Career insights and stories

InDesign produces the cleanest ATS-safe PDFs of any design tool. Adobe charges $240/year for it. The 3 cases worth paying, the gotchas, when to skip it.

Apache OpenOffice has been on life support since 2015. The 5-minute switch to LibreOffice, the templates that work in both, and why your old .odt files don't need to change.

LibreOffice is one of the cleanest ATS-export tools available. The real problem is template scarcity. 5 worth using, the DOCX gotcha, when to switch to Google Docs.

Figma's native PDF export converts text to vector outlines. ATS reads the file as blank. The plugin fix, when designers should use Figma anyway, when not.

PowerPoint stores resume text as separate slide objects. ATS reads them in creation order, not visual order. The 3 fixes, when it's defensible, when not.

Apple Pages ships 9 free resume templates. Only a few survive ATS parsing intact. Which ones to use, the ligature setting that breaks the rest, and the export trick that fixes everything.

LaTeX makes the prettiest resume in the stack. It also fails half of ATS parsers. 5 free templates (Jake's, Awesome-CV, Deedy, ModernCV, Europass) compared, Overleaf workflow, the honest fix.

Notion is great for drafting a resume but its PDF export breaks most ATS parsers. 4 free templates compared, the export workaround, and when to just use a doc.

75% of resumes are filtered by ATS keyword matching. But keyword stuffing gets you rejected by humans. How to find the right keywords and use them naturally.

PDF preserves formatting. Word is easier for some ATS. Here's when to use each and the "Print to PDF" trick most people miss.

75% of resumes are rejected by ATS before a human sees them. Tailored resumes get 61% more interviews. Here's how to do it in 20 minutes.