How do I write a resume that gets past ATS screening?

Use a simple single-column layout, standard section headings, real text (not images), and the actual words from the job description. That covers almost everything ATS-related — and it's worth knowing that ATS systems are far less ruthless than the panic industry around them suggests. **What ATS actually does**: it parses your resume into structured fields and makes it searchable. It rarely auto-rejects. What happens in practice is a recruiter searches for keywords and reviews what surfaces — so if your resume parses badly or lacks the terms they search, you're invisible rather than rejected. **The formatting rules that matter:** 1. **Single column.** Multi-column layouts frequently parse into scrambled order. This is the most common real failure. 2. **Standard headings**: Experience, Education, Skills, Projects. Creative headings ('Where I've Made an Impact') can fail to map to fields. 3. **No text inside images, graphics, or headers/footers.** Anything in a header may be dropped entirely, including your contact details — a genuinely common and fatal error. 4. **Simple bullets, standard fonts, no tables** for layout. 5. **Submit a .docx or a text-based PDF.** Most modern systems handle PDF fine; a scanned or image-based PDF is unreadable. 6. **Spell out and abbreviate**: 'Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)' catches both searches. **The keyword part, done honestly:** - Read the job description and mirror its exact terminology where it's genuinely true of you. If they say 'React.js' and you wrote 'React', add the variant. If they say 'stakeholder management' and that's what you did, use their phrase. - Put a clear Skills section with the concrete technologies. This is what searches hit. - Don't keyword-stuff, and absolutely don't hide white text — it's detected, and it ends your candidacy immediately when a human sees it. **What matters more than any of this**, and where people misallocate effort: the content. A perfectly parseable resume full of duty descriptions still loses. Replace 'responsible for managing social media' with 'grew Instagram from 2k to 18k followers in 8 months, driving 30% of site traffic'. Achievements with numbers beat responsibilities every time, for both the search and the human. One page if you have under ten years' experience. Two if genuinely warranted. And save it as `Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf` — small thing, but `resume-final-v3.pdf` in a recruiter's folder of two hundred files is a bad first impression.