Getting Past the ATS: Resume Advice From People Who Run One

Our recruiters search a database of over 2.5 million candidate profiles every day. So when we tell you what gets a resume found — and what makes one invisible — it's not theory. It's how we spend our mornings.

First, let's clear up the big myth. The ATS is not an AI gatekeeper rejecting your resume in three seconds. It's a search engine. When we have a Salesforce admin role open, we search "Salesforce administrator," a few certification names, maybe a couple of tool names — and the resumes containing those words come back. Resumes without them don't get rejected. They just never appear. Nobody sees them at all.

Once you understand that, most of the practical advice writes itself.

Use the words the job actually uses

If the posting says "Salesforce Administrator" and your resume says "CRM platform owner," you will not surface in the search — even if it's the same job. Mirror the language of your target roles. This isn't gaming anything; it's labeling your experience so it can be found.

Spell it out, then abbreviate

"Amazon Web Services (AWS)" covers both searches. Same for CI/CD, Kubernetes and K8s, PostgreSQL and Postgres. Recruiters search inconsistently — we're human — so cover the variants once.

Put the tech where the work was

A skills section listing eighteen technologies tells us very little, because everyone has one. What we actually read is the role bullet: "built the ingestion pipeline in Python and Airflow, cut nightly processing from 6 hours to 40 minutes." Now the keyword lives inside evidence. That resume gets a phone call.

Keep the format boring

Single column, standard headings, a normal font, .docx or a text-based PDF. Tables, text boxes, and two-column layouts parse unpredictably — your dates end up attached to the wrong job, or nowhere. The most beautiful resume we ever received was also, to the software, completely blank. Every hour spent on visual design is an hour spent on the one thing no recruiter is evaluating.

Numbers make bullets findable and believable

"Improved performance" is filler. "Cut page load from 4 seconds to 800ms" is a claim someone can picture and ask about in an interview. Three strong, specific bullets per role beat eight generic ones.

Don't keyword-stuff

We notice a resume with "machine learning" pasted eleven times, and it doesn't read as qualified — it reads as desperate. The word needs to appear where you did the work, once or twice, attached to something real.

And the advice nobody wants to hear: maintain two versions of your resume story. A master document with everything, and tailored cuts for the two or three role types you're actually pursuing. A resume that claims full-stack, DevOps, data engineering, and project management all at once surfaces in every search and wins none of them, because it doesn't look like the strongest candidate for anything specific.

The resumes that get placed aren't the cleverest ones. They're the ones where a tired recruiter, forty resumes into a Tuesday, can see the match in fifteen seconds.

Common questions

Should I use an ATS-optimization scoring tool? They're fine for catching parsing problems, but don't chase a score. Matching the actual job language and writing concrete bullets does more than any percentage grade.

One page or two? Whatever the experience honestly needs. A senior engineer with fifteen years fits badly on one page. Two focused pages beat one cramped one; three pages is almost always too many.

Do cover letters matter for IT roles? Through staffing firms, rarely — the recruiter conversation replaces it. Direct applications to smaller companies, occasionally. Put the effort into the resume.