You have been told to add keywords, tailor every line, match the job description word for word.
None of it matters if the system cannot read your CV first. A two-column layout, a logo, your name sitting in the header, and the parser hands the recruiter a scrambled mess with your name missing. You never see it happen. You just hear nothing back.
The one move
Before you optimise a single word, test whether your CV is even readable. Paste it into AI and make it act as the parser: it pulls out only what it can clearly see. Anything it garbles or drops is what breaks in the real ATS. Fix the formatting, not the wording.
The prompt
Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT:
"Act as an ATS CV parser. Here is my CV pasted in as plain text. Extract only what you can clearly read into these exact fields: full name, email, phone, current job title, then each role (employer, job title, start date, end date), education, and skills. If any field is missing, scrambled, out of order or ambiguous, flag it and tell me the formatting choice that most likely caused it (columns, tables, text boxes, graphics, or details hidden in the header or footer). Do not guess and do not fill in gaps. Here is my CV: [paste]."
Rebuild anything it missed as a single column, plain text, standard headings, dates in the body not the header. Run it again and watch the fields come back clean.
Proof
Some data suggests formatting alone breaks a lot of CVs before a keyword is ever read. Haired, a CV-optimiser vendor, ran 10,000 CVs through ATS simulations (Workday, iCIMS, Taleo, Greenhouse) and found 61% had formatting errors. A plain single-column Word file failed to parse about 4% of the time, versus about 52% for a PDF with columns or tables (Haired, "We Analyzed 10,000 CVs", haired.app).
One link worth your time
Enhancv's free ATS Resume Checker, shows your parse rate and format compatibility by reverse-engineering Greenhouse, Lever and Workday: https://enhancv.com/resources/resume-checker/
Your move
Reply with the file type you send (PDF, Word, one column or two) and I will tell you the first thing I would change.
And if Instagram is more your thing, I post what I test there: @yaser._.builds
See you next week,
Yaser