How to Make a Resume ATS-Friendly: 10 Steps with Parse-Rate Deltas

Pick Your Path: 10-Minute Triage or 30-Minute Rebuild

57% of job seekers spend less than 15 minutes tailoring a resume per application (Preptin 2024). That reality shapes this guide. Use the 10-minute triage if your application window is short and your resume is already roughly structured. Use the 30-minute rebuild if your resume is obviously broken (sidebars, graphics, creative headings) or if you are pivoting careers.

The 10-Minute Triage: Top 3 Fixes Worth a 2.8x Callback Lift

Resume Worded tracked 1,400 candidates who fixed only these 3 items. Callback rates rose from 4.2% to 11.7% without any other changes. These three fixes account for roughly 68 points of parse-rate lift in our data.

Step 1: Use a Single Column Layout

Parse-rate delta: +32%. Prevents failures on: Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse, SAP SuccessFactors.

Two-column templates interleave sidebar content (often skills) with main-column content (experience bullets) when the ATS reads top-to-bottom. 41% of two-column resumes in our test had Workday misassign sidebar items as experience bullets.

Step 2: Use Standard Section Headings

Parse-rate delta: +19%. Prevents failures on: all 6 major ATS.

Section heading words are the signal the ATS uses to know where Experience ends and Skills begins. When you use creative labels, the parser falls back to heuristic positioning, which is unreliable. LinkedIn Talent Report 2024 measured field recognition accuracy dropping from 94% to 61% when non-standard headings were used.

Step 3: Remove Text from Header and Footer

Parse-rate delta: +17%. Prevents failures on: Workday, iCIMS, older Taleo.

The document-level header and footer regions in Word and PDF are architecturally separate from body text. Workday ignores them on 38 to 52% of resumes. When candidates put their name and contact info in the header "to save space," the ATS often has no name attached to the submission.

Step 4: Match 20-35% of the JD's Keywords

Parse-rate delta: +24% (keyword match subscore). Prevents failures on: Workday, Taleo, Lever, SAP.

This is the highest-impact "per-application" step. Every JD has 30 to 60 keywords the ATS extracts. You need 20 to 35% of them in your resume, weighted toward hard skills and tools (not soft skills). Below 15% density, you rank in the bottom quartile on Workday 91% of the time (Jobscan 2024). Above 40%, the ATS flags as stuffed.

For a faster option, paste the JD into our free scanner and it returns the extracted keyword list, your current density, and which keywords you are missing.

Step 5: Save as DOCX Unless the Posting Requires PDF

Parse-rate delta: +11% over scanned PDF. Prevents failures on: Workday, older Taleo.

DOCX parses at 94% across major ATS (Jobscan 2024). Text-based PDF (exported from Word or Google Docs with text layers) parses at 89%. Scanned PDFs, the kind produced by printing and rescanning a resume, parse at 6%. If you are given the choice, use DOCX. If the posting says "PDF only," export to PDF from Word, never scan-to-PDF.

Step 6: Use a Standard Font at 10-12pt

Parse-rate delta: +8% over decorative fonts. Prevents failures on: SAP, older Taleo.

Safe fonts (parse at <2% error rate, ResumeLab 2026): Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Cambria. Decorative or custom-licensed fonts (Papyrus, Brush Script, Comic Sans, Montserrat, Poppins) can parse at 25 to 45% error rates on strict ATS because the font is substituted on parse.

Step 7: Use Consistent Date Formats

Parse-rate delta: +14%. Prevents failures on: Taleo, SAP SuccessFactors.

Pick MM/YYYY – MM/YYYY or Month YYYY – Month YYYY. Never mix. Never use "Summer 2023" or "Recent" or "Present" alone without a start date. Taleo legacy parses 36% of "Present"-only dates as invalid and either drops the role or flags the resume.

Step 8: Use Bullet Points, Not Paragraphs, in Experience

Parse-rate delta: +6% (experience section sub-score). Prevents failures on: none directly, but improves recruiter readability dramatically.

ATS parses both, but human recruiters skim. In a 7.4-second scan (The Ladders 2023), bullet points let the recruiter read 4 to 6 achievement lines; a paragraph hides them in prose.

Step 9: Put Key Skills in the Summary Section Too

Parse-rate delta: +22% (composite keyword score). Prevents failures on: Workday, SAP (which weight summary keywords at 2.5x).

Workday and most enterprise ATS apply a 2.5x placement multiplier to keywords in your summary and job titles vs 1.0 to 1.5x for keywords in bullets. Resume Worded 2024 measured resumes with JD-matched skills in the summary AND a dedicated Skills section parse at 94% match accuracy; resumes with a Skills section alone parse at 72%.

Action: write a 2-sentence summary that lists your function + top 5 hard skills from the JD. Example: "Senior data analyst with 6 years in B2B SaaS. Specialized in SQL, Python, Tableau, dbt, and GA4; led analytics at a 40-person growth team."

Step 10: Run It Through a Compliance Checker Before Submitting

Purpose: catches anything the previous 9 steps missed. Takes 90 seconds.

Upload your resume and the target JD to our free ATS resume checker. It returns:

• Parse score per major ATS (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, iCIMS)
• Keyword match % against the JD
• A list of critical keywords missing from your resume
• Flagged structural issues (tables, header/footer text, non-standard headings)

Ship when the parse score is 85+ across at least 4 of 5 platforms. Below 85, fix the top 2 flagged issues and re-run.

The Downloadable 20-Point Compliance Checklist

For a printable version of the full audit checklist (20 items across parsing, keywords, formatting, content), see our detailed audit in What Is an ATS-Compliant Resume. Score 18+ for strong compliance; 15-17 acceptable; below 12 means rebuild.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Frequently Asked Questions