO even if the CV does not contain that exact term. It looks for specific strings of text and either finds them or does not.
Job descriptions are essentially the keyword list that the ATS uses as its filter. Every time a job description uses a specific term, whether it is stakeholder management, data analysis, agile methodology or customer relationship management, the system is looking for those exact terms or close equivalents in the applications it receives.
If your CV describes equivalent experience using different language it may not register as a match even though a human reader would see the relevance immediately.
The fix for this is more straightforward than it sounds but it requires a deliberate step that most candidates skip entirely.
Before you finalise any application read the job description carefully and identify every specific skill, qualification and experience term it uses. Then read your CV and check whether those same terms appear in your document. Where they do not and where you genuinely have the relevant experience described differently, update the language in your CV to match the terminology the employer is using.
This is not dishonesty. It is communication. You are ensuring that the system can connect your genuine experience to what the employer is asking for rather than assuming the software will do that inference for you.
The Formatting Mistakes That Break ATS Parsing
Beyond keywords the second major category of ATS problems is formatting. This is where a lot of candidates with genuinely strong CVs get eliminated purely because of how their document is structured rather than what it contains.
ATS software reads CV content by parsing the text in your document in a specific way. It expects a linear flow of information with standard section headings it recognises. When a CV is formatted in a way that disrupts that parsing the software either misreads the content or cannot process it correctly and the application gets filtered out or ranked poorly.
The formatting elements that most commonly cause ATS problems are things that look visually appealing to a human reader but are technically problematic for automated systems.
Multiple column layouts are one of the most common culprits. A two column CV where your contact details and skills are in a sidebar on the left while your work experience is in the main column on the right looks clean and professional to the eye. But many ATS systems read documents left to right, line by line, which means they read a line from the sidebar followed by a line from the main content followed by the next sidebar line. The result is completely scrambled text that the system cannot interpret correctly.
Tables used to organise information create similar problems. Text inside table cells is often misread or skipped entirely by ATS parsers.
Headers and footers are another issue. If you have put your contact details in the document header because it looks tidy the ATS may not read that section at all which means it processes your application without knowing who you are.
Graphics, icons, logos and images embedded in the CV are invisible to ATS software. If you are using icons to indicate your skill levels or a small graphic element to separate sections those elements do not exist as far as the system is concerned. Any text that is part of an image rather than actual document text is also invisible.
Unusual fonts and heavily decorated templates can cause parsing errors in some systems even when the content itself is correct.
The solution is a single column layout with standard section headings, no tables, no graphics, no text boxes and all your content as actual document text rather than embedded images. This sounds like it produces a boring looking CV and compared to some of the visually elaborate templates available it does look plainer. But it is readable by both ATS software and human recruiters which is the only combination that actually matters.
How to Check Whether Your CV Has ATS Problems
You do not have to guess whether your CV is likely to have problems with ATS systems. There are tools specifically designed to test this.
Jobscan is the most widely used of these. You paste your CV text and the job description you are applying for into the platform and it analyses how well your CV matches the keywords and requirements from the job description. It also flags formatting issues that are likely to cause problems with ATS parsing. The free version gives you a limited number of scans per month which is usually enough for the job searches most people are running.
Resume Worded is another option that analyses your CV against ATS criteria and gives specific suggestions for improvements. It is particularly useful for identifying vague language that a human might accept but that an ATS would not score positively.
For a quick manual check you can also copy the text of your CV and paste it into a plain text editor like Notepad. What you see in the plain text version is roughly what an ATS sees when it parses your document. If the content looks garbled, if sections are out of order or if text is missing that was present in the formatted version you have formatting problems that need fixing.
The Section Headings That ATS Systems Expect
This is a small detail that creates surprisingly large problems when it is wrong.
ATS software recognises standard CV section headings because it has been trained on thousands of CVs that use consistent terminology. If you use non standard headings the system may not correctly categorise the content under them.
The headings that work reliably are Work Experience or Professional Experience rather than My Journey or Career Highlights. Education rather than Academic Background. Skills rather than What I Bring. Summary or Professional Summary rather than About Me or Personal Statement.
These distinctions sound trivial but they are not when the system is trying to find your work history or your qualifications and is looking for specific heading terms to locate those sections.
What to Do With Visually Designed CV Templates
Many people spend time and money on professionally designed CV templates from platforms like Canva, Etsy or similar sources. Some of these templates are genuinely beautiful and would impress any human reader who saw them.
A significant proportion of them are also partially or completely unreadable by ATS software.
The practical approach if you want to use a designed template is to have two versions of your CV. A clean plain text version formatted for ATS compatibility that you submit through online application portals at larger companies. And your designed visual version that you use when you are sending your CV directly to a person, when you are handing it over at an in person meeting or when you are applying to a smaller company that you know reviews applications manually.
This takes a little extra effort to maintain both versions but it ensures you are not being screened out by software at companies that use ATS while also making the best impression in contexts where a human is reading your document from the beginning.
The Mistakes That Summarise Most ATS Failures
Submitting a CV with a two column layout to any large company application portal. This is the single most common ATS formatting mistake and it eliminates more genuinely qualified candidates than any other factor.
Using the same CV for every application without adjusting the keywords to match the specific job description. The ATS at each company is running against the keywords from that specific role not a generic professional standard.
Putting important information in text boxes, headers, footers or image elements that ATS software cannot read. If your email address is in a header or your key skills are in a designed sidebar element the system may not find them.
Using creative job titles in your own CV to describe past roles. If your previous employer called you a Customer Experience Ninja but the industry standard term is Customer Service Manager use the standard term in your CV. The ATS is looking for standard terminology.
Not including enough relevant keywords from the job description because it feels like keyword stuffing. There is a genuine difference between stuffing keywords artificially and ensuring your genuine experience is described using the same terminology the employer uses. The latter is necessary and legitimate.
Where This Leaves You
The ATS reality does not make job searching more complicated than it needs to be. It just requires one additional step in your process that most candidates are currently skipping.
Read the job description carefully before you finalise each application. Identify the key terms. Check that your CV contains them in the context of your actual experience. Make sure your formatting is clean and single column with no elements that would confuse automated parsing. Run it through Jobscan or a similar tool if you want a more thorough check.
That process takes maybe twenty minutes per application on top of what you are already doing. For roles at companies you genuinely want to work for that twenty minutes is worth significantly more than sending a visually polished CV that gets eliminated before anyone reads it.
My colleague from the beginning of this story rebuilt his CV in a clean single column format, ran the job description keywords through Jobscan and updated his language to match the terminology of each role he was applying for. His callback rate from large company applications improved noticeably within the first two weeks of applying with the updated version. The experience on his CV had not changed. The software could finally read it properly and that turned out to be the only thing that needed to change.
