ATS-friendly CV: a format that online application systems can read

How an applicant tracking system reads your CV

When you apply for a graduate scheme, a placement or even a part-time job with a larger employer, you usually do it through an online application system rather than by emailing a CV to a person. Behind that system sits an applicant tracking system, or ATS: software that collects every application, stores it in a database and lets the recruitment team sort, filter and search through it.

The first thing the software does with your CV is turn it into plain text. It then tries to work out what each piece of text is: which line is your name, which block is your education, where each job starts and ends, and which words describe your skills. That information is saved into fields, and those fields are what recruiters see in lists and search results.

Recruiters then search. They might look for a degree subject, a skill such as Excel or Python, a type of experience such as customer service, or simply the job title. Some systems also rank or highlight applications that match the advert closely. Exactly how this works varies a lot from one employer and product to another, so be wary of anyone who claims to know the precise rules.

Two things follow from this, and they shape everything else in this guide. First, your CV has to survive the conversion into text with its order and meaning intact. Second, the words a recruiter is likely to search for need to be in your CV, written the way the employer writes them. An ATS-friendly CV is not a trick; it is a clear, well-organised CV that a machine and a busy person can both read quickly.

A layout that parses reliably

The safest layout is also the plainest. Use a single column that runs from top to bottom. Two-column designs, sidebars, tables and text boxes can be read left to right across the page, which mixes your skills into your job titles or splits a bullet point in half. Icons, skill bars and star ratings carry no text at all, so to the software they are empty space.

Put your contact details in the body of the page, not in the document header or footer, because some systems skip those areas. One line is enough: name, phone number, email address, town or city, and a LinkedIn URL if you have a profile worth showing. You do not need your full postal address.

Use the headings employers expect: Personal Profile, Education, Work Experience, Skills, and, if you have them, Projects, Volunteering or Positions of Responsibility. Creative headings like "Where I have been" look fresh to you but give the software nothing to recognise.

Choose a common font such as Arial, Calibri or Helvetica at 10 to 12 points for body text, with slightly larger, bold section headings. Keep formatting to bold, simple bullet points and consistent dates. Write dates in one style throughout, for example "Jun 2025 – Sep 2025", so the system can tell how long each role lasted.

Save the file in the format the portal asks for. When there is a choice, a .docx file or a PDF exported directly from Word or Google Docs both normally work. What causes trouble is a PDF that is really a picture: a scan, a photo of a printout or an export from a design tool that flattens text into an image. A quick test is to open your PDF and try to highlight a sentence. If you cannot select the words, neither can the software.

Keep it to two pages at most. For most students one full page is plenty, and graduates with placements and part-time work can use a second page. Finally, leave out the things a UK CV does not need: no photo, no date of birth, no age, no marital status and no nationality. They take up space, they are not relevant to whether you can do the job and an image is unreadable to the system anyway.

Section by section: what a UK student CV needs

Personal profile. Three or four lines at the top that say who you are, what you are applying for and what you offer. Name the degree, the type of role and two or three strengths the advert asks for. Avoid empty phrases like "hardworking team player"; replace them with evidence.

Final-year BSc Geography student at the University of Manchester (predicted 2:1) applying for graduate planning roles. Experienced in GIS mapping and survey data analysis from a dissertation on urban flood risk, with two years of part-time customer service work.

Education. List your degree first: the full title, university, dates and your classification or predicted grade, for example "BA History, University of Bristol, Sep 2023 – Jun 2026, predicted First". Add three to five relevant modules or a dissertation title if they match the role. Below that, give your A-levels on one line with subjects and grades. Include UCAS points only when the advert sets a requirement, and drop GCSEs to a single summary line or leave them out once you are at university.

Work experience. Use reverse chronological order, with your job title, the organisation, the location and the dates on one line. Under each role write two to four bullet points that start with an action verb and show a result where you can.

• Weak: "Responsible for helping customers."
• Better: "Resolved customer queries at a busy service desk, handling refunds and escalating complaints to the duty manager."
• Weak: "Did some data entry."
• Better: "Updated and checked 300 supplier records a week in Excel, cutting duplicate entries before the quarterly audit."

Part-time jobs count. Bar work, retail, tutoring and care work all show reliability, communication and time management, and many graduate employers value them. Placements and internships go in the same section, or under their own heading such as "Placement Year" if you did a full sandwich year.

Societies, volunteering and positions of responsibility. Committee roles, sports clubs, student ambassador work and volunteering are often where students show leadership and organisation. Treat them like jobs, with a title, dates and bullets:

• "Organised a charity quiz for 120 students as events officer, raising money for a local food bank."

Skills. A short list of hard skills, written as the advert writes them: "Microsoft Excel (pivot tables, VLOOKUP)", "Python", "Adobe InDesign", "Spanish (fluent)". Soft skills are more convincing when shown in your bullet points than listed here, so keep this section to specific, checkable abilities.

Interests are optional. Include them only if they add something, such as running a blog related to the industry or a long-running commitment that shows discipline.

Tailoring keywords from the job advert, honestly

Every advert tells you what the recruiter is likely to search for. Read it slowly and pick out three kinds of terms: hard skills and tools (Excel, SQL, CAD, Salesforce), qualifications and requirements (a 2:1 in a numerate subject, a full driving licence) and the language the employer uses for the role itself (graduate analyst, trainee, assistant, summer intern).

Then compare that list with your CV. Wherever you have genuinely done something the advert describes, use the advert's wording. If it says "stakeholder management" and you wrote "worked with lots of different people", rewrite the bullet to describe the stakeholders and what you did with them. If it says "data visualisation" and you built dashboards in Power BI, say so in those words.

The rule is simple: only add a term if you could talk about it confidently in an interview. Copying the whole advert into your CV, hiding keywords in white text or listing tools you have opened once can make you look like a strong match on paper, but recruiters read the CV too, and a gap shows up quickly. Honest tailoring takes ten to fifteen minutes per application and makes your CV better for both the software and the person.

A practical method is to keep a master CV with everything you have done, then for each application move the most relevant bullet points to the top of each role, adjust the personal profile to name the role and make sure the skills section reflects the advert. Leave the layout alone.

Graduate schemes, placements and part-time jobs

Graduate schemes and placement programmes at large employers often use an application form as well as, or instead of, a CV upload. You may be asked to type in your education, grades and work history field by field, answer motivational questions, then upload a CV at the end. Some forms try to fill themselves in from your CV, and that is where a clean layout pays off: if the system reads your CV correctly, you spend less time retyping and correcting dates.

Even when the form collects the same information, recruiters often open the uploaded CV when they shortlist. Make sure the two match exactly: the same dates, the same job titles and the same grades. Small differences look careless.

Many graduate and placement adverts list minimum requirements, such as a degree classification or particular subjects. Put those details where they are easy to find, near the top of your education section. If you are applying for a placement year, make your expected graduation date and the length of placement you are available for clear.

For part-time jobs alongside study, a one-page CV is usually right. Lead with availability if the advert mentions shifts, put customer-facing or relevant work first and keep your personal profile to two lines. Large retailers, hospitality groups and supermarket chains often use the same type of online system as graduate recruiters, so the same layout rules apply.

Before and after: an example CV that the system could not read

Hannah Patel is a fictional final-year Economics student at a university in Leeds, applying for graduate analyst schemes. Her first CV was built in a free online design tool: two columns, a photo, skill bars and a header holding her contact details. When she ran it through a checker against an analyst advert, the score was 50. Her email address was missing from the extracted text, her internship and supermarket job had merged into one block, and only a few of the advert's key terms appeared.

Her original work experience read like this:

• "Internship, Summer 2025: did some data work in Excel; helped the finance team with different tasks."
• "Shop job, 2022 - now: worked on the tills; helped customers."

She rebuilt the CV in a single column with standard headings and moved her contact details into the page body. She wrote a personal profile naming the degree, the predicted 2:1 and the analyst roles she was targeting. Then she rewrote each role with a full title, organisation, location and consistent dates:

• "Summer Analyst Intern, Finance Team, housing association, Leeds, Jun 2025 – Sep 2025: cleaned and analysed rent arrears data for 4,200 tenancies in Excel using pivot tables and XLOOKUP; built a monthly cash-flow forecasting model the finance team now uses for budget planning."
• "Customer Assistant (part-time), supermarket, Leeds, Oct 2022 – present: handle queries and complaints at the service desk; trained five new starters; trusted with end-of-day cash-up."

Her skills section went from "Microsoft Office, communication, teamwork" to specific tools and methods that the advert mentioned and she had actually used: Excel, Stata, data analysis, forecasting, report writing and stakeholder communication. Her role as treasurer of the Economics Society, which had been one vague line, became its own entry showing she managed a budget.

Checked again against the same advert, the CV scored 86. Nothing in it was invented. The information had been there all along; it was just hidden by the layout and buried under vague wording.

ATS-friendly CV checklist

Run through this list before each application:

• One column, no tables, text boxes, sidebars, icons or skill bars.
• Contact details as plain text in the body of the page: name, phone, email, town, LinkedIn if useful.
• Standard headings: Personal Profile, Education, Work Experience, Skills.
• A common font at 10 to 12 points, consistent bold headings and simple bullets.
• Dates in one consistent format, such as "Jun 2025 – Sep 2025".
• Degree title, university, dates and classification or predicted grade near the top.
• A-levels on one line; UCAS points only if the advert asks for them.
• Bullet points that start with action verbs and show results.
• Part-time jobs, placements, societies and volunteering included where relevant.
• Skills written in the advert's own wording, only where they are true.
• No photo, date of birth, age, marital status or nationality.
• Two pages at most, and one page if that is all you need.
• A text-based PDF or .docx, whichever the portal asks for, with a clear file name such as "Hannah-Patel-CV.pdf".
• CV details that match exactly what you typed into the application form.

Test your CV, then tailor it

Once your CV follows the checklist, test it before you hit submit. Our free ATS CV checker reads your file in your browser and shows whether the format, contact details, sections, skills and personal profile come through cleanly. Paste in the job advert and it also compares your keywords with that specific role, then gives you an indicative score and a list of fixes. A score is a guide to what to improve, not a promise of an interview, but it is a quick way to catch a broken layout or a missing skill before a recruiter does.

If you would rather not rebuild the CV by hand, StudentCV can do the heavy lifting. Upload your current CV or LinkedIn profile, or type your details in, and paste the advert. It rewrites and tailors your CV to that role in a clean, ATS-friendly layout and shows the score against the advert. You can see and edit the whole CV for free, and only pay when you want to download it as a PDF or Word file, as a one-off purchase with no subscription.