An ATS-friendly resume has two jobs. First, it must transfer your information into the employer’s system without scrambling or dropping important details. Second, the resulting document must help a recruiter understand your fit quickly.
That means the best format is not the most decorative one. It is the format that preserves the relationship between what you did, where you did it, when you did it, and what changed because of your work.
The Recommended ATS Resume Structure
Use this order unless your situation gives you a strong reason to change it:
- Name and contact information
- Professional summary
- Core skills or areas of expertise
- Professional experience
- Education
- Certifications, technical skills, or additional relevant sections
For most experienced candidates, professional experience should occupy the largest share of the document. Recruiters generally need evidence, not a long list of self-descriptions.
Contact Information
Place the following in the body of the document near the top:
- Full name
- City and state or broader location
- Phone number
- Professional email address
- LinkedIn profile, when complete and current
- Portfolio or GitHub link, when relevant to the role
You do not need to include a full street address. Avoid placing your contact information only inside a header, footer, graphic, or text box.
Professional Summary
A useful summary is normally three to five lines and answers three questions:
- What kind of professional are you?
- What problems or functions do you handle?
- What evidence makes you credible for this target role?
Weak summary:
Results-oriented professional with excellent communication skills and a proven track record of success.
Stronger summary:
Marketing analytics leader with 9 years of experience measuring acquisition performance across digital, email, paid social, and marketplace channels. Builds forecasting, experimentation, and attribution systems used to allocate multimillion-dollar budgets and improve incremental return.
The second version gives the recruiter searchable language and a concrete frame for the experience that follows.
Core Skills
A short skills section can help recruiters find relevant terminology, but it should not become a wall of keywords. Group related terms and prioritize the skills that matter to the target role.
For example:
Marketing Analytics | Experimentation | Forecasting | Incrementality | SQL | Python | Snowflake | Power BI
Do not list a tool merely because it appears in the job description. Anything in this section is fair game for an interview question.
Use a Single-Column Reading Order
A single-column layout is the safest default because both software and people can follow it from top to bottom.
Greenhouse specifically lists columns, tables, headers, footers, text boxes, graphics, and photos among the formatting choices that can contribute to incomplete parsing. Lever also notes that image files are not parseable and recommends checking whether document text can be highlighted. These are good reasons to remove avoidable complexity rather than testing the limits of each employer’s system.
A clean resume can still look polished. Use:
- Clear spacing between sections
- Consistent bolding for job titles or employers
- One readable body font
- Slightly larger section headings
- Conservative use of lines or shading
- Balanced white space
Avoid using design elements to carry meaning that the text does not also communicate.
Choose Standard Section Headings
Recruiters and parsing systems are accustomed to headings such as:
- Professional Summary
- Skills
- Professional Experience
- Education
- Certifications
- Technical Skills
Creative labels such as “My Journey,” “What I Bring,” or “Where I’ve Made an Impact” may sound distinctive, but they slow down scanning and may make section classification less reliable.
Originality belongs in your accomplishments, not in the label above them.
Format Experience So the Relationships Are Obvious
Each role should make four pieces of information easy to connect:
Job Title — Employer
City, State | Month Year–Month Year
Then use concise bullets to show scope, action, and results.
Example:
Senior Operations Manager — Example Company
Philadelphia, PA | March 2022–Present
- Lead a 28-person regional operations team supporting 14 locations and $42 million in annual revenue.
- Redesigned workforce scheduling using demand forecasts, reducing overtime expense 16% while maintaining service targets.
- Established weekly performance reviews across labor, quality, and customer metrics, improving on-time completion from 87% to 95%.
Do not make the recruiter hunt across opposite sides of the page to determine which date belongs to which job.
File Type: PDF or DOCX?
Major ATS platforms commonly accept both PDF and Microsoft Word documents. Greenhouse lists DOC, DOCX, PDF, RTF, and TXT as supported candidate uploads. Lever lists Word, PDF, RTF, HTML, OpenDocument, and other text-based formats.
Use this decision rule:
- When the employer specifies a format, use it.
- When no format is specified, a clean DOCX or text-based PDF is generally reasonable.
- Never submit a scanned image of a resume.
- Before submitting a PDF, verify that you can select and copy the text in the correct order.
A PDF preserves appearance more consistently. A DOCX may be easier for some systems or recruiters to manipulate. The quality of the document structure matters more than treating one extension as universally superior.
Font, Margins, and Visual Hierarchy
Use a professional font that remains readable on a laptop screen. Common choices include Arial, Calibri, Aptos, Helvetica, Georgia, and Times New Roman.
Practical ranges:
- Body text: about 10.5 to 12 points
- Section headings: about 12 to 15 points
- Name: about 18 to 24 points
- Margins: usually 0.5 to 1 inch
These are not ATS rules. They are readability guidelines. If your resume requires tiny text, extremely narrow margins, or dense blocks to fit, the real problem is usually excess content.
What to Remove From an ATS Resume
Remove elements that create risk without adding hiring value:
- Headshots for typical U.S. corporate applications
- Skill-rating bars or star ratings
- Logos
- Charts and graphs
- Decorative icons
- Multiple sidebars
- Important text embedded in images
- Repeated keyword lists
- References available upon request
A recruiter does not need a graphic showing that you rate yourself four out of five in Excel. Show what you built, analyzed, automated, or improved with Excel instead.
Test the Resume Before You Apply
Run three quick tests:
1. Copy-and-Paste Test
Select all the text, paste it into a plain-text document, and review the order. Job titles, employers, dates, and bullets should remain connected.
2. Skim Test
Look at the resume for ten seconds. Can you immediately identify your current level, target function, strongest qualifications, and recent results?
3. Evidence Test
Highlight every claim that sounds like a strength. Then ask whether the resume provides evidence for it. Words such as strategic, innovative, analytical, and collaborative are not persuasive on their own.
The Recruiter’s Bottom Line
A strong format removes friction. It lets the ATS create an accurate record and lets the recruiter evaluate your qualifications without decoding the page.
The goal is not to make your resume look plain. The goal is to make your value unmistakable.