‹ Blog

A resume that gets past the ATS: what the filters read

Resumes7 min · 2026-09-17

At most mid-size and large companies, software parses, ranks and filters your resume before a recruiter sees it. If the system cannot read your file, or cannot find the words it is looking for, the human stage never happens. A resume that gets past the ATS is not a dark art. It is a resume without four obstacles you probably did not know you were creating: a layout the parser cannot read, vocabulary that does not match the ad, bullets nobody can verify, and good material buried on page two. This guide takes the four in order, then shows where in Europe a CV in English is enough on its own.

What the ATS does with your file

An applicant tracking system does three things. It parses your PDF into fields: name, contact, jobs, dates, skills. It ranks the result against the job description. And it lets the recruiter filter the pile down to a shortlist they can read in an afternoon. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Teamtailor and SmartRecruiters are the common ones in Europe. Small companies often skip all of this and read email, which is why the same CV can get a reply from a ten-person firm and silence from a bank. The recruiter never sees your PDF the way you designed it. They see the parsed fields in a list, next to a hundred other candidates. The layout you spent an evening on is invisible; the words are not. Assume a parser first and a human second, and write for both.

Obstacle one: a layout the parser cannot read

This is the five-minute fix, and it is where most rejections happen. Use a single column. Two-column designs look great to a human and scramble in many parsers, which read left to right across the whole page and mix your skills into your job titles. Keep text out of headers and footers; plenty of systems ignore those areas entirely, which is exactly where people love to put their phone number. Export to PDF from a text editor, never as a scan or an image. And use the standard section names, Experience, Education, Skills, because the parser is looking for those exact words to know where it is.

Obstacle two: words that do not match the ad

Ranking systems compare your resume against the job description. If the ad says customer support and your resume says client success, a simple matcher scores you lower for describing the same work. So before each application, reread the ad and adopt its vocabulary for the skills you genuinely have. This is not gaming anything; it is translating your experience into the language the employer already speaks. The line you do not cross: never list a skill you do not have. You are optimising recognition, not inventing qualifications, and the interview is where invented ones get found.

Obstacle three: bullets nobody can verify

Once a human looks, they spend under a minute. Bullets that survive that minute share a shape: what you did, how, and what changed. 'Answered support tickets' is a duty. 'Handled 40+ support tickets a week and cut average response time from a day to two hours' is evidence, and a screener can picture it. As a junior you may feel you have no numbers. You do. Course projects, internships, part-time jobs and volunteer work all produce them if you look: users served, time saved, things shipped, people coordinated. One honest number per bullet beats three adjectives. A student project counts: 'Built a booking tool for a 30-member sports club, in use every week since March' has a user count, a timeframe and a result, and it beats 'passionate about software' on any screen.

Obstacle four: the good material is on page two

For junior roles in international companies, one page is enough. Screeners read the top third first, so put your strongest material there: the degree, the project, the internship, the numbers. Write it in English unless the ad itself is in another language. If the ad asks for German or Dutch and you have it, put the level in the skills line in the ad's own words; if you do not have it, apply to the ads written in English instead of hoping. Then tailor lightly per application. You do not need a rewrite, just the right three or four keyword adjustments and a reordered skills line. Ten focused applications beat fifty identical ones, every week of the search, and one good message to someone on the team beats an eleventh application.

One convention changes by country and is worth a row of its own: the photo. Germany, Austria and Switzerland still often expect one. The UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and the Nordics prefer none. When in doubt, leave it out; nobody was ever rejected for not having a photo.

Where a CV in English is enough

The four fixes get you past the parser. The next question is whether English alone gets you past the recruiter, and that depends on where you apply. Of the 29,410 listings we track as of 17 September 2026, 5,787 have the ad written in English, about one in five. The share is very uneven. In the United Kingdom it is 1,158 of 1,341, and in Ireland 224 of 257, so an English CV is simply the CV. In Germany it is 907 of 11,754, under 8 %, but those 907 are the largest English-language pool on the continent, and 271 of them are in engineering. Sweden posts 9,073 listings and 276 in English. If your CV is in English and nothing else, aim it at the ad in English, whatever the country: the recruiter who wrote the ad in English will read yours. Our guide to the best countries in Europe for English speakers ranks the markets; the entry-level jobs in Germany in English guide covers the biggest one.

What nobody mentions

First, the Europass CV. It is the official EU format, it is free, and it parses well because it was built to. Recruiters at companies find the default layout dated. Use it for public bodies and EU institutions; for companies, build a clean one-column CV with the same structure and the same field order. Second, your degree may need explaining. A recruiter in Munich does not know what a bachelor from a university in Lagos or Pune covers, so name the field and the length in plain words, and if the role is regulated (health, law, teaching), read the recognition of qualifications page before you apply. Third, the ATS is not the enemy. It rejects the file it cannot read and ranks the rest. Get read, then get ranked, then the interview is the same as it was before software existed; our first job interview guide picks up there.

You can now check your CV against the four obstacles in ten minutes: one column with standard headings, the ad's own words for the skills you have, a number in every bullet, the strongest material in the top third of one page. Then aim it at the ads written in English. Workcamino shows you the full original ad, not a summary, so you can see exactly which words the employer uses and mirror them honestly. Browse the listings with the ad in English. Buen camino.

Browse all jobs