How ATS Actually Works

75% of resumes are rejected before a human sees them. Here's exactly how Greenhouse, Lever, and Workday parse your resume — and what you can do about it.

What ATS Actually Does

Applicant Tracking Systems don't “read” your resume like a human. They parse it — extracting structured data into database fields.

ATS Extracts

Name, email, phone
Work history (company, title, dates)
Education (degree, school, year)
Skills (matched against JD keywords)

ATS Can't Read

Tables, columns, text boxes
Headers and footers
Images, logos, graphics
Fancy fonts and special characters

Major ATS Systems

Greenhouse

28%

Stripe, Airbnb, Shopify, HubSpot

Lever

18%

Netflix, Shopify, Twilio, Atlassian

Workday

22%

Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Target

iCIMS

12%

Fortune 500 companies, large enterprises

SmartRecruiters

Visa, LinkedIn, Bosch, Equinix

BambooHR

Small-to-mid companies, startups

ATS Do's and Don'ts

Single-column layout

Two-column or multi-column layouts

ATS reads left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Columns scramble the reading order.

Standard headings: Experience, Education, Skills

Creative headings: 'Where I've Been', 'My Journey'

ATS looks for exact heading keywords to categorize your data.

Plain text or Word-exported PDF

Canva, Figma, or Photoshop PDFs

Design-tool PDFs embed text as images. ATS sees a blank page.

Standard fonts: Arial, Calibri, Garamond

Decorative or custom fonts

Non-standard fonts can cause character recognition errors.

Keywords from the job description

Keyword stuffing in white text

Modern ATS detects hidden text and flags it as spam.

Contact info in the document body

Contact info in headers/footers

Many ATS systems skip header/footer content entirely.

Visual Comparison

ATS-Optimized Resume

SARAH CHEN

San Francisco, CA · sarah.chen@email.com · (555) 123-4567 · linkedin.com/in/sarahchen · github.com/sarahchen

✅ Clean header, no photo, all contact info in body (ATS reads this)

EXPERIENCE

Senior Software EngineerJan 2022 – Present

Stripe · San Francisco, CA

•Architected event-driven payment processing system using Go and Kafka, reducing transaction latency by 45% and handling 2M+ daily events
•Led migration from monolith to 12 microservices on Kubernetes, improving deployment frequency from weekly to 15x/day with zero-downtime releases
•Mentored 4 junior engineers through structured code review program, resulting in 3 promotions within 18 months

✅ Action verb + specific tech + measurable result

SKILLS

Languages: Go, TypeScript, Python, Java, SQL · Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS) · Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch · Practices: CI/CD, TDD, System Design, Agile

✅ Categorized, keyword-rich, ATS-parseable plain text

EDUCATION

B.S. Computer Science2018

University of California, Berkeley · GPA: 3.8/4.0

Common Mistakes Resume

✨ Sarah Chen ✨

📍 SF Bay Area · 📧 sarah.chen@email.com · 📱 (555) 123-4567

❌ Photo = bias risk + ATS can't parse. Emojis break parsing. Decorative font fails OCR.

🏢 Where I've Worked

❌ Non-standard heading — ATS looks for "Experience"

Senior Software EngineerJan 2022 – Present

Stripe · San Francisco, CA

•Responsible for backend development and maintaining microservices
•Helped with the migration to Kubernetes and Docker
•Worked with a team of engineers on various projects and features

❌ Vague duties, no metrics, no impact. 'Responsible for' = red flag

💡 My Skills & Superpowers

Go 🚀TypeScript 💻Python 🐍Kubernetes ☸️AWS ☁️React ⚛️Docker 🐳Leadership 🏆

❌ Emojis break ATS parsing. Pill badges = columns/graphics that ATS can't read

🎓 Education

B.S. Computer Science2018

University of California, Berkeley · GPA: 3.8/4.0

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