What an ATS is
An ATS is the software a company uses to post jobs, take applications and move candidates through interviews. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Oracle and SuccessFactors are among the common ones. When you apply, it stores your resume file and a parsed copy of it, the fields it read out of the file.
What the parser reads
- Contact details: your name, usually from the first line, an email, a phone number, a city and state, and links such as LinkedIn or a portfolio.
- Sections by their headings: Experience, Education, Skills, and their common variants.
- Each role as a title, an employer and a start and end date. Years of experience are often worked out from these dates.
- Schools, degrees, fields of study and dates.
- Skills, from a skills section and from the text of your roles.
What it misses
Parsers read text in order. Anything that breaks that order, or hides text from it, is where they fail:
- Contact details placed in the page header or footer, which many parsers skip.
- Text boxes, tables and columns, which can be read out of order or not at all.
- Pictures, icons and a resume saved as an image, which have no text to read.
- A link shown only as a word (“Portfolio”), whose address the parser never sees.
- An employer set apart from the title only by bold type. Bold is invisible to a parser, so the two run together.
- Roles with no dates, and headings with unusual names (“Where I've been”).
Does the ATS reject resumes automatically?
Mostly not, in the way it is often described. The common claim that an ATS throws out most resumes before a human sees them has no solid source behind it. Most systems do not score and discard resumes on their own; recruiters search and sort the applicants. What does screen people out automatically is knockout questions: a required answer on the form, such as work authorization, a license or willingness to relocate, that the company set to decline anyone who answers the other way.
So a resume that parses badly is rarely deleted. It is filed with missing fields, so it does not come up when a recruiter searches for the title or skill you have, and it looks thin when they open it.
How to make sure it reads
Keep one column, put your contact details in the body of the page, use plain headings, give every role its dates, and write links out in full. The ATS-friendly resume format guide goes through each rule, and the free ATS resume checker shows what a parser pulls from your own file.
