How an applicant tracking system (ATS) reads your CV

Before a person sees your application, a machine often reads it: an applicant tracking system, ATS for short. In Swiss job ads, the names behind it are Taleo, Workday or SAP SuccessFactors at large corporations, Personio, Recruitee or Teamtailor at growing companies, plus Ostendis and jobs.ch as home-grown systems. How such a system reads your CV decides whether your dossier ever reaches a screen.

Two very different machines

Applicant tracking systems are not all alike. Our dataset of 14 systems roughly separates two families:

Parser-driven systems (Taleo, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Ostendis) take your CV apart mechanically: they pull out name, contact details, positions, dates and degrees, and automatically sort your dossier into the candidate pool for the job. Whatever they cannot read does not exist for them.

Recruiter-driven systems (Lever, Greenhouse, Personio) parse only the basics and show the recruiter the document directly. Here the machine is not your first audience, but a person with a few seconds to spare. Parsing errors still cost you: a CV that falls apart in the preview looks sloppy by second two.

The advice therefore differs: with a parser you have to be machine-readable. With a recruiter-driven system you have to be clean and quickly scannable within those same five seconds. Both ask for the same thing: a plainly structured CV.

What the machine reads first: text, not image

The most common mistake, and the most expensive: a CV as an image PDF. Designs made in Canva look good but are an image internally. An applicant tracking system extracts nothing from it. SBB therefore names image formats explicitly as problematic for automatic reading, and BIZ Bern and the SECO leaflet additionally assume a machine-extractable text layer: a PDF in which text can be selected and copied.

The self-test is simple: open the PDF, click on your name and drag. If the text highlights, the machine can find it. If the image moves along instead, your competition wins.

The second mistake happens in formatting: icons instead of words. A phone symbol, a mail icon, a flag as proof of language skills — the machine reads a symbol, but no number. BIZ Bern and jobup both warn against decorative icons. There is a rare exception: a canton such as Graubünden explicitly allows icons used selectively (“in modo mirato”) — so the sources differ in strictness, not in direction. The safe route stays: icon only with text next to it, or leave it out entirely.

Tables are similar. If columns are repurposed as layout and running text is hidden in table cells, the parser can break the reading flow and output paragraphs in an unreadable order. Tables for tabular data — positions, languages, certificates — are no problem. An entire CV layout inside one table is.

What the machine lacks: judgment

Parsers are literal. They do not weigh the quality of your wording, and they do not recognize a cover letter’s motivation. A literal match with the job description wins: if the ad asks for “Project Manager” and your CV says “PM”, you can lose out. The key keywords of the job ad — required qualifications, tools, certificates — belong in your CV word for word, wherever they are true.

What the machine does not do, the recruiter does in the second step: read. The recruiter sees what the parser has prepared. That is why parsing errors are not cosmetic: an unrecognized date or a wrong phone number moves you down the ranking before a person has ever judged your strengths.

Checklist for Switzerland

1. Upload a PDF with a text layer — no JPG, no PNG, no Canva image PDF. (For apprenticeships Jura also tolerates Word — everywhere else, PDF.)
2. Do the selection test (drag across the text in the PDF).
3. Icons only with a text label; write out phone number, email and languages.
4. Remove running text from table cells; use tables only for genuine tabular data.
5. Use the literal keywords from the ad, where true.
6. Swiss wording when the ad is in German: Lohn rather than Gehalt, Zivilstand rather than Familienstand, workload (Pensum) in percent.
7. Then open the detail view for the system in your target industry (Workday at corporations, Personio at scale-ups, etc.) — our overview of 14 applicant tracking systems (DE, AT, US) is at jobsuchi.ch/en/ats.

Where sources contradict each other, we adopted the stricter variant in this list and named the exception — so your applications stay readable in every system in which Swiss companies receive them.

Sources

Taken from the rule catalog, accessed 2026-10-04:

• SBB: JPG/image files problematic for automatic reading
• BIZ Bern: ATS parsing fails without a text layer
• SECO leaflet: PDF as application format
• jobup: decorative icons are not read
• Canton of Graubünden (GR25): icons “in modo mirato” explicitly allowed
• Own dataset: 14 applicant tracking systems with parsing logic, see system overview