Every few months a new batch of "ATS tips" circulates on LinkedIn and Reddit, and most of them are either wrong, outdated, or so obvious they're useless. "Use a clean format." "Include keywords." Thanks, very helpful.
I want to give you something more concrete. I work with job descriptions and resume data every day, and there are specific, actionable things that affect whether your resume gets through automated screening. Let me walk through what actually matters in 2025.
One of the biggest reasons I keep coming back to this topic is that the same mistakes show up over and over. A candidate will have the right experience, but their resume buries the useful details under vague phrasing, fancy layout choices, or section labels that a parser will not understand. When I started looking at this problem through SWARA, it became obvious that the issue is usually not "bad candidate," it is "bad translation from experience into resume language."
ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System. It's software that companies use to collect and manage job applications. The most common ones are Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, iCIMS, and Taleo. What each of them does varies, but the core function is: receive applications, parse resume data into structured fields, and make it searchable for recruiters.
Here's the key thing to understand: ATS doesn't reject your resume. Humans do. What ATS does is parse your resume (sometimes badly), store the data, and present it to a recruiter in a structured way. The recruiter then decides whether to move you forward.
This matters because a lot of ATS advice is based on a misunderstanding — the idea that some algorithm is automatically filtering you out before a human ever sees you. At most companies, that's not how it works. What actually happens is your resume gets parsed, a recruiter searches or filters their applicant pool, and your resume either shows up in that search or it doesn't.
So the real goal is: make sure your resume is parsed correctly, and make sure the right keywords are there to be found.
Submit .docx or a clean .pdf. .docx is parsed most reliably by most ATS systems. PDFs are fine if they're text-based (not scanned images). Never submit .jpg, .png, or image-based PDFs.
Use standard section names: "Work Experience" or "Experience," "Education," "Skills." Creative alternatives like "My Story" or "What I've Done" confuse parsers. The parser is looking for known patterns.
Stick to Month Year or just Year. "January 2023 – March 2024" or "01/2023 – 03/2024" both work. Abbreviations (Jan 2023) generally work too. Vague formats like "2 years ago" or "Recent" will break parsing.
Avoid them. Most ATS systems either skip content inside tables and text boxes entirely or mangle it badly. If you use a Word template with tables for layout, the parsed version of your resume may be missing large sections.
Don't put important information (like your contact details) in the document's header or footer. ATS parsers often miss header/footer content. Put your contact info in the main body of the document.
Any information presented visually — a skills bar chart, a timeline graphic — is invisible to an ATS. It literally cannot read images. Every skill you've represented with a progress bar is a skill that's not in your parsed profile.
Yes, keywords matter. But there's a right and wrong way to handle this.
Wrong: Copying and pasting phrases from the job description into your resume verbatim, especially if they don't reflect your actual experience.
Right: Making sure the natural language you use to describe your experience matches the language the industry uses for those skills. If you've been calling it "machine learning" in your resume but the job description calls it "ML engineering," both terms should appear.
Practical tip: Read the job description and note the specific technical terms, tools, and frameworks they use. Check whether those exact terms appear in your resume. If you have the skill but you've called it something slightly different, update your terminology. This is not gaming the system — it's making sure your genuine experience is communicated clearly.
I want to be direct: most of the time, when a qualified candidate doesn't hear back, it's not because their resume failed an ATS filter. It's because:
ATS optimization is a 10% problem. Fit and impact are 90% of the problem. If you're applying to roles where you genuinely match the requirements and your resume clearly demonstrates that, you'll get through. If you're applying to roles you don't fit, perfect ATS optimization won't save you.
The most efficient use of your optimization energy is applying to the right roles in the first place. That's where something like SWARA's match scoring helps most — it tells you where you're a genuine fit before you spend time crafting an application and optimizing your resume for a specific role.
If I had to reduce all of this to one practical habit, it would be this: read the job description, copy down the exact tools and responsibilities that matter, then check whether your resume uses the same language for the same work. Not marketing language. Not buzzword language. The same plain language a recruiter would search for.
SWARA Editorial Team writes practical, experience-based job search guides for developers.