ATS advice from 2019 still circulates constantly. Here's what actually works in 2026 — including what changed and what people are still getting wrong.
ATS advice from 2019 still circulates constantly. "Use standard fonts." "Don't use tables." "Save as PDF."
Some of that still applies. A lot of it doesn't capture what's actually happening in 2026, when nearly every company with 50+ employees is running Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, or Workday — and the filtering has gotten more sophisticated.
Here's what actually matters now.
Early ATS systems were basically keyword counters. They looked for specific strings and ranked candidates by how many matched.
Modern ATS (and the AI layers being added on top) does a few things differently:
This changes the strategy. The goal isn't to stuff keywords — it's to make your resume structurally legible to the system.
This one has shifted clearly in the last two years. For anyone with more than 2–3 years of experience, skills should come before education in the resume structure.
Why: ATS systems prioritise skills extraction. Getting your skills section into the first third of the document means they're captured reliably. Education at the top is dead weight for experienced candidates — the system already knows you have a degree from your profile.
Order that performs best in 2026:
Two-column resumes look clean to human eyes but confuse many ATS parsers. The column on the right often gets read out of order or skipped entirely. One column, top to bottom, is safer across every major ATS platform.
Anything that isn't plain text — including a decorative header, skill icons, or a text box used for layout — is invisible to ATS. It either gets skipped or generates garbage characters. Clean, unstyled text only.
PDF is widely accepted now. The old advice to "always use .docx" is outdated. Most ATS platforms handle PDF correctly. What matters is that the PDF was generated from a text document, not scanned.
If the role is "Senior Product Manager, Growth" and your title was "Product Lead," consider adding a line in your summary or most recent role: "In this role I functioned as a Senior PM focused on growth initiatives…"
ATS systems weight the job title heavily. You can't fake it, but you can contextualise.
This sounds obvious. Most people still don't do it consistently.
Pull out 8–10 key phrases from the job description. Check your resume. If you have that experience but used different language, change the language. "Built data pipelines" vs "developed ETL pipelines" are the same experience — but if the JD says ETL, your resume should say ETL.
Adding every buzzword to a skills section triggers spam filters in modern ATS. A focused list of 8–15 skills you can actually speak to in an interview performs better than a list of 40 technologies you've "worked with."
The summary is underused. Most people write a vague paragraph about being "results-driven" and "collaborative." ATS systems and recruiters both ignore these.
A summary that works:
The summary is prime real estate for the keywords that matter most. Use it.
All of this assumes your experience is a reasonable match for the role. A perfectly formatted, keyword-optimised resume for a role you're 40% qualified for will still get filtered out.
The highest-leverage thing you can do isn't format optimisation — it's applying to the right roles. A resume that's a genuine 4/5 fit, formatted reasonably well, will almost always beat a resume that's a 2/5 fit but meticulously optimised.
Know your fit before you apply. Then optimise.
Put this into practice
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