What an ATS actually does

An applicant tracking system is a database, not a judge. It parses your file into fields — name, contact details, employers, dates, titles, skills — and lets a recruiter search and filter across everyone who applied. It rarely rejects you outright. What it does is decide whether you appear in the recruiter's search at all. If parsing mangles your history, you are invisible rather than rejected.

Formatting that quietly breaks parsing

• Two-column layouts. Parsers often read straight across, interleaving your skills sidebar into your job history.
• Headers and footers. Contact details placed there are frequently dropped entirely — the most common cause of "they never called".
• Tables and text boxes. Content inside them may not be extracted at all.
• Photos, logos and icons. No parsing value, and in several markets they invite bias screening rules.
• Creative section names. "My Journey" is not a heading a parser recognises. Use Experience, Education, Skills.
• Inconsistent dates. Pick one format (e.g. Mar 2023 – Aug 2025) and keep it everywhere, with no gaps left unexplained.

Tailoring in four steps

1. Pull the real requirements. Strip the job ad down to the 6–10 things it genuinely asks for. Ignore the boilerplate about being a self-starter.
2. Map each one to something you did. If you can't map it, that's a gap — worth knowing before you apply, and worth addressing in your cover note rather than hiding.
3. Adopt their vocabulary. If they say "revenue operations" and you wrote "sales ops", use theirs — for the same work. This is matching, not stretching.
4. Re-order for relevance. The bullets closest to this role go first under each job. A recruiter reads the top third of the page.

The line you should not cross

Tailoring is emphasis. Fabrication is a title you never held, a tool you never used, or a date you moved to close a gap. It survives the filter and dies in the interview — and in markets with background checks, it can cost an offer after acceptance. If a requirement is genuinely missing, say what you have instead.

Where Alphie fits

Paste a job description into Rate My Fit and Alphie scores your CV against it and names the gaps, so you can decide whether the role is worth your time before you spend an hour on it. If it is, Alphie tailors the CV to that role — reordering and rewording your real experience only — and outputs a single-column, ATS-compliant document. From there, Prepare with Alphie builds the interview brief and Alphie's Mock Interview lets you rehearse it out loud. All three are on the free plan.

Common questions