How to Make an ATS-Friendly Resume in LaTeX

A tracking system reads your resume as plain text before any person sees it, so what matters is not how the PDF looks but what falls out of its text layer. LaTeX is fine at this: every engine writes a real text layer. What breaks is layout. Two columns, a name drawn inside a graphic, skills in a table grid, and dates in a side rail all survive the eye and fail the parser.

Watch a layout choice break the parse

Turn each choice on and read the right-hand side. That column is not a simulation of a vendor, it is what text extraction yields, which is the first thing any tracking system does with your file.

Check your own file in one command

You do not have to trust an article about this, including this one. Poppler ships pdftotext, and running it against your own resume shows you precisely what a parser receives:

pdftotext -layout resume.pdf - | head -40

Read the output as a stranger would. Is your name the first line? Do the dates sit beside the roles they belong to? Did your skills survive as separate words? Drop the -layout flag and run it again, because some parsers do not preserve layout at all, and that is the harsher and more revealing test.

The rules that actually matter

1. One column for anything that must be read. A sidebar for a photo is survivable. A sidebar holding your employment dates is not.
2. Real text everywhere, including the header. A name set inside a TikZ banner or an included image extracts as nothing, and the field a recruiter searches by is the one you lost.
3. Lists, not grids. A skills grid built from tabular often extracts with no separator at all.
4. Standard section names. Experience, Education, Skills, Publications. A section called "Where I have been" is a section nothing matches.
5. Dates next to their roles, in one format. Pick "2024 to 2026" or "2024 - 2026" and hold it. Mixed formats within one file are a common cause of missing employment history.

None of this requires an ugly document. Every rule above is about where text sits in the page structure, not about typography, and a single-column resume with good spacing and a real typeface reads better to a human than a crowded two-column one anyway.

Getting there without rewriting it yourself

If you already have a resume with the risky choices in it, the work is mechanical: collapse the columns, pull the header text out of the graphic, turn the grid into a list. That is the kind of edit Lexi is good at, because every step is a rule rather than a judgment. The prompts below are the ones that produce the edit rather than a description of it.

- \begin{paracol}{2}
- \switchcolumn
+ % single column: dates inline with each role

Start from a template that already parses

Easier than repairing one: begin with a single-column layout. The CV and resume templates include plenty of them, and the resume template roundup sorts them by career stage and country, since a German Lebenslauf and a US resume are not the same document. Whichever you pick, run the pdftotext check on the compiled file before you send it anywhere.