There's a claim in almost every CV guide: "Make sure it's ATS-friendly." What the guides rarely say is which ATS — and that makes a big difference.
Four systems dominate the European market for mid-sized and large employers. Each parses your CV differently. Optimizing for an average that doesn't exist is how good candidates get filtered out.
The four ATS you should know
Workday is the system behind Lufthansa, Allianz, Deutsche Bank and many DAX-40 companies. It parses structured CVs well, but fails on column-based tables and PDFs saved as images. If your PDF is scanned, Workday sees nothing.
SAP SuccessFactors runs at SAP itself, Siemens, BMW, and many tier-1 industrial corporations. Worse at parsing than Workday — especially with nested layouts. Plain text structure works best here.
Personio is the DACH-specific system for companies between 50 and 2,000 employees. Over 14,000 firms use it. Personio is more forgiving with layout but heavily focused on skill tags — if the sought skill doesn't appear literally, you drop in the ranking.
Greenhouse and Lever dominate startups and scale-ups, often in tech. Both parse cleanly but give recruiters detailed comparison views. That means even if you get through, you're compared bullet by bullet with other candidates.
What all four consistently reject
Regardless of system, these formats fail everywhere.
Two-column layouts. Personio sometimes handles them, the others don't reliably. Skills end up under work experience, dates disappear.
Tables for data. Tempting for structured CVs, but risky. Place dates left of text using tabs or fixed width — not in an actual HTML or Word table.
Images containing text. Skills as icon lists, star ratings for language proficiency, embedded logos — the ATS sees none of it.
Headers and footers. Contact info in the Word header gets ignored by some systems. Put it in the main body of the first page.
Unusual fonts. Stick to Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, Helvetica. Fonts the system doesn't know fall back to default — sometimes without umlauts.
The format recommendation that actually works
A simple Word file, saved as PDF using "Optimized for printing and online viewing" (not "Minimum size"). Single column. Clear headings (H2 for sections, H3 for roles). Dates right of or below the role title — not in a table column. Font size 10-11pt for body text.
It's not exciting. It works.
What ATS-friendliness isn't
A common worry: "My CV looks ugly if it's ATS-friendly."
Not true. ATS-friendly means: simple structure, readable type, no hidden elements. You can still use accent colors, build clear hierarchies, work with white space. What you shouldn't do is bury your identity in a visual flourish the system can't read.
The honest numbers
About 70-75% of all applications in the EU now pass through an ATS before a human sees them. At DAX corporations, it's over 95%. An ATS-unfriendly CV isn't "slightly less effective" — it often doesn't even reach the recruiter's desk.
If your CV is older than two years and you've never checked it for ATS-friendliness, the chance it fails at one of these four points is high. Thirty minutes of cleanup is the single biggest lever you have in 2026.