CV advice

How to Write an ATS-Friendly CV in the UK (2026 Guide)

By the Gradvo team · Updated June 2026 · 6 min read

You apply for forty roles, hear back from two, and start wondering if your CV ever reached a human. Often, it didn't. Most medium and large UK employers run applications through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) — software that parses, ranks and filters CVs before a recruiter opens a single one. If your CV isn't built for that software, it doesn't matter how good your experience is.

What an ATS actually does

An ATS converts your CV file into plain structured text, slots the content into fields (name, education, experience, skills), and scores it against the job description — mostly by keyword matching. Three things break this process:

• Layout the parser can't read: tables, text boxes, two-column designs, headers/footers and graphics scramble or hide your content.
• Missing keywords: if the advert says "stakeholder management" and your CV says "worked with different teams", the keyword match fails even though you mean the same thing.
• Non-standard structure: creative section names like "My Journey" instead of "Experience" mean the parser files your work history as unknown text.

The format that always parses

1. Single column. No sidebars, no tables, no text boxes. Content flows top to bottom.
2. Standard headings: Professional Summary, Experience, Education, Projects, Skills. Exactly those words.
3. Standard fonts (Arial, Calibri, Helvetica) at 10.5–12pt, saved as .docx or a text-based PDF.
4. No photo. UK CVs don't include one anyway — it's a parsing problem and a bias problem.
5. Contact details in the body, not the header/footer, which some parsers skip entirely.
6. Two pages maximum for a student CV; one is often better.

Keywords: the part most students skip

Open the job description and highlight every skill, tool and qualification it mentions. Those are your keywords. Now mirror the advert's exact language wherever it's truthfully yours: if they say "data analysis" and you wrote "analysing datasets", change yours. Do this for every application — a generic CV is a keyword mismatch with every specific advert.

Rule of thumb: if a skill appears twice in the advert and zero times in your CV, you're being filtered out for it.

Bullets that score with humans too

Once you're past the software, a recruiter spends six to eight seconds scanning. Win those seconds with the formula action verb + task + measurable result:

• Weak: "Responsible for social media."
• Strong: "Grew the society's Instagram from 200 to 1,500 followers in one semester by producing weekly reels."

Part-time work counts more than students think. "Served 150+ customers per shift with 100% till accuracy" demonstrates reliability and pressure-handling — two things every graduate employer screens for.

Check before you send

Don't guess whether your CV passes — test it. Paste it into our free ATS Score Checker with the job description and you'll get a score out of 100 plus the exact keywords you're missing. If you'd rather have it done professionally, a Gradvo CV rewrite starts at £15.