How to beat the ATS in Australia without gaming it

Three quarters of Australian applications go through applicant tracking software before a person reads them. The folklore says the robots reject you; the truth is duller and more fixable. The software mostly parses, stores and searches. Rejection happens when your formatting breaks the parse or your wording misses the search.

What the software actually does

An ATS converts your file to text, tries to slot it into fields, and lets a recruiter search the result. When your employment history sits in a two-column table, the parser reads across the columns and your dates divorce your jobs. When your contact details live in a header, some parsers never see them at all. Nobody rejected you; you arrived as noise.

The eight decisions that matter

1. Single column, always.
2. Real headings: Experience, Education, Skills, not Where I Have Made Impact.
3. Dates as Month Year, consistently.
4. Contact details in the body, never the header.
5. Submit docx or a text-based PDF, never a scanned image.
6. No text boxes, and no tables carrying content.
7. Use the ad's own keywords honestly: if it says stakeholder engagement and you did it, write those words rather than a synonym.
8. Standard fonts at readable sizes.

What not to do

Keyword stuffing in white text is detectable, dishonest and grounds for rejection when caught. Cramming every synonym reads as spam to the human who eventually opens the file. The goal is not to trick the software; it is to stop the software from tripping over you, so the human decision happens on your actual record.

Run your own document against our free 24-point checklist, which includes the full software pass, or send it through the free review and a writer will run it for you.