ATS-Friendly CV Templates: What Makes a Template Safe, and a Test You Can Run in Two Minutes

What an applicant tracking system needs from a template

An applicant tracking system (ATS) stores applications and lets recruiters search them. To do that it turns your CV into fields: name, contact details, each job with its employer and dates, education, skills. It works that out mostly from position and adjacency: a job title next to a date range next to a company name.

So the template's job is simple. Keep related things next to each other in the text stream, and keep unrelated things apart. A template that places your skills sidebar alongside your first job may look tidy, but if the text comes out line by line across the page, the skills end up inside the job. Our longer explainer on what an ATS actually reads from your CV covers the parsing side in detail; this guide is about choosing the template.

The ATS CV format: seven rules for an ATS compliant CV template

The seven rules below are the ATS-friendly CV format in full. Colour, a banner header, a choice of font and modest design are all compatible with them. Keyword stuffing and white text are not: recruiters see the parsed text, so hidden keywords are visible to exactly the people you were hiding them from.

• One main column. A narrow strip for contact details at the top is fine; a full-height sidebar holding skills or dates is the most common cause of scrambled text.
• Real text. Every word must be selectable. A CV exported as an image, or with text inside graphics, is blank to software.
• Standard headings. Profile, Experience (or Work history), Education, Skills. Creative labels such as 'My journey' make sections harder to identify.
• Dates on the job line. Title, employer and dates together, in one consistent format, so each date range attaches to the right role.
• Nothing essential in the header or footer. Many parsers read the body text and skip page headers, so a phone number there can vanish.
• No text boxes or layout tables in Word. Text boxes are often dropped completely; tables commonly misattach dates.
• Plain skills. A list of words, not bars, stars or percentages. Graphics carry no text.

How the common layout families compare

Most template libraries, ours included, are built from a handful of layout families, and how reliably software reads each one is predictable from the layout alone. Commercial ATS parsers are more sophisticated than a plain text dump, so treat the column on the right as a guide to risk rather than a verdict: the copy-and-paste test further down tells you how your own file reads.

Which ATS-friendly CV template to choose (and the best ATS CV template for you)

There is no single best ATS CV template; there is a best layout family, and then personal taste. If your CV is going into online application forms, pick a single-column template: classic, minimal, timeline, banner or curved in our library. Together those families account for 34 of our 57 stock templates, so choosing an ATS-friendly CV template does not mean choosing a dull one.

Keep sidebar layouts for CVs a person will read directly: one you hand over at an interview, send to a hiring manager you have spoken to, or give to a recruiter who will reformat it. Executive layouts are fine for upload forms as long as the letter-spacing on the name and headings stays modest.

For a UK application specifically, a UK ATS CV template that employers will recognise also follows UK conventions: two sides of A4, no photo or date of birth, a short profile. Our UK CV formatting guide lists them, and the UK CV layout examples show the same CV in each family side by side.

How do I convert my CV to ATS-friendly?

You rarely need to rewrite anything. Converting a CV to an ATS-friendly format is mostly a layout job.

If a recruiter or a job board has told you your CV did not parse, the problem is almost always the layout rather than the content. Fix the layout first; reword later if at all.

• Move anything in a sidebar into the main column, under a normal heading.
• Take your phone number and email out of the page header and put them under your name.
• Replace skill bars with a plain list.
• Put each job's dates on the same line as its title, in one format.
• Rename creative section headings to standard ones.
• Save as a PDF with real text (try selecting a line), or Word if the employer asks for it.
• Run the two-minute test below.

The two-minute test for any CV template

Before trusting any template, including ours, put your own CV in it and run this. It uses nothing but a PDF viewer and a text editor.

Open the PDF, select all, copy, and paste into a plain text editor such as Notepad. Read down the result. Your name should come first. Each job title should be followed by its employer and dates before the next job starts. Your skills should appear after your experience or before it, not in the middle of it. If anything is out of order, a parser starting from that text will struggle too.

Then check the details that the paste test can miss: is your name split into single letters, does your email appear, did any section vanish? If all three are fine, the template is doing its job.

What about ATS scores and checkers?

Online ATS checkers give a score out of 100, and people reasonably ask whether 80% is good. There is no industry-standard ATS score: each checker uses its own criteria, usually keyword overlap with a job advert, and no employer's system shows you a number. A score is the checker's opinion, not the employer's.

What is useful is the extracted text and fields, because you can look at them and see whether your employer ended up in the right place. That is a fact about your CV rather than a judgement about it.

Putting your CV into an ATS-safe template

ConnectIQ reads your existing PDF or Word CV into a structured record, shows each extracted value next to the place it came from on your original page, and leaves a field blank rather than guessing when it is not sure. You can then set the same content in any of our 57 templates, including the 34 single-column ones, and export a PDF and a Word version from the same approved record.

The first conversion is free, with no card. It is also a quick way to see what software makes of your current CV, because the extracted record is the first thing you review. If you want help with the wording too, the AI rewrite runs at a level you pick and shows every change as a before-and-after; the safe ways to use it are covered in 6 ways AI ruins a CV.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most ATS-friendly CV format?

A reverse-chronological CV in a single main column, with standard headings, dates on the same line as each job, real selectable text and nothing essential in headers, footers, text boxes or sidebars. Saved as a text-based PDF, or Word if requested.

What is an ATS-friendly CV?

One that applicant tracking software can turn into correct fields: your name, contact details, each job with the right employer and dates, education and skills. In practice that means a layout whose text comes out in the order you wrote it.

How do I convert my CV to ATS-friendly?

Move sidebar content into the main column, take contact details out of the page header, replace skill graphics with a plain list, put dates on each job line and use standard headings. Then copy the PDF's text into a plain editor and check it reads in order.

Is 80% a good ATS score?

There is no standard ATS score. Online checkers each use their own criteria, usually keyword overlap with a job advert, and employers' systems do not show candidates a score. Check the extracted text and fields instead; they tell you whether the CV was read correctly.

Are two-column CV templates ATS-friendly?

Not reliably. Some text-extraction tools read across both columns and mix the sidebar into the job beside it. Use a single-column template for online applications, and keep two-column designs for CVs a person will read.

Can ChatGPT make an ATS-friendly CV?

It can suggest a plain structure, but it cannot see how your file will extract, and it may add details that were never in your CV. Use it for wording if you like, check every employer, date and figure afterwards, and test the layout with the copy-and-paste check.

Where can I get a free ATS CV template?

Any single-column template that passes the copy-and-paste test will do, including Microsoft Word's plainer built-in ones. On ConnectIQ, the first conversion is free with no card and includes every stock template, so you can put your own CV into a single-column ATS CV template UK recruiters will recognise and export it as PDF and Word.

What is the right CV ATS format: ATS format CV or a designed one?

You do not have to choose between plain and designed. An ATS format CV just needs one main column, real text, standard headings and dates on each job line; colour, a banner header and a good font all sit comfortably inside those rules.

Should an ATS CV template be in Word or PDF?

Either works if the text is real and the layout is single-column. Send PDF by default because it keeps your layout; send Word when an employer or agency asks for it.

Try it on a real CV

Put your own CV through it: see the record a parser pulls out, fix what is wrong, and pick a layout that survives the machine. No card required, and every AI change is shown as a before-and-after you approve.

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• Pricing and cost per CV
• More guides

Related guides

• ATS-Friendly CV: What an ATS Actually Reads From Your CV (7 Things It Takes, 4 It Drops)
• UK CV Layout Examples: Eight Layouts Compared on the Same CV, and Which Ones Software Can Read
• PDF vs DOCX for Candidate CV Submissions: A Recruiter's Guide