Resume & ATS Glossary

Software that companies use to receive, parse, search, and rank job applications before any human reviews them. The major systems are Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, and iCIMS.

If you apply through a corporate careers page, your resume almost certainly hits an ATS first. ATS systems read your resume as text — not as the visually-designed PDF a human sees — which is why formatting choices like multi-column layouts, text-in-images, and decorative tables can sink an otherwise-strong resume.

The process by which an ATS extracts structured fields — name, email, work experience, education, skills — from your uploaded resume. Parsers look for predictable section headings (“Work Experience” beats “My Journey”), single-column layouts, and PDFs with selectable text.

When parsing fails, your fields land in the wrong database columns — e.g. your job title might end up parsed as your name. That’s an instant disqualification before any human even sees you applied.

A 0-100 compatibility rating between a specific resume and a specific job description. Tools like our free ATS checker, Jobscan, and Rezi compute this by overlapping required keywords from the JD against keywords found in your resume, plus penalising formatting issues.

There’s no universal “ATS score” — every tool computes it slightly differently, and real-world ATS platforms don’t expose theirs. Treat the score as a direction (higher = better match for this JD), not as a guaranteed result.

The five ATS systems most commonly seen in 2026:

• Workday — large enterprises, Fortune 500
• Greenhouse — tech and startup
• Lever — mid-market tech
• Taleo — Oracle-stack legacy enterprises
• iCIMS — mid-large enterprises

Each has slightly different parser behaviour, but all five reward the same things: single-column layouts, standard section headings, and PDFs with selectable text.

A 3-5 line block at the top of your resume that tells the reader who you are professionally. Best version: a specific role label, a quantified scale of impact, and one differentiator. (“Senior Software Engineer with 8 years scaling consumer products from 0 to 1M+ users; specialised in mobile performance.”)

A summary is the section recruiters read first when they scan for 6 seconds, and the one ChatGPT pulls when you ask “what does this candidate do?”

A 1-2 line statement of what kind of role you’re seeking. Increasingly considered outdated for experienced candidates — the role you want should be obvious from the JD you’re applying to — but still useful for entry-level resumes, career changers, and applicants whose target role isn’t obvious from their work history.

See our 50+ career objective examples if you need a starting point.

A single bold line at the top of your resume — usually below your name — that names the role you do or want. “Senior Backend Engineer · Distributed Systems · ex-Stripe”.

Headlines are optional but high-signal; recruiters use them to immediately classify which role bucket you belong in.

A 1-page document accompanying your resume that explains, in narrative form, why this role specifically and what you’d bring. Cover letters are required for ~30% of applications today (down from ~70% a decade ago), most often at non-tech employers, government roles, and senior positions.

When required, write one specifically for that application — generic cover letters underperform no cover letter at all.

Any period longer than ~3 months between formal jobs. Whether to explain a gap is contextual: short gaps (under 6 months) usually need no explanation; longer gaps (caregiving, education, illness, sabbatical, entrepreneurship) are best addressed in one neutral line on the resume itself or in the cover letter.

ATS systems don’t penalise gaps; some recruiters do, but transparent gap explanations consistently outperform hidden ones.

The verb that opens a resume bullet point: Built, Shipped, Led, Negotiated, Reduced, Scaled. Strong action verbs describe what you did, not what your team did or what your role nominally included.

“Responsible for” is the canonical weak opener; “Led” is the canonical strong one for the same scope.

A single line inside a work-experience entry describing one thing you did and the outcome. Format that consistently works: [Action verb] + [what you did] + [quantified outcome].

Example: “Reduced p99 API latency from 800ms to 90ms by introducing a Redis caching layer; improved checkout conversion by 4%.”

A resume bullet that includes a number: a percentage, a dollar amount, a count, a duration, a rank. Resumes with quantified achievements consistently outperform those without — recruiters anchor on numbers because they’re easier to compare across candidates.

“Improved page load time” → “Reduced page load time by 47% (from 4.1s to 2.2s) across 12M monthly users.”

A framework for structuring achievement bullets and interview answers: Situation, Task, Action, Result.

On resumes, a compressed STAR — “In a fragmented onboarding flow [Situation], led a 2-month redesign [Action] that cut drop-off by 31% [Result]” — makes for the strongest single-line bullets.

Vague, over-used terms that occupy space without conveying signal: synergize, ninja, rockstar, results-driven, detail-oriented, proven track record, team player. Recruiters skip them; ATS systems don’t weight them.

Replace every buzzword with a specific outcome. “Results-driven sales manager” → “Sales manager who grew Mid-Market ARR 3.4x in 18 months.”

The default resume format: most recent job first, then backwards in time. Used by ~90% of candidates because it’s what ATS parsers expect and what recruiters scan for.

If you’re not sure which format to pick, pick this.

A resume organised by skill categories instead of by job. Designed to hide gaps or major career changes by foregrounding skills and pushing job history to a single line at the bottom.

Honest about its purpose, but recruiters know what it’s hiding the moment they see the format — most consider functional resumes a red flag. We don’t recommend it for most candidates.

A blend of reverse-chronological (job-by-job timeline) and functional (skill grouping). Used most effectively by career changers who want to emphasize transferable skills without hiding their actual work history.

Hybrid resumes work when designed deliberately; they fail when they look like the candidate couldn’t decide what to write.

A resume layout designed to parse cleanly through ATS software: single-column layout, standard section headings (“Work Experience”, not “My Path”), no graphics-as-text, no header/footer text containing key info, parseable PDF export, text-selectable content.

Multi-column “designed” resumes that look beautiful on screen often parse as gibberish into ATS databases. All Pika Resume templates are designed against this constraint.

A resume that runs content top-to-bottom in one column, no sidebars. The format ATS parsers handle most reliably.

Multi-column layouts (the kind where you have a left sidebar for skills/contact and a right side for experience) frequently get misparsed: skills land under contact, contact lands under experience, or one column gets ignored entirely.

Header (top of every page) and footer (bottom) areas in a Word/PDF document. Putting your name, phone, or email in the header breaks many ATS parsers — they sometimes ignore header/footer regions entirely, so your contact info effectively disappears.

Put contact info in the main body of the document.

A resume saved as PDF. Almost always the right format to submit. ATS systems have parsed PDFs reliably for ~10 years; PDF preserves your layout perfectly for the human reviewer too.

Two caveats: (a) some legacy systems still prefer DOCX, so check the application instructions; (b) “image PDFs” (e.g. a designed resume exported with text rasterised to pixels) are unparseable — make sure your text is text, not an image.

How long your resume should be. The honest answer is contextual:

• 1 page if you have under 10 years of experience or are applying in a 1-page-default market (US tech, consulting, finance)
• 2 pages if you have 10+ years or are applying in a 2-page-default market (most of Europe, academia, UK senior roles)
• 3+ pages is reserved for academic CVs (every publication listed) and federal resumes

Cramming 15 years onto one page by shrinking the font is a worse signal than going to 2 pages.

The specific terms a recruiter or ATS is looking for: skills, tools, methodologies, certifications, job titles, and industry vocabulary. Pulled directly from the job description you’re applying to.

Generic resume keywords don’t exist — what’s a keyword for one role is irrelevant for another. The phrase “managed cross-functional team” is a keyword for product management roles, not for backend engineering roles.

Cramming the same keywords into your resume multiple times — usually in tiny white text at the bottom, in a hidden text box, or repeated unnaturally in bullet points.

ATS systems have detected this for over a decade. Modern parsers downrank obvious repetition and recruiters spot it on visual inspection. Don’t do it.

Rewriting your resume to match a specific job description, by mirroring its vocabulary, surfacing the experience it asks for, and de-emphasizing the parts of your background it doesn’t care about.

Peer-reviewed research (Jobscan 2024, HBR 2023) shows tailored resumes receive 40-60% more recruiter callbacks than generic ones. Our Pika Match tool automates this in 60 seconds.

Concrete, demonstrable, often technical skills: programming languages, design tools, languages spoken, certifications held. They’re either present or absent — no judgment call.

“Python” or “Adobe Illustrator” or “CPA” are hard skills.

Behavioural and interpersonal capabilities: communication, leadership, conflict resolution, time management. Soft skills are notoriously hard to evidence in a resume (anyone can claim them); strong resumes evidence them indirectly through bullet points that imply the skill rather than name it.

(“Mediated a contract renegotiation with a strategic vendor that recovered $1.2M in committed spend” evidences negotiation without using the word.)

Skills you developed in one industry or role that apply to another. The single most important concept for career changers.

A teacher applying to product management has transferable skills in stakeholder management, curriculum design (read: roadmap planning), and presenting complex ideas. The resume’s job is to translate, not hide, the original context.

The 30-90 second initial scan a recruiter does on your resume before deciding whether to advance you to a hiring manager. Decisions are made on:

1. Does the role title roughly match what we’re hiring for?
2. Does the seniority and company calibre match?
3. Is there one specific, scannable accomplishment that justifies a longer look?

Most rejections happen here.

The percentage of applications that result in a recruiter or hiring manager reaching out for a screen. Industry baselines:

• 2-5% for cold applications through ATS systems
• 8-15% for tailored applications
• 30-50% for warm referrals

Tracking your own callback rate is the single highest-signal metric for whether your resume is working.