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Resumes and applicant tracking systems

An applicant tracking system is where an employer stores applications. It is a filing system that recruiters search, not a robot that scores you out of a hundred, and there is no compatibility percentage to chase.

What is worth getting right is narrow: whether your file can be read at all.

What employers are actually running

Counted across 1,408,477 live postings we read directly from company career pages. This is a count of what we track, not a survey of the market.

  • Workday58%
  • SmartRecruiters21%
  • Greenhouse11%
  • Workable5%
  • Ashby4%
  • Lever0%
  • BambooHR0%
  • pinpoint0%
  • Breezy HR0%
  • recruitee0%

What genuinely matters

Four things, and they are all about a file being readable. There is no fifth one about keyword density.

Send a PDF with real text in it
A scanned image has no text to extract, so nothing downstream can read it: not an ATS, not a search inside it, not a person copying your email address out. This is the only formatting mistake that reliably costs you the whole document.
Put contact details in the body, not the header
Text drawn in a page header sits outside the main text flow in some exports and is dropped by readers that only take the body. Costing nothing to avoid, it is worth avoiding.
Use ordinary section headings
“Work Experience” is matched by every parser; “Where I've Made Impact” is matched by none. The heading is a label for a machine as much as a reader.
Keep one column
A PDF records the order text was drawn, not the order you read it. Sidebar templates commonly emit the sidebar first, which puts your name in the middle of the extracted text.

What we are not going to tell you

That your resume scores 82 out of 100. Nobody can compute that number honestly. It would require knowing what a specific recruiter searched for, in a system we cannot see. Any tool showing you one has chosen a formula and is presenting it as a fact.

The useful version of the same question is whether your resume answers what a particular posting asks for, which is a judgement about content rather than formatting.