ATS CV: get past the recruiter's software

What an ATS really sees in your CV

An ATS does not look at your layout. It extracts text: your title, your experience with dates, your degrees, your skills, and compares them with the words of the job ad. A CV that looks great on screen can turn into garbled text once extracted, and an unreadable application is not ranked, it is ignored.

Recruiters often only see the list the software hands them. Getting past this first filter does not require cheating: you need a CV the machine can read and that speaks the vocabulary of the job ad.

The mistakes that make a CV disappear

The causes of automatic rejection are almost always the same:

• Two columns or a table: lines get mixed up during extraction, and a date ends up attached to the wrong job.
• Text inside an image: a logo, a banner or a CV exported entirely as an image contains no readable word.
• Page header and footer: your name and email placed in those areas are sometimes ignored.
• A scanned PDF or a photo of the CV: no text to extract.
• Creative headings: « My journey » or « What I can do » are not recognised as Experience or Skills.
• Missing or incomplete dates: without month and year, the length of an experience cannot be worked out.
• Exotic fonts and symbols: decorative bullets and icons turn into junk characters.

Keywords: use the exact terms of the job ad

An ATS compares words. If the ad asks for « project management » and your CV says « site coordination », the match may not happen. Read the ad, note the skills, tools and job titles it repeats, and use the exact terms where they are true for you: in the CV title, in the relevant experience, in the skills list.

Two limits. A keyword with no proof behind it will not survive the interview. And a CV stuffed with repeated words gets spotted by recruiters, who read after the machine. The right measure: every keyword present is tied to a fact from your track record.

Check your CV in two minutes

The Illuminagy CCO free trial includes two ATS analyses. You paste the job ad, pick your CV, and you get three scores (the literal reading of sorting software, the meaning, the eye of a hurried recruiter), a frank verdict and the precise list of what the ad expects and your CV does not show yet.

From that list, the optimisation proposes a version of the CV adapted to the ad, which you review line by line before applying it. The trial runs in French; paid plans add English and Spanish.

The checklist before sending

• A single column, no table, no floating text box.
• Name, email and phone in the body of the document, not in the page header.
• Standard headings: Experience, Education, Skills, Languages.
• Each experience with a job title, a company, and a start and end month and year.
• The exact terms of the job ad where they are true for you.
• A text PDF export (words can be selected with the mouse), never an image.
• A clearly named file: FirstName LastName CV.pdf.

Frequently asked questions