7 common ATS mistakes in your CV – and how to avoid them

In Word, headers and footers are a separate document area. Many parsers read it last or skip it entirely. If your phone number and email address live there, an otherwise perfect application can arrive in the system with no way to contact you.

Put your name, phone number, email address and city into the normal body text instead, right at the top of the first page. One line per detail or everything in a single line with separators – both work, as long as it is real text.

Templates with a sidebar look tidy to human readers. A parser, however, usually reads from top left to bottom right and can interleave columns. „Project management“ in the left column and „2019–2022“ in the right one then merge into an unusable string.

Build your CV in a single column. Dates belong on the same line as the role and employer, not in a separate layout column. Also avoid text boxes, images containing text and skill bars – the content of a graphic simply isn't there for the system.

Read more: ATS-friendly CV: structure and format · CV formats compared for ATS

„Customer wizard“, „Head of Happiness“ or an internal „Officer level 3“ mean nothing outside your former employer – and in an ATS they match none of the searched terms. Yet that is exactly what is filtered on.

Use the standard market title as your position and add the internal wording in brackets if it appears in your reference letter. That keeps you accurate and still findable.

The most common content mistake: your CV describes the same work, but in different words than the ad. If you write „evaluating data with queries“ while the ad consistently says „data analysis“ and „SQL“, you lose matches for no substantive reason.

Read the ad and mark every hard requirement: tools, methods, standards, certificates, language levels. Then check which of them you can genuinely back up and use exactly that wording where you actually did the work. No context-free keyword lists, and no terms you couldn't explain in an interview.

Read more: How to use ATS keywords properly · Why ATS rejects applications

A parser identifies sections by familiar labels. „Berufserfahrung“ (professional experience), „Ausbildung“ (education), „Kenntnisse“ (skills) and „Sprachen“ (languages) are unambiguous. „My journey“ or „What defines me“ are not – such blocks often end up in no field at all, or in the wrong one.

Stick to standard headings and list your experience in reverse chronological order, most recent role first. Every entry needs a job title, employer, location and period in MM/YYYY format – mixed formats such as „spring 2020“ create gaps in the parsed data.

A scanned CV or one exported as an image contains no machine-readable text. The same applies to PDFs made of screenshots and to formats such as .pages or .odt, which are rarely supported in application processes.

Always export from the original document, verify the result with a simple selection test (if you can select the text in the PDF, it can be parsed) and give the file a meaningful name such as „CV_Mustermann_Account_Manager.pdf“. Also respect the format requested in the ad and the portal's size limit.

Read more: PDF or DOCX – what you should send · How to apply by email in Germany

„Responsible for projects“ tells neither the system nor the recruiter anything. Scope, tools and outcome are all missing. Such sentences generate no matches and convince no human in the second step either.

Phrase every task along one pattern: what you did, with which tool, at what scale, with what result. Two to four bullet points per role are enough. What matters is that the technical terms sit inside the sentence, not in a separate word cloud.

• Contact details are in the body text, not in the header.
• Single-column layout, no tables, text boxes or skill bars.
• Job titles match common market wording.
• The key hard requirements from the ad appear in the text.
• Standard headings and consistent dates (MM/YYYY).
• Text in the PDF is selectable, the file name is meaningful.
• Every role states the task, the tool and the result.
• One final version per application – tailored to that specific ad.

Once these seven points are done, your CV is technically readable and substantively aligned. The next step is fine-tuning: which terms from this specific ad are still missing, and how strongly does your profile overlap with the requirement profile overall?

How a score is calculated and what it actually tells you is covered separately. For a plain check, comparing your CV with the job ad is enough – it takes a few minutes.

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