Blog, Career Advice, CV Writing in Kenya

Taiwo had 14 years of project management experience, an MBA, and a beautifully designed CV. He applied to 7 global roles. Zero responses.

What an ATS Actually Does to Your CV

An Applicant Tracking System is software used by 95% of medium-to-large employers to filter applications before a human reviews them. When you submit your CV through an online portal, the ATS reads it, extracts your information, scores it against the job requirements, and ranks it against every other applicant. If your CV scores below the threshold typically a 70 to 80% keyword match a recruiter never sees it. Not because they rejected you. Because a machine decided you were not worth surfacing.

Research across multiple hiring studies consistently shows that approximately 75% of CVs are filtered out by ATS systems before any human reviewer sees them. The majority of those filtered-out candidates are qualified. The majority are eliminated not by their experience — but by their formatting.

The Canva CV Problem

Canva and similar design templates use visual elements multi-column layouts, text boxes, icons, graphics, skill-rating bars, decorative fonts that ATS systems cannot parse accurately. When the machine attempts to extract your information from a two-column design, it reads across both columns simultaneously, producing garbled, unusable text. Your 14 years of experience becomes unreadable data. Your carefully written achievements become noise. A strong profile becomes a failed filter.

The Complete ATS-Compatible CV Checklist

✅  File format:  Save as .docx not PDF, not Canva export, not image file. Some ATS systems handle PDFs adequately, but .docx is universally compatible. Never submit a Canva export to an online application portal.

✅  Single-column layout:  No sidebars. No two-column designs. No text boxes. ATS systems read left to right, top to bottom. Anything in a sidebar, header, or text box may be entirely ignored.

✅ Standard fonts:  Arial, Calibri, or Garamond. 10–12pt for body text. 14–16pt for your name. No decorative or uncommon fonts — some ATS systems fail to parse unfamiliar font encoding.

✅ Contact information in the document body:  Not in a header or footer. ATS systems routinely fail to extract information from headers and footers. Your name, phone number, email, and LinkedIn URL must appear in the main body of the document.

✅ Standard section headings:  Work Experience. Education. Skills. Professional Summary. Not ‘My Professional Journey’ or ‘Career Story.’ The ATS is pattern-matching for specific strings. Use the strings it expects.

✅ No graphics, icons, or skill bars:  These are invisible or parsed as meaningless data by ATS systems. The visual bar showing ‘80% proficiency in Excel’ registers as noise — not as evidence. Remove all of them.

✅ Exact keyword matching:  Read the job description. Identify the 5–8 most frequently repeated professional keywords. Use them in your CV — in your summary, skills section, and experience bullets — using the exact phrasing in the posting. If the posting says ‘stakeholder management’ and your CV says ‘stakeholder engagement,’ you may not match.

✅ Achievement language in every bullet:  Start every bullet with a strong action verb. Include at least one number in every role. The ATS rewards keyword density and structured content. The human reviewer who eventually sees your CV rewards achievement evidence.

The Quick ATS Self-Test

Copy and paste the entire text of your CV into a plain text document – Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac. Read what appears. If your information reads clearly, in logical order, with all sections intact your CV is likely ATS-compatible. If it is scrambled, missing sections, or producing garbled text it will fail most machine readers, regardless of how strong the underlying content is.

Taiwo’s Result

We rebuilt his CV from scratch: single-column Word document, achievement bullets with figures, keywords drawn directly from three target job descriptions. He reapplied to the same 7 roles. Four responses within 3 weeks. Two advanced to final stage. One offer accepted — remote Senior Project Manager for a UK-based telecoms infrastructure consultancy.

READY TO TAKE ACTION?

Want us to audit your CV for ATS compatibility? Send it to kethafrica@gmail.com and we will tell you exactly what to fix. DM us ‘ATS’ to get started.  kethafrica@gmail.com | info@kizunaedgetalenthub.com | 0742118284. Join our community: https://forms.gle/pJZXzQznoxrDPGam9