ATS Resumes: What Applicant Tracking Systems Actually Do
Almost everything written about beating the ATS is guesswork stacked on a statistic nobody can source. This guide does the opposite: it starts from what the software vendors publish about their own parsers, and only then says what to do about your resume.
What an applicant tracking system is
An applicant tracking system is the database an employer runs its hiring in. It receives the application, stores the file, extracts what it can into structured fields - name, employers, dates, contact details - and gives recruiters a way to search, tag, rank, and reject the pile. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, iCIMS and Ashby are the names you will meet most often.
Two things follow from that description, and they matter more than any trick. First, the system is a filing cabinet with a search box, not a judge: the decisions are made by people using its filters. Second, the quality of what the system extracted from your file determines whether those filters can find you at all.
Scale is real. Jobscan, which sells resume-scanning software and therefore has an interest in the number, published its own manual count of Fortune 500 career pages: it detected an applicant tracking system for 97.8% of them in its June 2025 review. In the Harvard Business School and Accenture study Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, more than 90% of surveyed employers said they use their recruiting management system to filter or rank candidates before a person looks.
What the vendors document about parsing
This is the part almost nobody quotes, even though it is public. Workday's own administrator documentation says that "Resume parsing results can vary based on resume format and order of words" and advises, in its own words, that "For best results, use resumes that don't have images or image-based styles." The same page notes that Workday does not auto-fill certain fields at all, naming Languages and Skills among them.
Greenhouse publishes the file types a candidate may upload: .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf and .txt, with a ceiling of 100 MB. That is a wider list than the folklore suggests, and PDF is on it.
Read those two documents together and the practical picture is clear. Your file will almost certainly be accepted. What varies is how much of it survives extraction - and the vendors themselves point at layout and at text stored as an image as the reason it varies.
The statistic we are not going to repeat
You have read that three quarters of resumes are rejected before a human sees them. We went looking for the study behind that number and could not find one: it is quoted everywhere and sourced nowhere we could verify. So we are not going to print it, and you should be suspicious of any resume site that does.
The honest version is duller and more useful. Employers say they filter and rank with this software before reading - that part is documented. Whether your particular application died in a filter, in a recruiter's ten-second skim, or in a hiring manager's shortlist is something nobody outside that company can tell you. Optimize for the things you control.
What makes a resume parse cleanly
Everything below follows from the vendor documentation above or from what a parser has to do mechanically. None of it requires knowing which system an employer runs.
One column, top to bottom
A parser reads a document in the order the file stores it, which in a two-column layout is rarely the order your eye follows. Sidebars are where dates detach from the jobs they belong to. If you want a visual template, at least keep the reading order linear.
Real text, never an image
A logo, a skills chart, a header saved as a graphic: to an extractor these are blank space. Workday says it plainly - avoid resumes with images or image-based styles. This is the single biggest difference between a resume that parses and one that arrives half empty.
Standard section headings
Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications. Not "Where I Have Made An Impact". The parser is matching headings it knows against a list, and a clever title is a heading it cannot classify - so the section under it may be filed nowhere.
Dates written the same way every time
Pick one format - Mar 2022 to Present, or 03/2022 - and use it for every role. Mixed formats and creative ranges like "summer of 2021" are where employment timelines come out garbled or missing.
The words the posting uses, in your own sentences
If the job says Kubernetes and you wrote k8s, a keyword search for the former will not find you. Use the posting's vocabulary where it is honestly yours, inside the bullets that describe the work, not in a hidden block of white text at the bottom.
A file the recruiter can also read
Greenhouse accepts PDF, Word, RTF and plain text. A PDF exported from a text editor keeps its text layer and is safe; a PDF that is really a scan is an image and is not. When an application form asks for Word specifically, send Word.
What an ATS score can and cannot tell you
Any tool that gives your resume a number out of a hundred - ours included - is running its own checklist. It is not talking to Workday. No applicant tracking vendor publishes a scoring formula, and none of them endorses anybody's score, so a score is a proxy for craft, not a prediction of outcome.
That is why the honest answer to "is 70 a good score" is: it depends entirely on which checks the tool ran. Our own score is ten explicit checks - contact details, a summary, experience with enough detail, bullets that open with action verbs, quantified results, a skills section, education, total length, no first-person pronouns, and keyword overlap with a job description if you paste one. A 70 there means several of those ten are missing, and the tool will tell you which. That list is the value; the number is just how it is displayed.
Treat any score as a checklist that has been ticked off for you. If a tool gives you a number without telling you what failed, the number is decoration.
A ten-minute pass before you submit
Do this once per application, in this order.
Read the posting twice and mark the repeated nouns
The requirements the employer states twice, or states first, are the ones the shortlist will be built from. Those are the terms that belong in your summary and your top three bullets - if they are true of you.
Copy your own PDF into a plain text editor
Select all, copy, paste. What you see is roughly what an extractor sees. If the order scrambles, if the skills vanish, or if the whole thing pastes as nothing, you have found your problem before the employer did.
Check the top third against the job title
Your headline and summary are what a recruiter reads in the first seconds and what a search hits first. If the posting says Backend Engineer and your headline says Full Stack Developer, decide which one is true and make it match.
Confirm the contact block is text, not a header
Email and phone placed in a document header or a decorative box are the most common fields to go missing. Keep them in the body of the page, on their own line, in ordinary text.
Questions people ask
What does ATS-friendly actually mean?
It means the text of your resume survives extraction and the structure is recognizable: one column, standard headings, real text rather than images, consistent dates, and a file type the employer accepts. It is a statement about machine readability, not about design taste, and no template can be certified compliant because there is no standard to be compliant with.
Is it safe to send a PDF?
Yes, when it is a text PDF rather than a scan. Greenhouse lists .pdf among its accepted uploads alongside .doc, .docx, .rtf and .txt. The failure case is not the extension, it is a PDF whose content is an image of a page: no extractor can read that, and neither can a recruiter searching for your name.
Is 70 a good ATS score?
There is no industry ATS score, so the number only means something inside the tool that produced it. What matters is the list of checks behind it. On our score, 70 means several of ten specific checks failed and each one is named - fix those and the number follows. A score with no itemized list behind it tells you nothing.
Do two-column templates break parsing?
Not always, and that is the problem: they fail unpredictably, depending on the parser and how the file stores its reading order. A sidebar that carries only skills and contact details usually survives; one that splits your work history across columns is a genuine risk. If the role matters to you, send the single-column version.
Should I paste the whole job description into my resume?
No. Keyword stuffing, white text and hidden blocks are visible in the extracted text a recruiter reads, and they read as dishonest rather than as clever. Take the vocabulary the posting uses for the work you have genuinely done, and write it into the bullets where that work is described.
Does the file name matter?
Not to the parser, but to the human who downloads forty files into one folder. Firstname-Lastname-Role.pdf costs nothing and makes yours findable on a recruiter's desktop, which is a small edge in exactly the moment where small edges are all that is available.
Sources
Every figure quoted above, with the document it came from. If a claim about hiring is not on this list, it is craft advice, not research.
- Workday - Concept: Resume Parsing (administrator guide)
The source of the two quotations about parsing results varying by format and word order, and about avoiding images and image-based styles.
- Greenhouse Support - Supported formats for resumes and other candidate uploads
Lists .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf and .txt as accepted uploads, up to 100 MB.
- Fuller, Raman, Sage-Gavin and Hines - Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent (Harvard Business School and Accenture, September 2021)
Page 5: more than 90% of surveyed employers use their recruiting management system to filter or rank candidates, 94% for middle-skills and 92% for high-skills roles.
- Jobscan - 99% of Fortune 500 companies use applicant tracking systems
A vendor's own manual review of Fortune 500 career pages, dated 2 June 2025, reporting a detectable applicant tracking system at 97.8% of them.
Keep going
Run the ten checks on your own resume.
Paste or upload what you have. The score names what is missing, and the editor is right there to fix it.