How to Write an ATS-Friendly Resume in Australia (And Actually Get Past the Filter)

Most resumes don’t fail because the person isn’t qualified. They fail because the formatting is unreadable to the ATS scanner. If you’ve been applying on SEEK for weeks and hearing nothing, there is a strong chance your document never reached a human at all.

Around 4 in 5 Australian employers now use applicant tracking system (ATS) software to screen resumes before a recruiter sees them. The ATS reads your file, extracts your details, and scores you against the job. Below a certain threshold, you’re filtered out automatically. No one reviews it. No one calls.

If that sounds like your situation, you’re not alone — and it’s fixable. This is the practical guide to formatting your resume for the ATS systems Australian employers actually use, extracting the right keywords from any job ad, and verifying your resume is readable before you submit.

If ATS filtering is only part of why you’re not hearing back, Why You’re Not Hearing Back From Jobs in Australia covers the full picture — ATS is Failure Mode 1 in that article.

What is ATS software — and why does it matter for your resume?

ATS stands for applicant tracking system. It is the software an employer uses to receive, organise, and screen job applications.

When you submit a resume on SEEK or through a company’s careers portal, the ATS receives it before any human does. It parses your document — extracting your name, contact details, work history, education, and skills — and scores your application against the job description. If your score falls below the employer’s threshold, your application is filtered out of the recruiter’s queue entirely.

Around 60% of mid-sized Australian companies were using an ATS by 2024. For large employers — banks, mining companies, government health systems, major retailers — adoption is closer to universal. That means the overwhelming majority of online applications you submit pass through one of these systems first.

The key thing to understand: the ATS does not read your resume the way a person does. It reads it the way a document parser does — looking for text it can extract and classify. If your formatting gets in the way of that extraction, your data becomes garbled or invisible. A two-column layout can cause your work history to appear as scrambled, unreadable text. A Canva-built PDF often registers as a blank document. A section titled “My Career Journey” may not be recognised as work experience at all.

The fix is not to write a more impressive resume. The fix is to write a readable one.

Which ATS software do Australian employers use?

This is where most ATS guides fall short. Generic advice tells you to avoid tables and use standard fonts. What it does not tell you is which platforms you are actually dealing with — and why that matters.

Three platforms dominate Australian hiring.

PageUp

PageUp is Australian-built and the most common ATS in the public sector. NSW Health, Queensland Health, Woolworths, and ANZ all use PageUp. If you are applying for roles in government, public healthcare, aged care, universities, or large retail chains, PageUp is the system you are most likely submitting to.

If you are applying for a nursing role in Mackay, a council position in Ballarat, or an administrative role at a Queensland university, your resume is almost certainly going into PageUp.

PageUp handles .docx and clean PDFs equally well. What breaks it is complex layout: tables, multiple columns, text boxes, and contact details placed in the document header rather than the body. What it parses is exactly what the recruiter sees — there is no correction step after upload. Get the formatting right before you submit.

JobAdder

JobAdder is also Australian-built and dominates the recruitment agency world. Most SMEs in marketing, technology, professional services, and finance that use an ATS are using JobAdder. If you submit through a recruitment agency, you are almost certainly in a JobAdder environment.

JobAdder prefers .docx strongly over PDF. Its PDF parsing is the weakest of the three major platforms — any graphical elements in a PDF will frequently cause a partial or failed parse. A simple, single-column Word document is the safest choice for agency submissions.

JobAdder typically operates with automated ranking turned on. Your keyword match score directly affects where you appear in the recruiter’s queue. Position 3 versus position 47 is often a formatting and keyword decision, not a qualifications decision.

Workday

Workday is a US-origin enterprise platform used by Australia’s largest employers. CommBank, NAB, Rio Tinto, BHP, and Woolworths (for some divisions) run Workday. If you are applying to an ASX-listed company, a major bank, or a large mining operation, you are almost certainly in Workday.

Workday accepts both .docx and clean PDFs well, but has one well-known parsing quirk: right-aligned dates placed on the same line as a left-aligned job title cause Workday to merge them into a single garbled field. Keep dates on their own line or use a consistently left-aligned layout.

Workday has a feature the other platforms do not: a parsed preview screen before final submission. After you upload your resume, Workday shows you exactly what it extracted — your job titles, dates, employer names, and qualifications. Most applicants click through this screen without checking. That is a serious mistake. This is the one moment you can correct what the machine misread. Spend two minutes reviewing every field before you hit submit.

The six resume mistakes that guarantee ATS rejection

These are the specific formatting choices that cause ATS failures — not vague “avoid graphics” advice, but an explanation of what the parser actually does when it encounters each one.

1. Tables and columns. ATS software reads left to right, top to bottom in a linear stream. A two-column resume layout breaks that stream. Content from column one and column two gets merged into a single jumbled block of text. Your job titles, dates, and employer names collide into nonsense.

2. Graphics and icons. Skill bars, decorative lines, profile photos, icons, and logo images are not text. The parser either skips them entirely or reads them as noise characters. The information you placed inside a graphic — a skill level, a language rating, a personal summary — is invisible to the ATS.

3. Canva templates. This is the single most common reason qualified job seekers receive no response. Canva exports image-based PDFs by default. When the ATS attempts to parse an image-based PDF, it reads a blank document. Not a garbled document — a blank one. The design is completely irrelevant because the machine cannot extract a single word from it.

Canva’s resume templates typically combine all three problems: multi-column layouts, skill bars with icon graphics, and text embedded in image boxes. A Canva PDF looks impressive to a human. To an ATS, it does not exist.

4. Non-standard section headings. ATS software recognises section headings by matching them against an internal vocabulary: Work Experience, Employment History, Education, Skills, Summary, Certifications. If your experience section is titled “My Journey” or “Career Story”, the ATS may classify the contents as unstructured text or skip the section entirely.

5. Wrong file format. A PDF scanned from a physical document is a photograph of text, not text itself. The ATS cannot read it. Similarly, a PDF exported from Canva or InDesign is typically image-based. The safest default is .docx. A PDF exported directly from Microsoft Word or Google Docs is text-based and generally readable, but .docx is still the safer choice for JobAdder.

6. Contact details in the header. Many resume templates place your name, phone number, and email address inside the document header — the region above the main body margin. ATS parsers frequently skip headers and footers entirely. Your contact details become unreachable. Put them in the body of the document on the first page.

How to extract and use keywords from a job ad

Keyword matching is not keyword stuffing. It is using the exact phrase from the job ad, not a synonym you think means the same thing.

Here is the practical workflow.

Open the SEEK or LinkedIn job ad. Read the “About the role” and “Key requirements” sections carefully. Identify the five to seven phrases that appear most frequently — especially in the first half of each section. These repeated terms are signals of what the employer is weighting in their ATS configuration.

Write those phrases down exactly as they appear. Then check your resume for each one.

If the ad says “stakeholder management”, your resume needs to say “stakeholder management”. Not “relationship management”. Not “cross-functional communication”. The ATS is matching exact strings, not concepts. Two phrases that mean the same thing to a human are two different strings to a parser. One matches. One does not.

Here is a concrete example. An ad for a project coordinator role lists “stakeholder engagement”, “project governance”, and “risk management” in the first paragraph of requirements. Your current resume says “liaised with business units”, “maintained project controls”, and “identified risks”. None of those phrases match. A quick revision — adding the exact terms from the ad into your summary and most relevant role — can move your match score from below the threshold to above it.

Australian job ads often include both a position description and selection criteria. The phrases that appear in both are almost always the highest-weighted terms in the ATS. If “community engagement” appears in the position description and again in the selection criteria, use that phrase in your resume.

Natural placement beats repetition. Use each key phrase once or twice, in context, where it accurately describes your experience. Do not repeat phrases mechanically to inflate a score.

Word document or PDF — which format to send in Australia

The honest answer: .docx is almost always the safer choice.

Here is the breakdown.

.docx (Microsoft Word): The safest format across all three major platforms. PageUp, JobAdder, and Workday all parse .docx reliably. If you are unsure which ATS an employer uses, .docx is the default. If you are submitting through a recruitment agency — and therefore almost certainly into JobAdder — .docx is essential.

PDF (exported from Word or Google Docs): Acceptable for PageUp and Workday. These platforms handle text-based PDFs well. A PDF is a reasonable choice if the application portal explicitly states it accepts PDF, or if the job ad requests it. Text-based means exported directly from Word or Google Docs — not printed to PDF from a designed template, not exported from Canva.

PDF (from Canva, InDesign, or a designed template): Do not send this. The PDF is almost certainly image-based. The ATS reads a blank document. No amount of design quality changes that outcome.

Scanned PDF: Never. A scanned document is a photograph. Unparseable.

One practical check: open your PDF in Adobe Reader or a browser, then try to select and copy a word from it. If the text highlights when you click, it is text-based. If nothing highlights, it is image-based. Do not submit the image-based version.

When the job ad explicitly requests a PDF, send a text-based PDF. When the ad specifies Word, send .docx. When the ad says nothing, default to .docx.

How to check your resume with a free ATS tool

You do not have to guess whether your resume will pass an ATS scan. Free tools give you a match score and flag specific problems before you submit.

Jobscan is the most thorough option. Upload your resume and paste in the job description. Jobscan returns a keyword match score and a detailed report showing which terms you are missing and which formatting issues it detected. Aim for 70% or above on roles you are well suited for. A score below 60% for a role that fits your background is almost always a formatting or keyword problem — not a qualifications problem. Available to Australian job seekers.

Resume Worded checks your resume for overall effectiveness and keyword coverage. It is useful for general polish and for identifying sections that are weak on relevant terms. Good as a second pass after Jobscan.

Resume Scanner (resumescanner.ai) gives a quick ATS compatibility check and keyword gap analysis. Useful for a fast read before submitting to a specific role.

SkillSyncer is a free keyword comparison tool — paste your resume and the job ad, and it shows you which terms align and which are missing. Faster than Jobscan for a quick gap check.

A note on scores: these tools use their own parsing logic, which differs from the logic inside PageUp, JobAdder, or Workday. A 75% score on Jobscan does not guarantee a pass in the actual system. But a score below 60% is a reliable indicator that something is wrong — and the report will tell you what to fix.

Your ATS checklist before every application

Use this list before you submit. It covers the decisions that determine whether your resume reaches a human.

File format

• [ ] Save as .docx unless the ad specifically requests PDF
• [ ] If sending PDF, export from Word or Google Docs — not from Canva or a design tool
• [ ] Confirm the PDF is text-based: open it and try to select text

Layout

• [ ] Single-column layout — no tables, no text boxes, no side panels
• [ ] No graphics, icons, skill bars, or profile photos
• [ ] Contact details in the document body — not in a header or footer

Section headings

• [ ] Use standard labels: Summary, Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications
• [ ] No creative section titles

Content

• [ ] Pulled five to seven keyword phrases directly from this job ad
• [ ] Those exact phrases appear in your summary and most relevant role
• [ ] Dates formatted as Month YYYY (e.g., March 2022) — left-aligned or on their own line
• [ ] Australian English spelling throughout (organise, colour, labour)
• [ ] Two pages for professional roles; one page acceptable for early-career

Fonts

• [ ] Calibri or Arial, 11pt body, 12pt headings — no embedded or custom fonts

Platform-specific

• [ ] If applying through a recruitment agency (likely JobAdder): use .docx, not PDF
• [ ] If applying via Workday: review the parsed preview before final submission — correct any misread fields

Final check

• [ ] Run your resume and the job description through Jobscan or Resume Worded
• [ ] Aim for 70%+ keyword match for roles that fit your background

If your resume passes this checklist and you are still not hearing back, the issue may be one of the other failure modes covered in Why You’re Not Hearing Back From Jobs in Australia.