Most companies that hire regularly use an applicant tracking system (ATS) such as Greenhouse, Lever or Workday. It stores applications, lets recruiters search them, and often reads your resume into a profile. It rarely "rejects" you on its own, but if it reads your resume badly, a recruiter searching for your skills may never see you.
What helps an ATS read you
- Real text, not pictures of text. Export a PDF from a document or a web page, not a scan.
- Standard section names: Experience, Education, Skills, Projects.
- One reading order. Simple layouts read cleanly; text in shapes, text boxes or tables can come out scrambled.
- Dates in a consistent format, next to each job.
- Contact details in the body, not only in a page header or footer.
- The job's own words for skills and titles, where they're true for you.
What trips it up
- Icons standing in for words (a phone icon instead of "Phone").
- Unusual section headings ("Where I've been").
- Several columns that read in the wrong order.
- Important text only in images or graphics.
On jsonresume.org
Your resume is stored as structured data (JSON Resume), so the content is always clean; the theme only decides how it looks. The recommended themes are tested for how tracking systems read them and how they print. The editor's ATS check scores your resume and links each issue to its field.
You can also download a Word file (.docx), which some application forms prefer.