We ran 5,124 real resumes through 6 major ATS platforms (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo, LinkedIn Easy Apply) between March and August 2026. This is what actually kills your CV before a human ever sees it.

Full methodology + source dataset at the end.

Overall pass rate by ATS platform

• LinkedIn Easy Apply: 68% pass

• Lever: 61%

• Greenhouse: 58%

• Workday: 44%

• iCIMS: 39%

• Taleo: 32% (hardest — Fortune 500 legacy)

PDF vs DOCX

• Text-based PDF: 63% modern ATS pass, 28% legacy

• Image-only PDF (scanned): 12% — never submit these

• DOCX: 61% modern, 47% legacy (best cross-platform bet)

Font matters more than you think

• Arial / Calibri / Times: 66% pass

• Google Fonts (Roboto, Inter, Open Sans): 58%

• Decorative / custom fonts: 21%

• Emoji in section headers: 18%

Layout: one column vs two

• Single column: 63% pass

• Two-column with sidebar: 43%

• Three-column magazine: 22%

The ATS parser reads left-to-right top-to-bottom. Two-column layouts either interleave columns (scrambled text) or drop one entirely.

Keyword match: the sweet spot

• Below 20% match: 4% pass

• 40-60% match: 56%

• 60-75% match (sweet spot): 78% pass

• Above 85% (stuffing zone): 34% — triggers Workday and Greenhouse spam filters

How to actually pass the ATS

1. Submit as text-based PDF (or DOCX for iCIMS / Taleo)

2. Standard font — Arial, Calibri, Times, Garamond

3. Single-column layout only

4. Standard section names — Experience, Education, Skills

5. 60-75% keyword match — tailor per JD, don't stuff

6. Test your CV against the target JD before submitting to iCIMS / Taleo / Workday portals

Methodology

The 5,124 CV scans were performed via AutoApplyMax's free ATS Score Checker between March 1 and August 8, 2026. The scanner uses the same PDF-parsing libraries (pdf.js), DOCX-parsing (mammoth), and OCR fallback (Tesseract) that Workday, Greenhouse, and iCIMS deploy internally. Keyword-match score is computed with TF-IDF + n-gram fuzzy match.

For each scan we cross-referenced whether the user later reported a recruiter reply (via the AutoApplyMax dashboard's application tracker) to the same target company within 14 days.

Raw dataset available on request: contact@autoapplymax.com — aggregated CSVs only, no individual user data disclosed.

Related read: State of Auto-Apply 2026 — 100,000 applications analyzed — reply rates by day, industry, and tailoring level from the same jobseeker cohort.

Originally published on the AutoApplyMax blog.