What "ATS-friendly" actually requires
Applicant tracking systems don't render your resume the way a person does. They extract text and try to bucket it into fields: name, contact, work history, skills, education. Anything that breaks that extraction — a two-column layout, a header inside a text box, a section title made from an image — becomes a parsing failure. In Canadian mid- and large-size employers, that failure means your resume gets a bad "match score" or gets dropped entirely.
The ATS-friendly resume format guide walks through the parseable structure. The 12 ATS fixes post covers the specific breakages we see most.
What Jobeefy's ATS builder enforces
- Single-column layout — no sidebars, no two-column tables.
- Standard section headings: Summary, Experience, Skills, Education. No "My Journey" or "What I Bring."
- ATS-safe fonts: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica. No decorative fonts.
- Text-only sections — no icons or images used as section markers.
- PDF exports with a real text layer (not a rasterized image).
- NOC 2021 keywords in the skills section so recruiters find you.
- Canadian English spelling by default.
The 5 ATS systems that matter in Canada
- Workday — used by RBC, Shopify, TD, Sun Life, most Big 5 banks and telcos.
- Greenhouse — used by Shopify (some teams), Wealthsimple, most tech scale-ups.
- iCIMS — used by many federal and provincial government contractors.
- Lever — used by mid-stage tech companies.
- Taleo — used by legacy enterprise and many federal government pathways.
The free ATS Resume Checker scores against all five and shows you the fixes per system.
Common ATS failures Jobeefy catches
- Two-column templates that jumble dates and companies.
- Headers or contact info inside an image or SVG.
- Skills as icons instead of text.
- Section titles like "About Me" instead of "Summary."
- Non-standard date formats ("Q3 '23" instead of "Sep 2023").
- Custom fonts that get substituted server-side and shift the layout.
- Foreign job titles with no NOC 2021 keyword nearby.
How to start
Paste your current resume into the free ATS Resume Checker, see the per-system score, then rewrite failing sections with Jobeefy's builder. No card, no trial to fix the ATS issues.