Let’s suppose a Monday morning, you see a stellar candidate’s résumé on your computer screen. Brilliant experience, strong metrics, great brands. Then your applicant tracking system (ATS) turned it into soup—titles in the wrong fields, dates missing, half the skills swallowed by a fancy two-column template. You took a sip of lukewarm coffee, sighed, and opened the next application. That’s the reality: the first “person” reading your résumé is software, and it’s picky.

Good news: you don’t need a designer template or magic keywords. You need a clean, repeatable workflow that helps the ATS parse your value and helps a human skim it in seconds. Let’s walk through it, recruiter-to-job-seeker.

How the ATS actually reads you (and where it breaks)

Think of the ATS like a careful librarian. It scans top to bottom, grabs your name, contact info, job titles, companies, dates, and skills, then files each piece into tidy database fields recruiters can search. Things go sideways when those items aren’t where the system expects them—stashed in headers or footers, trapped inside text boxes, split across two columns, or rendered as graphics. A practical explainer from SHRM on how to purchase an applicant tracking system lays out what these platforms do in practice and why consistent formatting matters for parsing.

Your north star is clarity. Use familiar section labels: Summary, Skills, Experience, Education, Certifications. Put the job title first, then the company, then dates—on one line, same format throughout (e.g., “Apr 2022–Aug 2025”). Keep core content as plain text; avoid tables or decorative shapes for anything the ATS must read. Quick gut check: if you pasted your résumé into a spreadsheet, would each bit land in the right column?

Recruiters have seen sharp résumés fail because a role title sat inside a pretty shape. They’ve also watched a simple Word doc float to the top because it was legible. The lesson is boring and powerful: structure beats decoration.

Start where your data already lives: LinkedIn → draft

Most of your stories already exist on LinkedIn. The sections map neatly: About → Summary, Experience → Experience, Education → Education, Skills → Skills. If you need a refresher on capturing what’s there, LinkedIn’s guide to downloading a profile PDF shows where to export so you can audit what’s strong (impact metrics, tools, scope) and what’s missing.

If you want help bridging the profile-to-résumé gap, try a lightweight tool like LinkedIn Resume Builder to turn your profile into an editable draft. Treat that output as scaffolding, not the finished house. Rewrite for evidence. Swap responsibilities for results:

• “Owned HubSpot” → “Built a five-step lifecycle in HubSpot that cut lead response time by 38%.”
  
  
• Add scale and cadence: “ran eight A/B tests per quarter,” “managed a $250k budget,” “trained a team of five SDRs.”

When you revise, read the lines aloud. Feel the verbs. Strong verbs make your work sound like something you actually did, not something that happened near you.

Format for machines and humans

The recruiter once printed two résumés and handed them to a VP. The “pretty” one looked great on paper but lost half its content in their system. The “plain” one parsed perfectly and got the interview. You can have clarity and polish if you follow a few rules.

• File type. If allowed, submit .docx; many parsers digest Word files more reliably than PDFs. If a PDF is required, export it from Word (not a design tool) to preserve reading order.
  
  
• Sections. Use simple, bold headers for Summary, Skills, Experience, Education, and Certifications. No icons required.
  
  
• Contact block. Name on top, then city/state (or city/country), phone, email, and one portfolio or LinkedIn link. Keep it in the body, not a header or footer.
  
  
• Experience lines. Job Title — Company, Location | Apr 2022–Aug 2025. Consistency > style.
  
  
• Bullets. One to five per role. Lead with the result, follow with context, close with tools.
  
  
• “Reduced churn 12% by launching a four-email onboarding flow; built and tracked in HubSpot and Looker.”
  
  
• Skills. Separate tools/technologies (SQL, Salesforce, GA4, Python) from domains (lifecycle marketing, deliverability, churn modeling). If you wouldn’t defend it in an interview, don’t list it.

If you’re building a repeatable hiring or upskilling process on the operations side, bake this hygiene into your stack. A short playbook that pairs candidate records with standardized résumé attachments can be supported by CRM marketing automation and a straightforward Gmail–CRM integration setup so recruiters and hiring managers see the same, clean information every time.

Keywords without stuffing (use data, not guesswork)

Recruiters often filter by title, skills, and specific tools. Instead of guessing which terms to include, mine two reliable sources.

• The job description. Highlight repeating nouns and verbs—lifecycle campaigns, SQL joins, pipeline hygiene, QA dashboards. Mirror the phrasing only when it’s true for you.
  
  
• Neutral references. The U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET Online lists common tasks and technologies for each role. If the target job mentions “relational databases” and “data cleaning,” and you’ve done it, say so plainly.
  
  
• “Cleaned and joined 12M+ rows across Snowflake tables to build weekly pipeline QA dashboards.”

I’ve rejected keyword-stuffed résumés that read like a tag cloud. I’ve advanced quite, credible ones that pair two or three precise terms with real outcomes. Depth over density.

The six-to-ten second skim (and how to ace it)

Let’s consider a recruiter opening a résumé, taking one sip of coffee, and deciding whether it deserves a full read. They only scan the top third: Summary + Skills + Latest Role. Make that area pull weight.

• Summary: One sentence, two at most. “Lifecycle marketer with six years in B2B SaaS; cut churn 12% and lifted trial-to-paid +22% by building journeys in HubSpot and Segment; SQL-literate and comfortable in GA4/Looker.”
  
  
• Skills: Don’t list everything. List what matches the posting and your story.
  
  
• Latest role: Your sharpest bullets live here. Lead with the result; keep the nouns concrete.

Non-linear path? Own it. A single clarifier prevents bad assumptions: “2019–2021: part-time consulting (two clients) while completing M.S.; full-time 2021 onward.” That line stops the “job hopper” filter from misfiring.

Build a reusable system so you can apply fast

You’ll move faster with versions, not one-offs. Set up three files and a tiny tracker.

1. Master résumé (2–3 pages, private). Every project, every metric, every tool—the source of truth.
   
   
2. One-page templates by target role. Lifecycle Marketing Manager, RevOps Analyst, Product Marketer. Each template has a role-specific skills cluster and your most relevant roles.
   
   
3. Job-specific version. Open the closest template, mirror the posting’s phrasing for one or two bullets per role, verify the skills list, and save.

Track submissions in a sheet or your CRM: company, role, link, version used, status, and next step. When recruiters run panel interviews, they love seeing a clean résumé version attached to the candidate’s record—everyone reads the same thing, and decisions move faster.

They can still hear the soft clack of keys when a good résumé loads, with clean lines, sensible headings, a crisp summary, and numbers that anchor the story. Build yours to create that feeling. Start with LinkedIn, shape it into a plain-text structure machines can parse, and keep a few ready-to-edit versions so you can tailor fast. Do it once, and you’ll spend your energy on conversations—not formatting battles.