How to optimise your CV for ATS filters in 2026

You send applications and get automated rejections within 24 hours — sometimes within minutes. It's rarely your background that's the problem. A piece of software has filtered your CV before any recruiter even opened it. Here's how to optimise your CV (or resume, depending on the market) to pass ATS filters without losing the substance of your profile.

What an ATS is and how it reads your CV

An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is the software HR teams use to centralise and triage applications. In the UK and US, the most common ones are Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, iCIMS, Taleo (Oracle) and Oleeo (popular in UK public-sector recruitment).

The process is nearly always the same:

Parsing: the ATS extracts the text from your PDF and splits it into blocks (experience, education, skills, contact).
Scoring: it compares those blocks to the job posting and assigns a score based on keyword matches, tenure, education level, and sometimes location.
Triage: only CVs above a threshold reach a recruiter. The rest get auto-rejected or buried in the database.

The consequence: an excellent CV that's badly parsed reads to the ATS as a bad CV. At this stage, form matters more than substance.

CV vs Resume — get the terminology right

A small but real signal of professionalism: use the correct term for the target market.

UK: use "CV". The header on your document is optional, but if you include one, write "CV".
US: use "Resume". A "CV" in the US specifically means an academic-style document — multi-page, comprehensive, used for research/academia. A "Resume" is the standard 1-2 page document used in business.
International / unsure: default to "CV" — it's broadly understood worldwide.

Recruiters and ATS keyword-match on file naming too: john_smith_resume.pdf for US, john_smith_cv.pdf for UK.

Formats that pass (and what breaks parsing)

Most parsing errors come from formatting. Here's what works in 2026.

File format

Text-based PDF only. Not a PDF generated from a scan or an image. Quick test: open your CV and try to select the text. If nothing selects, the ATS will read zero words.
Avoid .docx unless the posting explicitly asks for it. Rendering varies by recruiter's Word version and blocks can deform.

Layout

Single column. Two-column CVs are trendy but many ATS read line by line and mix left/right blocks. An experience becomes unreadable.
No nested tables, no floating text boxes. The ATS ignores them or merges them in the wrong order.
No icons as bullet points (phone, email, star). The ATS can't interpret them and may cut the information that follows.
Photo: this is where conventions diverge sharply.
- US: never include a photo. EEOC anti-discrimination concerns lead many recruiters to auto-reject CVs with a photo to protect themselves.
- UK: avoid a photo. The Equality Act 2010 creates a similar bias-protection norm. Most recruiters discard CVs with photos.
- Continental Europe: photo optional, sometimes expected.

Personal information you should NOT include (UK/US)

This is one of the biggest cultural pitfalls for candidates moving from a French-style CV to a UK/US market. Strip these systematically:

Date of birth or age
Marital status, number of children
Nationality (unless visa-relevant — see below)
Full home address (city + postcode is enough for UK; city + state for US)
A photo (see above)
"Permis B" or French driving licence terminology

For visa status, only mention it if it's clearly an advantage: "Right to work in the UK (British citizen)" or "Authorised to work in the US for any employer". Never mention your SSN, NIN, or immigration paperwork.

Typography

Sans-serif font: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Inter, Source Sans Pro. Avoid decorative fonts or exotic Google Fonts that may not embed properly in the PDF.
Body size 10 to 12 pt, never smaller.
No colour on body text. Reserve colour for section headings only.

Keywords: the golden rule without stuffing

Scoring relies primarily on overlap between the words in the job posting and your CV. But stuffing keywords stopped working long ago: modern ATS penalise over-density, and recruiters spot copy-paste instantly.

The method that works

Identify the 8 to 12 strategic keywords from the posting: technical skills, named tools (Salesforce, SAP, Figma, AWS), methodologies (Agile, Lean Six Sigma), expected certifications (PMP, CIPD, ACCA), languages.
Rephrase your experiences so at least 60% of those keywords appear naturally in your bullets, without inventing anything.
Add a "Core Skills" or "Technical Skills" section near the top, listing 8 to 15 keywords in plain text. This is where ATS score the highest.
Keep acronyms AND their expanded form at least once ("SEO (search engine optimisation)", "GDPR (data protection)"). ATS don't always link the two.

Before / after example

Before (poorly optimised for a digital project manager role):

Led various cross-functional projects for the marketing department, coordinating multidisciplinary teams.

After (rephrased from a posting mentioning Agile, JIRA, budget management, KPIs):

Led 4 digital projects in Agile (Scrum) on JIRA, coordinating 6 developers and 2 UX designers, managing a £180k budget and tracking weekly KPIs with the leadership team.

Same role, completely different read by ATS and recruiter.

Structure expected by ATS

ATS expect standard section names. Avoid creative titles like "My Journey" or "Where I Grew Professionally". Use the conventional labels.

Contact details at the top, single line or single column: name, city + (postcode UK / state US), phone, email, LinkedIn URL.
Target role title under your name (matches the posting's title where possible).
Professional Summary / Profile: 3 to 4 lines, with 2-3 strategic keywords.
- UK: this section is often called "Personal Statement" or "Professional Profile" and is expected near the top.
- US: a "Summary" is optional but increasingly recommended for senior profiles.
Professional Experience: reverse-chronological, dates in MM/YYYY format, company name, location, role title.
Education: reverse-chronological, degree + institution + year. Convert French grades to local equivalents: French Mention "Bien" → UK 2:1, "Très Bien" → First, "Assez Bien" → 2:2.
Skills: technical, language, sometimes soft skills.
Languages with native vocabulary:
- UK: "Native / Fluent / Intermediate / Basic"
- US: "Native / Fluent / Professional working / Conversational"
- Avoid CEFR (B2, C1) unless the role is EU-facing. Most US/UK recruiters don't know the framework.

Quantification — more important in US than UK

US recruiters expect aggressive quantification: every bullet should have a number, percentage, dollar amount, or scale figure. "Managed $2.4M budget", "Reduced churn 18%", "Shipped to 12M MAU".

UK recruiters appreciate quantification but accept outcome-focused phrasing without exhaustive numbers. "Led the migration of a 12M-user platform" reads professionally in UK without needing a £-figure.

If your source CV has no numbers, don't invent any. The honesty signal matters more than the quantification.

The mistakes that cost most points

Avoid these absolutely if you want to maximise your score:

Headers and footers containing your contact details (most ATS don't read them).
Dates as "Summer 2024" or "3 years ago". Always MM/YYYY.
Company logos next to the name: ignored and they shift the parsing.
One long block per role. Prefer 2 to 4 short, quantified bullets.
A 3-page CV when your experience fits in 1 or 2. ATS read everything, but recruiters don't scroll past page 2.
US English on a UK CV ("organize", "color") or vice versa ("organise", "colour"). Perceived as sloppy.

In practice with ShotCV

Manually adapting each CV to each posting takes an hour per application. With ShotCV's AI refit, you paste your CV and the job posting, and you get back, in 30 seconds, a rewritten version that:

Detects the target market (US or UK) from the job posting and applies the right conventions automatically.
Integrates the posting's keywords into your existing experiences.
Reorganises your skills to match the structure expected by Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters and similar ATS.
Invents nothing — no fake degrees, no fabricated experience. It's a hard rule of the model.

If you want to compare ShotCV with other tools on the market, the comparison page details the differences on accuracy and ATS-friendliness.

Conclusion

Optimising a CV for ATS in 2026 isn't SEO hacking: it's respecting a grammar the filters understand. Clean text format, single column, standard section names, posting keywords integrated without stuffing, market-appropriate conventions (UK vs US), no FR-only fields when applying abroad. Get these basics right and your CV lands on the recruiter's desk in the "to read" pile rather than the "auto-reject" folder. The rest is your career speaking for itself.