ATS Screening: What It Actually Is and How to Make Sure Your CV Gets Through

You've spent an hour writing a great application. You click submit. And within milliseconds, before any human has even glanced at it, your CV is scored, ranked, and quite possibly rejected. Welcome to ATS screening.

What Is an ATS?

An Applicant Tracking System is software that companies use to manage job applications. Think of it as a filter that sits between you and the hiring manager. When you submit your CV through a company's careers page or a job board, it goes into their ATS first.

The ATS parses your CV — breaking it down into structured data fields like job titles, skills, companies, and dates. It then compares this data against the requirements of the role. CVs that don't match well enough never make it to a human reviewer.

The statistic everyone quotes is that 75% of CVs are rejected at this stage. Whether the exact number is 70% or 80% varies by study, but the point stands: most applications are filtered out before anyone reads them.

What ATS Systems Actually Look For

Every ATS works differently — there are dozens of platforms (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Bullhorn, iCIMS, and many more), each with its own parsing logic and scoring. But they generally look for:

Keyword matches. The ATS compares the words in your CV against the words in the job description. If the job asks for "project management" and your CV says "managing projects," some systems won't recognise that as a match. Exact terminology matters.

Job title relevance. Your current and previous job titles are weighted heavily. If the role is for a "Business Development Manager" and your title is "Commercial Growth Lead," you might score lower even if the roles are identical.

Skills matching. Most ATS platforms extract a skills list from your CV and compare it against required and preferred skills in the job spec. Missing a key skill can drop you below the threshold.

Parseable formatting. If the ATS can't read your CV properly, it can't score it. Fancy layouts, graphics, tables, and unusual fonts can all cause parsing failures.

How to Get Past ATS Screening

Use a clean, simple format. Stick to standard section headings (Profile, Experience, Education, Skills). Avoid tables, text boxes, headers/footers, and graphics. Use a standard font like Calibri or Arial. Save as .docx — some older systems struggle with PDFs.

Mirror the job description's language. This is the single most impactful thing you can do. Read the job ad carefully and use the same terminology in your CV. If they say "stakeholder engagement," use that phrase, not "client relationship management."

Include a skills section. List your key skills explicitly. Don't assume the ATS will infer them from your experience descriptions. If the job requires Excel, write "Excel" in your skills section.

Use standard job titles. If your actual title is unusual, consider adding a recognised equivalent in brackets. For example: "Commercial Growth Lead (Business Development Manager)."

Don't stuff keywords. Some candidates try to game the system by hiding keywords in white text or repeating terms excessively. Modern ATS platforms detect this and it can get you flagged or rejected outright.

Why We Don't Give You an "ATS Score"

You might have seen other tools that claim to give your CV an ATS compatibility score or match percentage. We deliberately don't do this, and here's why: it would be misleading.

Every ATS works differently. There are dozens of platforms in use across the UK, each with its own parsing rules, keyword weighting, and screening criteria. No external tool can accurately replicate what a specific employer's ATS will do with your CV. A score of "85%" from one tool means nothing when applied to a different company's system.

Instead, we focus on what actually works across all platforms: structuring your CV with the right keywords, formatting, and role-specific language drawn directly from the job description you're applying to.

The Bottom Line

ATS screening isn't going away. If anything, more companies are using it as application volumes increase. The good news is that beating ATS isn't about gaming the system — it's about presenting your real experience in the language and format that the system (and the human behind it) is looking for.

The candidates who get through are the ones whose CVs speak the same language as the job description. Everything else is noise.