ATS resume checker: why your CV gets rejected before a human sees it

Contact details, job titles, employers, dates, education, and a bag of skill keywords. That's roughly it. Everything else — design, colour, personality — is discarded. Optimise for those seven fields.

Multi-column layouts (text is read left-to-right across columns and scrambles), text inside images or icons, headers and footers holding your phone number, tables for the experience section, and non-standard section names like "My Journey" instead of "Experience".

Many systems match strings, not meaning. If the posting says "Kubernetes" and your CV says "K8s", you can score zero on that requirement. Write both forms once, naturally, in the skills line.

Use a consistent MMM YYYY – MMM YYYY format. Inconsistent date formats are the most common cause of empty employment history after parsing.

Aim for 80%+ against the specific posting, not in the abstract. An ATS score only means something relative to one job description — a CV that scores 90% for a data analyst role can score 40% for a product manager role.

ApplyBean's CV Analyzer parses your CV the same way an ATS does, shows the score, lists the missing keywords for your target role, and the CV Optimizer rewrites the weak sections for you.