CVs and ATS software: what actually helps automated reading

An ATS (applicant tracking system) is software for managing job applications. Its first purpose is to receive, store and organise applications, move them between the people involved and keep a history of the exchanges.

Many of these systems also extract text from the documents they receive, to populate fields such as name, experience and skills, and to allow keyword searches. The quality of that extraction varies considerably from one product to another.

Two points usually left unsaid. First, not every employer uses one: in Switzerland, plenty of small and medium companies still receive dossiers by email and read them directly. Second, the decision stays human; keyword filtering helps sort, it does not hire.

You will often read that a precise percentage of CVs is « automatically rejected by ATS ». Those figures circulate without a verifiable source and change from one article to the next. We will not quote any: what follows is based on how this software is documented to work, not on unverifiable statistics.

The goal is not to please a machine. It is to stop correct information from becoming unreadable because of formatting.

• Standard section headings: "Work experience", "Education", "Skills". Creative headings get filed badly.
• Real text, not images: a CV exported as an image, or with contact details inside a logo, reads poorly.
• Important information in the body of the document, not in a header or footer, which some parsers ignore.
• A simple layout, ideally single-column: multiple columns are sometimes read out of order.
• Consistent, explicit dates in a uniform format (for example 03/2021 - 08/2024).
• A PDF containing selectable text, unless the advert asks for another format.
• Common fonts, and no decorative characters inside job titles.

A quick test: open your PDF, select everything, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. What you get resembles what a parser receives. If the result is empty, scrambled or incomplete, the formatting is the cause.

Reusing the vocabulary of the advert is useful, on one condition: that it is true of you. If the posting says « agile project management » and you worked in Scrum, writing both phrasings is legitimate, because they describe the same reality.

Adding skills you do not have, or hiding keywords in white text, works against you: the first is uncovered in the interview, and the second is treated as manipulation by the recruiters who spot it.

• Write acronyms and their full form at least once: "ERP (enterprise resource planning)".
• Name tools precisely, using the advert's spelling when it is correct.
• Attach every skill to an experience where it was used, rather than to an isolated list.

Whether an ATS is involved or not, a human decides. A line describing a verifiable result carries more weight than a list of responsibilities.

Task description« Responsible for customer support. »Achievement« Customer support for 400 accounts; built a response library that cut first-reply time from two days to four hours. »

Only quote numbers you can explain. An honest order of magnitude beats an invented precision.

No method, no tool and no provider can guarantee an « ATS score ». The reasons are concrete:

• there are many such systems and they behave differently;
• each employer configures them against its own criteria;
• most do not produce a public score, and those that compute one do not publish it;
• passing a filter never replaces genuinely fitting the role.

What you can reasonably aim for is a CV readable by a machine and by a person, faithful to your actual background and aligned with the requirements of the advert. That is the principle behind TalentFlowCV: the tool reorders and rephrases from your real CV, highlights every adaptation together with its reason, and does not invent experience. You approve before anything is sent, and no interview is guaranteed.

For the written part of the dossier, see our guide to cover letters in Switzerland.