CV Formatting Standards by ATS in 2026

If you submit candidate CVs to client ATSes, you've felt the pain: a beautifully formatted resume comes back as scrambled text in Workday, or Greenhouse rejects your PDF because of an embedded font. Every ATS has its own parser, and in 2026 the field is more fragmented than ever.

This is a working reference compiled from our own ATS submission logs across ~120k CVs.

What every ATS agrees on

Before the differences, the consensus:

• Single-column layout parses cleanly everywhere.
• PDF or DOCX — both work. Don't send .pages, .odt, or images.
• Embedded standard fonts (Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Times) round-trip without substitution.
• Section headers in plain bold work better than icons or graphic dividers.
• Tables are risky — even single-cell tables get flattened unpredictably.

ATS-by-ATS notes

Workday

Workday's resume parser was rewritten in 2025 and is significantly better at multi-column, but it still chokes on:

• Text inside SVG (parses as image, drops the text)
• Header/footer content on page 1 (silently dropped)
• Bullet characters outside U+2022 (•) — exotic bullets become "?"

Recommendation: keep page 1 header-/footer-free, use • for bullets, no SVGs.

Greenhouse

Greenhouse uses Sovren under the hood. Sovren handles modern layouts well but has two quirks:

• It infers section boundaries from font size deltas. If your section headers are the same size as body text but bolded, expect mis-classification.
• It struggles when employer and date are on the same line separated only by whitespace; use a | or —.

Lever

Lever's parser is the most permissive of the major ATSes in 2026 — DOCX with tables generally survives. The catch: Lever only accepts the first 5MB of an attachment. PDFs with embedded photos can blow past that.

Bullhorn

Bullhorn (popular in EMEA staffing) requires Word .docx for full field-parsing. PDFs are stored as-is but don't auto-populate candidate records. If you're submitting to Bullhorn clients, ship DOCX.

Taleo (Oracle)

Taleo is the conservative one. It still expects:

• Times New Roman or Arial only
• No images at all (it strips them silently and parses surrounding text incorrectly)
• A "References" section as a parse anchor — many candidates have stopped including it; add a placeholder if submitting to Taleo

iCIMS

iCIMS recently added an AI-powered parser that's surprisingly good. The one thing that breaks it: multi-page candidates with a footer that repeats the candidate's name. The parser treats each page's footer as a new candidate record.

The 2026 universal-format rule

If you're submitting one CV to all five, this is the safe set:

• DOCX format
• Single column
• Calibri 11pt body, Calibri Bold 13pt section headers
• • bullets
• No tables, no SVGs, no header/footer on page 1
• Employer / date on separate lines or separated by —
• Max 4MB

CV Cleaner Pro's "Multi-ATS safe" template ships with these defaults. Browse templates →