How to Write an ATS-Friendly Resume That Actually Gets Past the Screeners

Keywords are how ATS platforms match your resume to a job opening. When a recruiter searches for candidates or when the system scores applicants against a job requisition, it’s looking for specific terms. The closer your resume’s language matches the job description, the better you’ll score.

Where to find the right keywords.

Start with the job description itself. Read it carefully, more than once. Pull out the specific skills, tools, certifications, and job functions mentioned. Pay attention to what appears multiple times or what’s listed near the top of the requirements section. Those are the terms the employer cares most about.

Then look beyond the single posting. Search for similar roles at other companies. Look at three or four job descriptions for the same type of position. The terms that appear across multiple postings are industry-standard language, and those are the keywords that matter most.

Where to place them.

Keywords should appear naturally in three areas of your resume:

Your professional summary or profile section at the top. This is prime real estate for ATS. A concise summary that includes your core competencies, target role language, and industry terms sets the stage for everything below it.

Your skills or core competencies section. This should be a focused list of technical skills, tools, platforms, methodologies, and certifications. Think “Salesforce,””financial modeling,””Six Sigma,””project management,””Python,””HIPAA compliance.” These are the terms recruiters actually search for.

Your experience bullets. This is where keywords get context. Listing “project management” in your skills section tells the system you have the skill. Describing how you led a cross-functional team through a product launch on a compressed timeline tells the human why it matters. You need both.

Hard skills vs. soft skills in keyword strategy.

ATS keyword matching is driven almost entirely by hard skills. Technical competencies, tools, platforms, certifications, methodologies. Soft skills like “team player” or “strong communicator” rarely appear in recruiter searches. They have their place in your resume’s narrative, but they should not be the backbone of your skills section.

A warning about over-optimization.

We occasionally see resumes that read like someone copied the job description and rearranged the sentences. That’s not optimization. That’s keyword stuffing, and it backfires. The ATS might score you well, but the recruiter who reads it will see through it immediately. Every keyword on your resume should be backed by real experience described in your own words.

The Five Most Common ATS Mistakes We See

We review hundreds of resumes a week. These are the five problems that come up over and over.

1. Using a designed or template resume with columns, text boxes, or graphics.

We talked about this in the formatting section, but it’s worth repeating because it’s the most common issue by a wide margin. Canva templates, creative layouts from Etsy, two-column designs from resume builders… they look great on screen and parse terribly in most ATS platforms. The system reads your project management experience as part of your education section. Your skills end up merged with your job titles. It’s a mess. For online applications, clean and simple wins.

2. Burying keywords in charts, icons, or visual elements.

We see this a lot with skill rating bars and pie charts. You know the ones. “Project Management: 4 out of 5 stars.” The ATS can’t read that star rating. It can’t read an icon. It can’t interpret a progress bar. If a skill matters enough to put on your resume, spell it out in plain text.

3. Writing a skills section full of soft skills and personality traits instead of technical competencies.

A skills section that reads “Detail-oriented, self-starter, strong work ethic, team player, problem solver” tells the ATS almost nothing useful. Recruiters aren’t searching for “self-starter.” They’re searching for “SAP,””Tableau,””AWS,””lean manufacturing,””CRM administration.” Your skills section should be a concentrated list of the hard skills and technical competencies that define your professional value. Soft skills belong in context, woven into your experience bullets where they’re demonstrated through results.

4. Missing or inconsistently formatted contact information.

This one seems basic, but we see it regularly. A phone number in the header that doesn’t parse. An email address that’s actually an image. Or different formatting in different sections, like a full address at the top and just a city in the work history. Keep your contact information in plain text at the top of the document, outside of any header or footer, and make sure your name, phone, email, and location are all present and consistent.

5. Using an internal or creative job title that doesn’t map to standard role names.

Your company may have called you a “Client Happiness Specialist” or “Revenue Ninja” or “Associate III, Customer Solutions.” The ATS doesn’t know what that means, and neither does a recruiter running a keyword search. If your actual title doesn’t clearly communicate your role, add the industry-standard equivalent. You can format this as “Client Happiness Specialist (Customer Service Manager)” or list the standard title and note the internal one parenthetically. The point is to make sure the searchable, recognizable version of your role appears on the document.

What an ATS-Optimized Resume Actually Looks Like

Let’s put this together and walk through what a well-structured resume looks like from top to bottom.

Contact information comes first. Name in a slightly larger font, followed by phone, email, and city/state. All in plain text. No header, no footer, no graphics.

Professional summary sits right below that. four to seven lines. This is where you establish who you are, what level you operate at, and what your core strengths are. A strong summary for a mid-career operations manager might open with years of experience and industry focus, then hit the two or three competency areas that define the role, and close with a results statement. It should read like a confident introduction, not a paragraph of buzzwords.

Core competencies or skills section follows the summary. Two to three rows of technical skills, tools, platforms, and certifications in a simple format. No columns, no tables, no rating bars. Just a clean list or a series of terms separated by vertical bars or bullet points. This section exists for the ATS and for the recruiter who’s skimming for specific qualifications.

Professional experience is the body of the resume. Each position includes the company name, your title, the location, and the dates. Below that, a brief scope statement describing the role, followed by bullet points that lead with outcomes whenever possible. Good bullets follow a pattern: what you did, how you did it, and what happened as a result. Not every bullet needs a number, but enough of them should include quantified results to demonstrate impact.

Education and certifications close out the document. Degree, institution, graduation year. Relevant certifications with issuing bodies and dates. Keep it simple unless your education is your primary qualification.

On length: if you have five or more years of experience, a two-page resume is completely fine. The old one-page rule is a leftover from a time when resumes were physically printed and handed across a desk. ATS doesn’t care about page count. Recruiters care about relevance. If your second page is full of relevant experience and accomplishments, use it. If it’s padding, cut it.

The through-line in all of this is clarity. A resume that’s clean, well-labeled, and packed with specific, relevant content will perform well in any applicant tracking system and read well when the human picks it up.

When DIY Isn’t Enough

Everything in this post is actionable. If your career path is fairly linear, your resume formatting is clean, and you have a strong handle on the language in your industry, you can absolutely implement these changes yourself.

But there are situations where doing it yourself creates more problems than it solves.

Career pivots are the most common one. When you’re trying to reposition five or ten years of experience toward a different type of role, the keyword strategy gets complicated fast. You need to translate your background into the language of a new industry without fabricating experience you don’t have. That requires a level of strategic framing that goes beyond swapping out a few terms.

Employment gaps are another trigger point. Whether you took time off for caregiving, health, a layoff, or a career pause, the way you structure and present that gap on your resume affects how the ATS categorizes your timeline and how a recruiter interprets it. There are effective approaches, but they depend on the specifics of your situation.

Formatting complexity is the third. If you’ve held multiple concurrent roles, worked across different countries, have a mix of contract and full-time positions, or sit at the intersection of two different career tracks, your resume needs a structure that most templates and AI tools aren’t equipped to handle.

We work with professionals in exactly these situations every day. Across our Grand Rapids resume writing, Lansing resume writing, and Ann Arbor resume writing offices, we see the full range of career scenarios that Michigan’s job market produces, from automotive engineers repositioning into EV, to healthcare administrators navigating system mergers, to tech professionals caught in layoffs working their way back in. But our clients come from across the country, and the principles are the same everywhere. A resume has to work in the system before it works on the person reading it.

If you’re weighing whether to tackle this yourself or bring in a professional, career coaching can help you think through the bigger picture, and our professional resume services are built specifically around the kind of ATS optimization this post covers.