Is a LaTeX resume ATS-friendly? A 2-minute test

Short answer: yes, a LaTeX resume can be ATS-friendly, and a good one usually is. Whether yours is depends on two things that have nothing to do with LaTeX itself: the layout of the template, and whether the PDF carries real, extractable text. You can check both yourself in about two minutes, and this guide shows how.

If you're an engineering student or a developer, there's a good chance your resume came from Overleaf, and probably from Jake's Resume. So the worry is common: "Did I pick a format that a robot will mangle before a human ever sees it?" Let's look at what actually happens to a PDF after you click Apply.

What an ATS actually does with your PDF

An applicant tracking system (ATS) such as Greenhouse, Lever or Workday does two jobs with your resume:

1. It stores the file so a recruiter can open it, exactly as you designed it.
2. It extracts the text and tries to sort it into fields: name, email, phone, employers, titles, dates, education and skills.

That extracted text is what the system searches. Greenhouse, for example, lets recruiters run a full-text keyword search across candidates' resumes, and its Talent Filtering feature lets them mark keywords as required or preferred.

So the real question is not "LaTeX or Word?" It is: when software pulls the text out of your PDF, does it get your words, in the right order, spelled correctly? If it does, a recruiter searching for "Kubernetes" or "Spring Boot" finds you. If the text comes out scrambled, you're invisible to that search, however good the PDF looks.

Why LaTeX gets blamed (and when the blame is fair)

LaTeX compiles your source into a PDF in which every word is real text, not an image. That's a good start. Problems come from a few specific places:

• Ligatures and special glyphs. pdfLaTeX joins letter pairs like "fi" and "fl" into single glyphs. Unless the PDF includes a map from glyphs back to Unicode, extraction can turn "efficient" into "e cient" or a stray symbol. The fix is two lines in the preamble, and Jake's Resume already has them, with a comment that says why:

  \input{glyphtounicode}
  % Ensure that generate pdf is machine readable/ATS parsable
  \pdfgentounicode=1
  

  You can see them in the original template source.

• Multi-column layouts. Fancy templates put skills in a sidebar next to your experience. A parser reading left to right can interleave the two columns, so a line from your sidebar lands in the middle of a job description. Single-column templates avoid this completely.

• Icons and symbols for contact details. Font Awesome phone and envelope icons look tidy but extract as nothing, or as odd characters. Plain text such as +91 98xxx xxxxx and name@email.com is safer.

• Tables, text boxes and graphics. Skill bars, rating dots and charts carry no text a parser can use. A recruiter's search can't match "Python: ●●●●○".

• Creative section names. A heading like "Where I've made an impact" is harder for a parser to label than "Experience". Standard headings cost you nothing.

Notice that none of these are LaTeX problems. A Canva or Word resume with two columns and icons has exactly the same issues. A plain, single-column LaTeX template has none of them.

Is Jake's Resume ATS-friendly?

Jake's Resume is about as parser-friendly as a template gets:

The usual way to break it is by editing it: adding a photo, a second column, icons, or a custom font without proper Unicode mapping. If you've changed the template heavily, run the test below.

The 2-minute test: see what a parser sees

You don't need an "ATS score" from a tool to know whether your PDF parses. Do what the ATS does: pull out the text and read it.

Test 1: copy and paste (30 seconds). Open your PDF in a browser or PDF viewer, select everything (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A), copy it, and paste it into a plain-text editor such as Notepad, TextEdit in plain-text mode, or VS Code. Then check:

• Are all words intact? Look closely at words with "fi", "ff" and "fl": efficient, profile, workflow.
• Is the order right? Each job's title, company and dates should sit together, not scattered.
• Are your email and phone number there as text?
• Did any bullet points turn into strange symbols? A few odd bullet glyphs are harmless; missing words are not.

Test 2: pdftotext (1 minute, more exact). If you have Poppler installed (brew install poppler on macOS, or sudo apt install poppler-utils on Ubuntu), run:

pdftotext -layout resume.pdf - | less

This is close to what many parsing pipelines start from: raw text in reading order. If it reads like your resume, you're in good shape.

Test 3: search yourself. Think of three skills from a job you want, say "PostgreSQL", "Docker" and "REST APIs", and search for them in the extracted text. If they're on your resume but missing from the extract, you've found your problem.

Myth check: "75% of resumes are rejected by ATS"

You'll see this number on many resume sites. It traces back to a 2012 claim by Preptel, a resume-optimisation company that later shut down, and no study behind it was ever published, as this analysis of the claim and others have pointed out.

What is documented is that automated screening is common. In Harvard Business School and Accenture's Hidden Workers study, 63% of employers surveyed in the US, UK and Germany used a recruitment management system, and more than 90% of those used it to make a first cut or rank applicants. The same research found these filters often drop qualified people who don't match the posted requirements exactly.

The takeaway is not that a robot deletes most resumes. It is this: your resume is often searched and ranked by keywords before a person reads it closely. Clean, extractable text plus the job's own wording, used honestly, is what helps.

What matters more than LaTeX vs Word

Once your PDF extracts cleanly, the format question is settled. Three things then decide whether you get a call:

1. The words match the job. If the post says "PostgreSQL" and your resume says "Postgres", a strict keyword search may miss you. Use the employer's terms where they're true for you. Our guide to tailoring your resume to a job description walks through it.
2. The proof is visible. "Built REST APIs in Go serving 2M requests a day" beats "Backend development". A recruiter's skim and a keyword search both reward specifics.
3. It's one page and easy to skim. For students and engineers with a few years of experience, one page keeps the strongest work on top.

You can check the first one quickly: paste a job post and your resume into the free resume and job description checker to see which required skills and keywords your resume shows and which it's missing.

Frequently asked questions

Is Overleaf ATS-friendly?

Overleaf is just the editor and compiler; what matters is the template you use. A single-column template with standard headings and \pdfgentounicode=1, like Jake's Resume, produces a PDF that parses cleanly. Two-column or icon-heavy templates can parse badly wherever they're made.

Should I submit my resume as PDF or Word?

Submit a PDF unless the application asks for Word. Modern ATSs extract text from PDFs, and a PDF looks the same on every screen. If a portal specifically asks for .docx, follow the instruction.

Does the font matter for ATS?

The font matters less than how it's embedded. Computer Modern, the default LaTeX font, extracts fine when glyph-to-Unicode mapping is on. Avoid decorative or icon fonts for any text you want a parser to read.

Do I need an "ATS score" checker?

No single ATS score exists that every system uses, so treat any score as a rough guide. The copy-paste test above shows you what a parser sees, and a job-match check shows whether your resume uses the job's language.

Can I make my existing LaTeX resume more ATS-friendly?

Yes. Switch to a single column, replace icons with plain text, use standard section names, and add \input{glyphtounicode} with \pdfgentounicode=1 to the preamble. Or start from Jake's Resume in fastcv's builder, which generates it this way and lets you download the .tex file or open it in Overleaf.