mistake
Two-column layout where the parser reads top-to-bottom
fix
Stick to single column. If you must use a sidebar, label it in the PDF structure (we do this automatically for the Contemporary template).
Seven steps and six mistakes to avoid. Written for the 2026 hiring market, with the formats every major ATS parses cleanly and the bullet structure every recruiter scans for.
Reverse-chronological is the safest choice for 90% of applicants. Functional and combination formats raise immediate flags with both recruiters (who learned them to mean 'hiding gaps') and parsers (which expect dated work history blocks). Two exceptions: career changers with no prior industry experience, and senior consultants with a project-led history rather than role-led.
Name in 14 to 18pt, role title underneath, then a single line with email, phone, city, LinkedIn. Don't put your headshot in the document. Don't put the entire header inside a text box (most parsers ignore content in floating frames). Don't centre everything: most parsers read left-to-right and lose the line order on centred multi-element headers.
A summary that says 'results-driven professional with a passion for excellence' is a 2-line score hit. A summary that says 'Senior backend engineer with 9 years building distributed systems at Stripe and Cloudflare; specialised in payment infrastructure and high-throughput Kafka pipelines' is worth keeping. If you can't write the latter, skip the summary.
Each role: company, title, location, dates. Then 3 to 6 bullets. Each bullet starts with a strong verb (built, shipped, led, owned, scaled), lands a concrete artifact or system, and ends with a quantified outcome where possible. 'Built X' is weaker than 'Built X handling 12k requests per second' which is weaker than 'Built X handling 12k req/s while reducing p99 latency by 38%'.
Group by category (Languages, Frameworks, Infrastructure, Tools). Don't repeat skills that already appear in your experience bullets. Don't pad with the implicit (no engineer needs to list 'Git' in 2026). Do include the canonical name and not just the abbreviation, because some ATS regex matches the long form: 'AWS (Amazon Web Services)', 'GCP (Google Cloud)'.
Degree, school, year. If the year is older than 15 years and the role is senior, drop the year to avoid age screening. Certifications go below education unless the role is heavily certification-gated (security, finance, healthcare) in which case they go in their own block.
Projects (great for early-career engineers), Publications (academic, research, technical authors), Talks, Open source, Languages spoken. Keep them tight: a project with one line of explanation is worse than no project. A talk with a venue and a year is enough.
Stick to single column. If you must use a sidebar, label it in the PDF structure (we do this automatically for the Contemporary template).
Always export PDF with selectable text. If your CV's text is selectable in Acrobat, the parser can read it.
Bullets, not tables. Parsers reorder table cells unpredictably.
Use 'Experience', 'Education', 'Skills', 'Projects'. Parsers regex against these.
Most parsers strip them. Don't put load-bearing content there.
Stick to widely-licensed faces (Inter, Newsreader, Calibri, Cambria). Every cvoracle template embeds the font into the PDF so font-substitution can't reflow the layout.
Bullets that start with weak verbs (worked on, helped, was responsible for, assisted with) get downgraded by both recruiters and the outcome-density sub-score. Stronger verbs, grouped by the kind of impact they imply:
Reverse-chronological with a one-line summary, three to six bullets per role, a deduplicated skills block, and an education block. This is the format every major ATS parses cleanly and every recruiter scans in 7 seconds.
One page for under 8 years of experience. Two pages for senior roles. Three pages only for academic or research CVs where the publication list is the work product. Never three pages because you 'have a lot to say' about a marketing internship.
Summary, yes, if you can write a specific one. Objective, no: objectives went out with paper resumes. A great summary is 2 to 3 lines, names your level (senior backend engineer, marketing director), the years of experience, the domains you've worked in, and the specific specialty.
Three to six. Six bullets at your most recent role, three at the role you held five years ago that's no longer load-bearing. Don't pad earlier roles to match the length of recent ones.
Start with a strong verb, name the artifact or system, end with a quantified outcome. Land one keyword from the JD per bullet, naturally. Cap at 22 words.
Use AI to rewrite weak bullets, not to draft the resume from scratch. AI-drafted CVs read like AI-drafted CVs (over-flowery, vague verbs, unquantified outcomes). AI-rewritten bullets read like a sharper version of you, which is what you want.
Lead with projects, not jobs. A reverse-chronological list of substantial projects (with the same bullet structure as work experience) beats a sparse work history every time. Three GitHub projects with quantified user numbers outranks two months of unpaid internship.
Run the resume against the same six sub-checks an applicant tracking system uses.
Once the format is right, line it up against the role you're applying for.
Seven editorial templates that preserve parseability and your score.
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