10 ATS mistakes UK job seekers keep making

TL;DR: if your CV is getting silently rejected, it is almost never because you are underqualified. It is because something in the formatting or wording is making the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) score you below the cut-off. These are the ten mistakes that knock UK applicants out before a human reads a single word.

1. Multi-column layouts

Most ATSs read top-to-bottom, left-to-right. A two-column CV with a sidebar gets parsed as gibberish: your skills end up interleaved with your job titles, your dates jumbled. The CV looks beautiful on screen and unreadable to the software.

Fix: single column, full width. If you want visual interest, use bold headers and white space, not columns.

2. Headers and footers

Many UK applicants put their name and contact details in the document header. A lot of ATSs ignore headers entirely, which means your name and email disappear before scoring even begins.

Fix: put your name, phone, email, and city as the first lines of the body text, not in the header.

3. Image-based PDFs

If you scanned a printed CV, or exported from Canva as a flattened image PDF, the ATS sees a picture. No text, no score. You will be silently rejected.

Fix: open your PDF and try to highlight a word. If you cannot, the ATS cannot read it. Re-export from Word or Google Docs as a text-based PDF.

4. Tables for the skills section

Skills laid out in a 3-column table look tidy and parse terribly. The ATS often only catches the leftmost column, missing two-thirds of your skills.

Fix: use a comma-separated list or bullet points. Boring beats invisible.

5. Decorative fonts and icons

Fancy fonts (anything that is not Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Georgia) can render as boxes. Icons for phone, email, and LinkedIn render as the underlying Unicode characters, which the ATS reads as random symbols next to your contact details.

Fix: boring fonts, written labels (“Email:”, “Phone:”) instead of icons.

6. Missing the exact keywords

The ATS does not interpret synonyms well. If the job advert says “stakeholder management” and your CV says “working with senior leaders,” you score zero on that keyword. If it says “P&L responsibility” and yours says “budget ownership,” same problem.

Fix: read the job description, list the 8-12 most-repeated nouns and verbs, and mirror them exactly in your professional summary and bullets. (Full method in the tailoring guide.)

7. Abbreviating qualifications

UK qualifications often have both a long and a short form. NMC PIN vs Nursing and Midwifery Council Personal Identification Number. MRCP vs Member of the Royal College of Physicians. QTS vs Qualified Teacher Status. ATSs only match what the job advert uses.

Fix: include both. “NMC PIN (Nursing and Midwifery Council)” covers you whichever way the advert is written.

8. Buried experience

UK CVs are typically two pages, with the most recent role at the top. If your last role is irrelevant to the job you are applying for and your relevant experience is on page two, both the ATS and the human are scoring you on the wrong thing.

Fix: if you are pivoting careers, lead with a “Relevant experience” section that surfaces the matching bullets to the top, then a separate “Other experience” section below.

9. Vague bullet points

“Responsible for managing a team in a busy retail environment” tells the ATS nothing about scope, scale, or outcome. It mirrors no keywords and contains no numbers. The ATS scores you low; the human skim-reads past it.

Fix: every bullet should follow: action verb + scope/numbers + outcome. “Led a team of 12 in a high-volume retail branch, delivering 110% of quarterly KPIs three quarters running.”

10. Same CV to every application

This is the biggest one. The ATS is built to score one CV against one job. If you send the same CV to 50 roles, you will score middlingly against all 50 instead of strongly against any one. Tailoring is not optional, it is the entire game.

Fix: tailor every single application. Manually it is 20-30 minutes per job. With Sausage Dog, under a minute.

The quick sanity check

Before you send your next application, open your CV in plain text view (in Word: Save As → Plain Text; in Google Docs: Download → Plain Text). Read it. If it makes sense top-to-bottom and your contact details, qualifications, and priority keywords are all visible, you are in good shape. If it looks like word salad, the ATS sees the same thing.