ATS Optimization: A Pre-Apply Checklist for Your Resume

Header photo by Irham Setyaki on Unsplash. A stock photo, not a screenshot of AceDraft or of any ATS.

ATS optimization, for a resume, is a short run of clerical fixes you make before you click apply: standard section headings, contact details in the body of the page, plain dates, the file the employer asked for, the job ad's own words where they're true, and careful answers to the screening questions. If you came here to optimize your resume for ATS software, that's the whole list. This post puts it in order and says where the evidence for each item runs out.

Now the part that costs me something. I built AceDraft's free ATS scan, and it can't check most of this list. As of 5 October 2026, its Formatting bar says "coming soon", so it doesn't score your headings or your dates at all. It also never sees the application form, which is where the screening questions live.

One more limit before the list. AceDraft is pre-launch, with no users and no hiring results to point to, and I haven't submitted a resume through Workday, Greenhouse, Lever or any other employer's applicant tracking system (ATS). Where I lean on evidence, it's a vendor's own documentation or another company's dated test, credited by name. If you'd like to test my claims on a known file: check in presale page for our demo resume and you can verify our claims in the opensource tool we have mentioned there.

This post doesn't explain what an ATS is, and it doesn't retell the scare stories. I've written both separately: a guide to what an ATS is and how it works, and ATS myths, checked, which goes through the PDF, table and keyword-stuffing claims one at a time.

Key takeaways

• Seven checks, in order. None of them needs a paid tool.
• Greenhouse's help page on auto-reject (last updated 30 January 2026) describes employers rejecting applicants automatically on their answers to Yes/No or select questions. The page doesn't mention resume layout as a trigger, which is why the screening questions get the most care here.
• Use the job ad's words for work you've actually done. Coursera's ATS guide (updated 10 June 2026) gives the example of writing "copy" instead of "content" when that's the posting's word.
• Limitation: as of 5 October 2026, AceDraft's free scan doesn't score formatting and can't see any employer's ATS. I also haven't re-tested its keyword extraction.

What does ATS optimization actually mean for a resume?

ATS optimization means making your resume easy for an employer's software to turn into text and fields, and making sure the words the employer used for the job appear on your page wherever they're true of you. Coursera's guide to applicant tracking systems (updated 10 June 2026) says many systems convert a resume into plain text, and that plain text is what recruiters see.

So the job has two halves. One is mechanical: does the text come out in the right order, under headings a machine expects? The other is about words. Does the resume describe your work in the vocabulary of the job you're applying for?

Then there's a part of the application that has nothing to do with your resume file at all. The screening questions. I think they matter most, and they get their own section below.

When I pulled Google's US results for "ats optimization" through OpenSEO on 5 October 2026, four of the eight ordinary results were Reddit, LinkedIn or Quora posts, and the one LinkedIn post told readers to stop optimizing their resume altogether. I understand the mood. The checklist below is short partly so you can finish it and stop.

How to optimize your resume for an ATS: the pre-apply checklist

Here are the seven checks in the order I'd do them. The last column is where each piece of evidence stops, and a few of those limits are AceDraft's.

The rest of the post takes the checks one at a time, in the same order.

Which section headings should I use so my resume parses cleanly?

Use plain, standard section headings: Work Experience (or just Experience), Education, Skills, and a Summary at the top if you write one. Extra sections like Projects, Certifications or Volunteering are fine, as long as each heading says plainly what's under it.

The best evidence I have is small, and it's someone else's. Resuhive, a company that sells a resume tool, published a test on DEV Community on 27 September 2026 (updated 3 October 2026) in which their own rule-based checker didn't recognise a "Work History" heading as an employment section. Resuhive's post (updated 3 October 2026) also says their checker can't tell how a commercial parser attributes bullets, so I read it as one vendor's model of a parser.

I still take the hint, because renaming a heading costs nothing. "Work Experience" says the same thing as "Where I've Been" or "My Journey". If a parser matches heading text against a list, the plain words are the ones I'd bet are on it. That's a guess on my part, and I haven't measured it.

Resuhive's checker also scored a two-column version of the same resume lowest, 83 against 100, with 26% of its lines flagged as multi-column (Resuhive, 27 September 2026). Columns and tables get a full section in my post on ATS myths, so I'll stop at this: one column is the cheap choice.

For type, Coursera's ATS guide (updated 10 June 2026) suggests a standard font such as Arial, Calibri, Georgia, Helvetica or Times New Roman, at 11 point or larger.

A note on AceDraft's own labels. The guest editor's sections include Professional Summary, Skills, Education and My Experience. Those are the names of the form sections you fill in. I haven't checked, template by template, what heading text each of the six templates prints above them, so open your exported PDF and read the headings before you send it. If one prints something odd, that's my bug, and I'd want to know.

If you're still choosing a tool to build the resume in, my post on what a free ATS resume builder should give you covers what to look for in one.

Where should my name, email and phone number go?

Your name, email, phone number and city should go at the very top of the page body, typed as plain text on their own lines, with your LinkedIn URL written out if you include one. Keep them out of a Word header or footer, and out of images and icons.

I'll be straight about the evidence: none of my sources tests how a parser treats a Word header. A header is a separate area of the document. A contact line in the body sits in the main flow of the text with everything else, so it has fewer ways to go missing. I'm treating this one as a cheap precaution, and I'd rather you knew that than mistook it for a rule.

The reason to keep contact details out of pictures is the plain-text point from Coursera's ATS guide (updated 10 June 2026). If a system turns your resume into text, a picture of your email address has no text in it to turn into.

Here's the top of the page as I'd set it up:

• Your full name on the first line, and nothing else on that line.
• Email and phone number, typed out. No icons standing in for labels.
• City and country. I leave off my street address.
• A LinkedIn or portfolio URL as visible text, so the address still means something if a link gets lost when the file is converted.

In AceDraft, the free export after Save opens your browser's print dialog, where you choose Save as PDF. I haven't checked whether every one of the six guest-editor templates keeps the contact block in the main page body. The copy-paste test further down is how you'd confirm it on your own file, and it takes about as long as reading this paragraph.

How should I write dates, job titles and company names?

Write each job as its title, the employer's name, and a start and end date with month and year, in one format you use everywhere on the page. Coursera's ATS guide (updated 10 June 2026) recommends month and year for each position.

Resuhive's 27 September 2026 test points the same way from the other side: in their own checker, job entries with no dates cost points.

Here's the shape I'd use. It's an illustration I wrote for this post, and the brackets are placeholders:

[Job title]

[Company name], [City]

[Mar 2023] to [Present]

And the rules I'd hold to:

• Pick one date style and keep it. "Mar 2023" everywhere, or "03/2023" everywhere. Mixing them gives a reader two formats to decode on one page.
• Use your real job title, the one your employer gave you.
• Spell out an acronym once, then add it in brackets. Coursera's guide (updated 10 June 2026) gives "structured query language (SQL)" as its example. My reading is that this covers a recruiter who searches for either form.
• Short jobs still get months. I'd rather show an honest four-month range than round it to a year that hides it.

Coursera's guide (updated 10 June 2026) also suggests a chronological resume when you apply through an ATS, which means your most recent job first. A full comparison of resume formats needs its own post, so I'll leave formats there.

Author's take. If I only had ten minutes before applying, I'd spend them on dates and headings. They're dull, and they're where the cheap, checkable mistakes hide. The wording work can wait for the next draft; a missing end date can't.

Which file type and file name should I submit?

Submit the file type the application form asks for, and if it doesn't say, a text-based PDF named after you is a sensible default. Greenhouse's help page on supported formats (last updated 19 August 2026) lists .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf and .txt uploads up to 100 MB, which is what one ATS vendor accepts at the upload step.

I'm not going to re-argue the PDF question here. The myths post has a whole section on whether PDFs fail, with the same Greenhouse page behind it.

Here's where AceDraft costs you something. Both AceDraft exports, the free one and the paid one, are PDF only. If a form insists on a Word document, AceDraft can't produce one, and you'd need to rebuild the resume in a word processor. Better you hear that before you start than after.

A text-based PDF is one where the words are real text you can select with your cursor, as opposed to a photo of a page. The free export from AceDraft's guest editor goes through your browser's print dialog (Save as PDF). You can confirm the result is selectable text with the copy-paste test in the checking section below.

For the file name, use something a person can recognise in a downloads folder: [Firstname]-[Lastname]-Resume.pdf, with the role added if you're sending several versions. I don't have a source that says a file name affects any ATS. It's for the person who downloads it, and for you, three weeks later, trying to remember which version went where.

Heads up. If the form has both an upload box and a "paste your resume" text box, paste the plain text from your own PDF and read it through once. Whatever you paste is what that box holds, line breaks and all.

If you're comparing layouts before you build, I've written a separate guide on what to look for in an ATS resume template.

How do I use the job ad's wording without keyword stuffing?

Use the job ad's wording by swapping your own word for theirs wherever both describe the same thing you actually did, and by leaving out anything you didn't do. Coursera's ATS guide (updated 10 June 2026) gives the example of a posting that says "copy" rather than "content": if that's the ad's word, consider using it.

That's the whole technique, and it's smaller than it sounds. You're matching names for things. A bullet that says "wrote web content" and an ad that asks for "copywriting" describe the same work, and the ad's word is the one the employer chose.

Here's how I'd do it in practice:

1. Read the ad once and underline the nouns: the tools, the skills, the qualifications, and the job title itself.
2. Next to each underlined word, find the line on your resume where you did that thing. No line, no word.
3. Where your line uses a different name for the same thing, change it to the ad's name and leave the facts alone.

Coursera's guide (updated 10 June 2026) also warns against keyword stuffing and against hiding keywords in white text. The myths post covers why I'd never do either, so here's only the practical test: if a word is on your resume, you should be able to talk about it in an interview without changing the subject.

If you're doing this for several jobs, my walkthrough on how to tailor a resume to a job description without rewriting it shows the AceDraft side of it.

AceDraft's scan shows Keywords Matched and Keywords Missing for a pasted job description. I haven't re-tested its keyword extraction for this post, and an earlier batch of my posts recorded scans that returned zero keywords. So treat those rows as a prompt, and do the underlining yourself.

Why do screening questions matter more than formatting?

Screening questions matter more than formatting because they're the one part of an application where I can point to vendor documentation of automatic rejection. Greenhouse's help page on auto-reject (last updated 30 January 2026) says employers on its Plus and Pro tiers can set rules that reject an applicant automatically based on their answer to an application question.

Greenhouse's page (last updated 30 January 2026) says those rules work only on Yes/No, single-select and multi-select questions. Its own example is a truck-driving job that asks whether you hold a Class A Commercial Driver License and rejects applicants who answer no.

Two limits on that. It describes what Greenhouse lets employers configure in one product, and it tells you nothing about Workday, Lever or anyone else. I've also never seen an employer's settings, so I can't tell you how often anyone switches the rule on. The myths post has a section on whether an ATS automatically rejects your resume that goes further into the documentation.

What that means for the minutes before you submit:

• Read each question twice. A Yes/No question about a licence is the kind Greenhouse's auto-reject example (last updated 30 January 2026) describes, and a careless click there is the one mistake on this list I can show you a documented rule for.
• Answer truthfully. A Yes you can't back up comes out later, in the interview or the checks after it.
• Make your answers agree with your resume. If a question asks for years of experience, count them from the dates on your page, so the two don't contradict each other.
• Notice which questions you couldn't honestly answer Yes to. That tells you something about the job before you spend an evening on a cover letter.

AceDraft doesn't help with this part, and I'd rather say so plainly. The scan works from your resume PDF and a pasted job description, so it never sees an application form or the questions on it.

How do I check my resume before I click apply?

Run two quick tests on your resume yourself, a copy-paste test and a read against the ad, and then a scan if you'd like a second look at the wording. Each one catches different mistakes, and none of them is an employer's ATS.

The copy-paste test

1. Open your PDF and select all the text.
2. Paste it into a plain-text editor: Notepad on Windows, or TextEdit switched to plain text on a Mac.
3. Read it top to bottom. Your name and contact details should come first. Check that every heading made it, and that each job's dates still sit beside that job.
4. If something is missing or comes out scrambled, fix the layout before you send the file.

I like this test because it's free and fast, and it's close in spirit to the plain-text view Coursera's ATS guide (updated 10 June 2026) says recruiters see. It's still my rough stand-in. Your PDF reader pulls text out in its own way, and an employer's system may do it differently.

The read against the ad

Put the ad next to your resume and go down its requirements one at a time. For each, find the line that proves it. This is slower than any tool, and it's the check I trust most, because you're the only one who knows which lines are true.

What AceDraft's scan checks, and where it stops

AceDraft's free ATS scan takes a resume PDF up to 10 MB and a pasted job description, with a target job title as an optional extra. Results come back in about 30 seconds and aren't held behind an email. Signed out, you get 15 scans a day; signed in, there's no daily cap.

For the longer version, I've written about what a free scan can tell you, and what it can't.

What haven't I tested?

I haven't tested any item on this checklist against a real employer's ATS, and I haven't put a resume through one, so every claim here comes from someone else's dated page or from reasoning I've labelled as mine. Here's the full list, so you can weigh each check for what it is.

• No employer ATS. Not Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo or iCIMS. The two Greenhouse help pages I cite (last updated 30 January 2026 and 19 August 2026) describe what Greenhouse lets employers configure and which files it accepts, and I don't use them for anything about how it reads a resume.
• Resuhive's test, published 27 September 2026 and updated 3 October 2026: one fictional resume in their own checker. I haven't reproduced it.
• Contact details in a Word header. I found no source either way, so that advice is a precaution.
• AceDraft's six guest-editor templates. None has been through a parser test, and I haven't checked their printed headings or where each puts the contact block.
• AceDraft's scan, as of 5 October 2026: accuracy untested by me, keyword extraction not re-tested, and Formatting and Content Quality not scored.
• No outcome data. AceDraft is pre-launch, so nothing here tells you which change leads to an interview.

There's one file you can check for yourself: check in presale page for our demo resume and you can verify our claims in the opensource tool we have mentioned there.

That tool is ATS Screener (ats-screener.vercel.app). As of 5 October 2026, ATS Screener is open source, simulates Workday, Oracle Taleo, iCIMS, Greenhouse, Lever and SAP SuccessFactors, and isn't affiliated with any of them. A simulator is still someone's model of those systems, so I give it the same caveat as my own scan and Resuhive's checker. I haven't recorded any scores from it, and I won't quote one.

What can I safely stop optimizing?

Once the seven checks on the pre-apply checklist above are done, you can safely stop optimizing your resume for an ATS. Past that point, the things left to fiddle with are the ones my sources don't support: extra keywords stuffed in, hidden white text, chasing a higher number on a scanner, and swapping a PDF for a Word file out of fear when the form accepts either.

The myths post I linked at the top goes through each of those with dated sources. I'd rather you spent the hour you saved on the next application.

Use this if you're about to apply through an online form and want a short, ordered list, with the limit of the evidence printed next to each item.

Skip this if you want a tool that guarantees your resume gets through a named ATS. Nothing I've built does that, and I haven't found a source showing that any tool can.

Sources

• Greenhouse Support, "Auto-reject". Last updated 30 January 2026; read 5 October 2026.
• Greenhouse Support, "Supported formats for resumes, cover letters and other candidate uploads". Last updated 19 August 2026; read 5 October 2026.
• Coursera Staff, "Navigating the Applicant Tracking System (ATS): A Job Guide". Updated 10 June 2026; read 5 October 2026.
• Resuhive on DEV Community, "The Career-Change Resume Advice That Quietly Breaks ATS Parsing". Published 27 September 2026, updated 3 October 2026; read 5 October 2026.
• OpenSEO US SERP data for "ats optimization", checked 5 October 2026.
• AceDraft, AceDraft presale page. Read 5 October 2026.