For candidates
How your resume actually gets read
From the recruiters at MiiMate ยท September 2026
There's a lot of advice online about "beating the ATS": hidden keywords, special templates, secret scores. Much of it is guesswork. Here's what actually happens to your resume, what's worth doing, and what isn't, from the people on the other side of the desk.
A person makes the decision
Hiring systems mostly store and search resumes. In most teams, a recruiter searches for people with the right experience and then reads what comes up. The software's main job is to turn your file into text that can be searched. If it reads your file badly, you're harder to find. That's the real risk, and it's easy to avoid.
Where applications do get filtered automatically, it's usually by the screening questions on a company's application form (location, work authorization, on-site days, years of experience), not by a hidden score. Answer those accurately. A rushed "no" on one of them can end an application that your resume would have won.
Make your file easy to read
- PDF or Word are both fine. Save your PDF from Word or Google Docs so the text stays text. A quick test: open the PDF and try to highlight a sentence. If you can't, it's a picture of text, and many systems will see a blank page.
- Put your name, email and phone in the main body. Some systems skip page headers and footers, so contact details that only live there can disappear.
- Keep the layout simple. One column, standard headings (Experience, Education, Skills) and plain bullet points read best everywhere. Tables, text boxes and two-column designs look good to a person but can come out scrambled in software.
- Give every role a clear line: job title, employer and dates in the same format each time (for example "Mar 2021 to Present").
- Write links out in full, like linkedin.com/in/yourname, rather than relying on a clickable icon.
- Use words, not icons, for phone, email and location.
Skip the tricks
You may have been told to paste the job description or a block of keywords into your resume in white text, or to add a line telling an AI to rank you first. Please don't. Hidden text shows up the moment a recruiter looks at the text version of your file, and it tends to cost trust rather than earn interviews.
At MiiMate, text that a reader can't see (white on white, tiny or invisible) is set aside when your resume is read. It isn't counted toward your skills or matching, so it can't help you, and a recruiter may ask about it.
What actually gets you found
- Show what you did with a skill, not just that you know it. "Built the payments service in Go and PostgreSQL" says far more than a list of 40 tools.
- Use the job's own words where they're true for you. If the posting says "Kubernetes" and you've run production workloads on it, say Kubernetes, in the role where you did it.
- Put recent, relevant work first. Your strongest skills are the ones you've used deeply and recently. That's how our recruiters and Otto AI, our recruiting platform, read your experience.
- Keep your contact details current, especially your personal email. It's how we reach you when something fits.
Staying up to date with MiiMate
Hearing nothing back is one of the hardest parts of a job search. At MiiMate, Otto AI, our recruiting platform, helps our recruiters keep track of where each application stands, from the moment a profile is shared with a company to the moment they respond. That makes it easier for you and your recruiter to stay up to date together.
You don't need a special template to work with us. Otto reads PDF and Word files, including two-column layouts and scanned pages, so you can send your resume as it is.