ATS-friendly Folios

Many employers pass the resumes they receive through an applicant tracking system (ATS). It reads the text out of your PDF and files it under headings such as experience, education and skills. A resume that looks good to a person can still read badly to that software. A Folio marked ATS-friendly is built so its text reads cleanly, in the right order.

A Folio is the design of your PDF resume. If you have not picked one yet, start with Folios.

What ATS-friendly means

An ATS-friendly Folio keeps to a few rules:

One flow of text. The page reads from top to bottom in a single column. Some designs put dates or labels in a narrow margin beside the text, or set your name on a band of colour, but the content itself is never split into side-by-side columns. Two-column designs can come out interleaved when software reads them line by line.
Real, selectable text. Every word in the PDF is text you can select, search and copy. Nothing is drawn as a picture of text.
No photo. ATS-friendly Folios have no photo slot.
Your name comes first, and each section title stands on a line of its own, in the same order as your profile.
Entries read in order. A job’s title comes before its bullet points, and the bullets stay in sequence.
Plain headings and lists. Section titles are not spaced out letter by letter, and lists such as skills are written as ordinary comma-separated text, not as chips or grids.

Every ATS-friendly Folio is checked against these rules, in each font it offers, before it is released.

Folios without the badge are not broken: their PDFs also contain real text. They use sidebars, split layouts or a photo, which a person reads without trouble but which some systems read out of order.

How they are marked

In the editor, open Folio, then Change Design. Under Choose a Folio:

A card with the ATS-friendly badge is an ATS-friendly design.
Turn on ATS-friendly only to hide every other design.

You can combine the switch with the style filter and with Free or Premium. The With a photo switch shows a different group: ATS-friendly designs do not print a photo. If no design matches the filters you set, the gallery says “No Folios match these filters.”

Choose one

Open your profile and select Folio in the editor sidebar.
Select Change Design.
Turn on ATS-friendly only.
Select Use this Folio on the design you want. It becomes your active PDF resume and the PDF is rebuilt within a minute.
Select Download PDF in Your PDF.

A Folio with the Premium badge needs a plan that includes premium Folios; see pricing.

When to pick one

Pick an ATS-friendly Folio when:

you upload your resume to a job portal or a company’s application form;
a recruiter or agency asks for a “plain” or “simple” resume;
you are not sure how the file will be read.

A design with a sidebar or a photo is a reasonable choice when a person reads the file directly — for example when you email it to someone you know, or hand it over in print.

You do not have to choose only one. Every Folio you add is kept under Your Folios with its own colours, font and page size, so you can keep an ATS-friendly design and a more visual one and Switch between them. Only the active Folio is the one visitors download from your website.

Tips for a clean read

Changing the theme or font of an ATS-friendly Folio keeps it ATS-friendly.
On the Pages tab, choose US Letter for applications in the US and Canada and A4 for most other countries.
The PDF shows your published content. Select Publish changes before you download, so the file matches your latest edits.
Keep section names recognisable. The PDF prints the names your profile uses, and software looks for familiar headings.