What an ATS actually does with your CV
Applicant tracking systems are search engines, not judges. Knowing which one changes what you put on the page.
It is a search box, not a robot recruiter
The phrase "my CV was rejected by a robot" is mostly wrong, and believing it leads people to optimise for the wrong thing. An applicant tracking system is a database with a search box on top. A recruiter types in what they need and reads what comes back. Very few systems auto reject anyone.
What that means in practice: your CV is not being scored out of a hundred and binned below a threshold. It is sitting in a pile, and the question is whether it surfaces when someone searches. That is a retrieval problem, and retrieval problems are solved with the right words in the right places.
The words have to be the employer's words
A recruiter hiring a BIM coordinator searches for BIM. If your CV says Revit fifteen times and never says BIM, you do not appear. We have seen exactly this: an architect with Revit at the centre of every role, and the string BIM appearing zero times in a two page document. Every architecture posting in our index uses BIM as a search term.
Mirror the posting. If it says stakeholder management, write stakeholder management, not engaging with interested parties. Synonyms are for essays, not for search.
Where the words go
Terms carry different weight depending on where they sit. A skill in your summary and again inside a bullet that describes real work reads as genuine. The same skill in a comma separated list at the bottom reads as a claim. Both get you found. Only one survives the interview.
Three formatting habits that genuinely break parsing
- Two column layouts. Many parsers read a page as one text stream and interleave the columns, which turns your skills section into nonsense scattered through your job history.
- Text inside images, headers or footers. A logo with your name in it means your name is not in the file.
- Two phone numbers. It sounds trivial. It confuses field extraction often enough to matter.
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