What Is an ATS? How Applicant Tracking Systems Read Your Resume

An ATS is the database behind a company's hiring process. Well-known examples include Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Greenhouse, Lever and iCIMS. Whatever the brand, most systems do the same core jobs:

• Collect applications from the careers site, job boards and email.
• Parse each resume: extract its text and sort it into structured fields.
• Store candidates so recruiters can find them again, sometimes for other roles months later.
• Search and filter candidates by keywords, job titles, location, availability or answers to screening questions.
• Manage the workflow: stages, notes, interview scheduling and emails to candidates.

In other words, the ATS is mostly an organisation tool for recruiters. Decisions about who gets an interview are, in the large majority of cases, still made by people.

When you upload your file, the parser extracts the text and tries to recognise each part of your resume. A well-parsed resume becomes something like this in the recruiter's database:

Name: Sarah Martin · Current title: Marketing Coordinator · Employer: Northwind Ltd · Dates: 03/2022 – present · Skills: Google Analytics, HubSpot, SEO, copywriting · Languages: English (native), French (B2)

Parsing works best when your resume is predictable. It struggles when:

• important information is inside an image, an icon or a chart (skill bars, logos, a photo of your contact details);
• section headings are unusual ("My journey" instead of "Work experience");
• dates are missing or written in different formats across the document;
• the file is a scanned image rather than a text-based PDF or Word document;
• contact details only appear in the page header or footer, which some parsers ignore.

When parsing fails, the information still exists in your file — but it may be missing from the fields recruiters search.

A recruiter facing 200 applications rarely reads them in arrival order. They search the ATS for terms such as a job title ("account manager"), a tool ("Salesforce"), a certification or a language, and they filter on criteria like location or work authorisation. Some systems also rank candidates by how closely their profile matches the posting.

This is why keywords matter: if the posting asks for "stakeholder management" and your resume only says "worked with other teams", a search for the posting's term won't find you.

You may have read that ATS software automatically rejects most resumes, often quoted as "75%". That figure has no reliable published source. Automatic rejection does exist — typically through knockout questions ("Do you have a valid work permit for this country?") or filters the employer chose — but the more common problem is simpler: a resume that is hard to find or hard to read.

1. Use standard section headings: Work Experience, Education, Skills, Languages.
2. Keep key information in real text, not in images, icons or skill bars.
3. Use one date format throughout, with month and year.
4. Mirror the posting's vocabulary where it honestly describes your experience — exact job title, tools, methods.
5. Send a text-based PDF unless the employer asks for Word.
6. Write for the human reader too: after the search, a recruiter reads your resume in a few seconds.

Our step-by-step guide on how to create an ATS-friendly resume goes through each rule in detail, and the ATS resume builder page explains how CVixeo's templates apply them.

Two quick manual tests catch most problems:

• The plain-text test: copy all the text from your PDF and paste it into a plain text editor. If sections appear in a strange order, words are merged or your contact details are missing, a parser may struggle too.
• The keyword test: list the skills and tools named in the posting and check that each one you genuinely have appears in your resume, in the same words.

With CVixeo Premium, the ATS check gives your resume a score from 0 to 100 with concrete suggestions, and job description matching lists the skills and keywords from a specific posting that weren't found. For a full walkthrough, see how to know if your resume will pass an ATS.