Best font for tech CV, or does formatting not trouble ATS?

When it comes to creating an effective CV as a technology job-seeker, content is certainly king.

But there’s often discussion, conjecture, and the odd urban myth surrounding certain formatting conventions such as colours but also fonts.

Here, exclusively for Free-Work, I will answer whether there is a best font for tech CV owners, while setting the font and formatting record straight, writes Matt Craven, career development expert and founder of The CV & Interview Advisors.

Urban myth

The idea that fonts affect ATS (Applicant Tracking System) optimisation is largely an urban myth.

However, there are a few exceptions and considerations.

The truth is, Applicant Tracking Systems are not that picky and take a pretty inclusive attitude towards CV fonts.

Not to put too fine a point on it -- but why would an ATS developer go to the trouble of restricting certain fonts on candidate CVs?!

Fancy Dan = ATS fail

Having said all that, if someone has created a font that uses unique encoding that is hard for the ATS to recognise, then you might have a parsing issue.

But I would guess that these situations are pretty rare.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that if a font uses special characters or ligatures, the ATS might not recognise or interpret the character correctly.

Incorrect parsing

Worst-case scenario, a letter or word might not parse correctly.

Additionally problematic, though, you could choose a font for your CV that isn't installed on the ATS. That’s a bit like how certain newer fonts weren’t installed on older versions of MS Word!

But once again, the worst-case scenario is that the odd letter or word might be misinterpreted. So the formatting might go a bit skew-whiff. To be avoided? Yes? The end of the world? Probably not.

Golden oldies

But tech job candidates ought to take note -- an older ATS with limited optical character recognition (OCR) capability might be a bit more wobbly.

In the main, though, these systems have mostly been updated or mothballed.

The scale of this issue is comparable to the claim that ATS doesn’t accept PDFs – once upon a time maybe so; but that really hasn’t been the case for some time now.

Rule of thumb with tech CV fonts

Unless you’ve gone wildly off-piste with your CV font choice, there’s certainly no evidence or technical reason why an entire CV would be rejected by an ATS due to font alone.

The rule of thumb is that if the font is effectively plain text, you should be OK.

The ‘but’...

Having said all that, I would recommend keeping things pretty safe, even if you’re applying for a more creative technology role.

If there’s any chance of a glitch from ATS, fonts like Comic Sans, Papyrus, Vivaldi and Chiller are more likely to be culprits – and therefore to be avoided on your CV, versus the safer choices of Arial, Calibri, or Cambria.

The humans (and this one likes Cambria for a tech CV font)

It’s not all about ATS either! Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

It’s just as important (or arguably more important) that your CV appeals to humans.

Despite what I cautioned above about creative tech roles, if you really do want to portray a comical personal brand as an IT contractor or tech applicant, then by all means use Comic Sans.

But typical business conventions call for typical business fonts such as the three aforementioned. Personally, I’m a fan of Cambria.

More than one font on your IT industry CV, or not?

Interestingly, the typical business position on the number of fonts is open to debate.

In fact, there is conjecture that multiple fonts can trip up ATS, quite apart from, say, four different fonts in one CV, looking a bit too jazzy to us mere mortals.

However, I’ve not seen any evidence, empirical or otherwise, that multiple fonts on a CV constitute an ATS fail.

Submitting multiple job application documents, in multiple fonts?

What about in the instance you need to submit multiple documents for a tech job application, such as ‘doc 1,’ a cover letter, ‘doc 2,’ a CV, and ‘doc 3,’ a portfolio?

Well, I cannot see why an ATS would be happy with ‘doc 1’ in Arial and ‘doc 2’ in Calibri but when ‘doc 3’ has both Ariel and Calibri, it chooses not to parse the data correctly! That seems like odd technical behaviour to me.

Why numerous fonts on your tech career CV are probably a no-no

More likely the issue with using numerous fonts on a CV is that it can simply appear like a lack of attention to detail.

Personally, I would stick to one font just in case ATS does happen to have a bad day, or it indulges in the strange behaviour outlined above.

A single font also invariably looks tidier to a human reader.

And it saves you -- the applicant -- faffing about with different fonts to achieve no real (tangible) gain.

CV: Should techies use bullet points?

Some CV ‘experts’ will argue that ATS cannot handle formatting, but virtually every CV ever written has some bullet points in it!

So we can safely say that unless the ATS creator was mad, they would build an ATS that was fine with bullet points.

That said, while ATS can handle standard bullet points found within MS Word documents, any fancy characters or symbols might appear as gobbledegook.

What your CV looks like in the ATS database

Remember, when a CV appears in the ATS database, the text will usually no longer have the bullet points.

It should be said that every ATS is built differently so what it looks like to a tech recruiter (when viewed inside their database) will vary.

I should also add here that while the CV will usually find its way into the IT recruiter's inbox (especially the case for more senior techie job applications), it’s the parsed data that ends up in the ATS database.

The latter, parsed data is usually more relevant for future roles, rather than the one which you, the candidate, have just applied for.

Tables and Boxes and Columns. Oh my!

Generally, tables and boxes on your tech resumé or CV are more likely to affect formatting, so be on guard for anything wonky.

But with both, the data is still usually parsable -- although it can be ‘hit and miss’ how the data looks inside the ATS post-parsing.

Tech CV evangelists often say that tables just add another level of formatting that the ATS has to deal with.

But based on what I saw one computing job candidate ask on LinkedIn, your CV’s ‘career highlights’ aren’t usually recommended for inclusion in a table, and therefore such ‘highlights’ should parse and appear perfectly.

As to the ‘Key Skills’ section -- a must for many IT contractors -- my recommendation is that these sit within a two-column table. The ATS will usually just put the two columns into one, but systems vary and some can indeed get their knickers in a twist!

Colours

An urban myth of CV fonts/formatting is that colour affects ATS optimisation.

But I’d love someone to explain to me how a piece of software can detect font colour! And then further explain to me how ATS would decide to reject certain colours -- unless of course it was programmed that way, but such detection and programming seem like a waste of developer-time (and budget), just to build such pointless functionality.

The process of text extraction from CVs involves interpreting characters and structure (like sections and headings), none of which are inherently tied to text colour.

Remember, ATS is a stripper...

The ATS strips out all formatting, including colour, bold, italics, and so on, when creating its plain text version.

That said, I see no reason why anyone would want to write their CV in anything other than normal black text! Again, if you go forward for a creative IT role, maybe the odd heading might benefit from some colour.

But only if you have that creative flair should you deviate from the norm of black here. At least 98% of your tech CV should be in black text.

Should you be bold?

There’s also conjecture doing the rounds on LinkedIn around using bold and italics.

Again, there’s no evidence to suggest that either formatting convention poses a problem.

On the contrary, some basic formatting of certain characters can help to highlight headings, and make clear important information to a human reader.

Layout considerations for IT job application: It’s CV first, ATS second

Overall with fonts, formatting and layout of your tech CV, my take is that it’s the ATS which should be built to accommodate standard CV conventions, rather than CVs being built around ATS functionality!

But for a successful job application, the line to tread is probably somewhere between the two.

An ATS should be able to handle most standard CV formatting that techies use and in many cases they do but be aware, all Applicant Tracking Systems are not built equal!

Still got questions on tech CV fonts, formatting and ATS?

My team offers 1-2-1 and confidential CV reviews – you can find out more here: https://cvandinterviewadvisors.co.uk/partners/free-work