Free resume help: templates, ATS checks, and framing what you've done

An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is the software a company uses to collect applications and move people through hiring. Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS and Lever are common ones. When you upload a resume, the system tries to pull your name, jobs, dates, schools and skills into fields a recruiter can search.

Most of the time a person still makes the final call on who gets an interview. But the ATS gates a lot of opportunities before anyone looks. Knockout questions about things like work authorization, a required license or location can screen you out automatically. And if the system can't read your resume, your experience doesn't come up when a recruiter searches for it. You weren't rejected. You were invisible.

• One column. Tables, text boxes, sidebars and skill bars are where parsing usually breaks.
• Standard headings: Experience, Education, Skills, Projects. "Where I've been" is charming, and no parser knows what to do with it.
• Contact info in the body of the page, not tucked into the header or footer.
• If it's a PDF, export it from a document. If you can't highlight the text, the system can't read it either.
• If it's a Word doc, keep it plain: normal fonts, normal bullets, no graphics.

Upload it somewhere and watch what happens. When an application offers to fill in your work history from your resume, does it get it right? Or do you end up fixing half the fields by hand? If you're correcting a lot, a recruiter's search is probably missing things too.

Two more quick checks. Copy everything in the file and paste it into a plain text editor. If the order comes out scrambled, that's roughly what the ATS sees. Or drop it into any AI chat and ask it to list your jobs, dates and skills. If it can't pull them out cleanly, fix the formatting before you fuss with the wording.

Read the job posting and notice what they keep repeating. Then find the places where your experience matches, and use their words for things you've done. That's tailoring. Adding a skill you don't have because the posting mentioned it isn't. It falls apart in the first interview and wastes everyone's time.

For each bullet, lead with what you did, then what changed because of it. Numbers help when you have them. When you don't, say who it helped and how. The show your value page walks through eight jobs this way.

AI is good at structure and bad at knowing what you did. Give it the facts and let it help with the shape. This prompt works in the free versions of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini:

Here is my resume and a job posting. Rewrite my resume as a single-column, ATS-friendly document with standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills). Use only the jobs, dates, titles and results already in my resume. Do not invent skills, numbers or responsibilities. If a bullet is vague, ask me a question instead of guessing. Then list the requirements in the posting that my resume shows no evidence for, so I can decide what's true and worth adding.

[paste your resume]

[paste the job posting]

If you already pay for Claude, Claude Design has a Résumé template: go to claude.ai/design, open Choose a template, and pick Résumé. It makes something that looks sharp. Run the easy test above on whatever it gives you before you send it anywhere.

• Zety. Calls itself a free builder, then charges to download a PDF or Word file.
• Novoresume. The free PDF is capped at one page and watermarked.