Using ATS friendly fonts will help you pass the first round of the test and increase your chances of getting shortlisted for an interview.
Table of Contents
1. Overview Of ATS Friendly Fonts
The HR department receives hundreds of job applications, which can be quite overwhelming for any human to manually review. Therefore, recruiters use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to weed out job applications before an HR pro can evaluate the remaining applications.
This is why it’s essential to know what ATS friendly fonts to use in your resume.
Using ATS friendly fonts will help you pass the first round of the test and increase your chances of getting shortlisted for an interview.
However, you still need to keep in mind that your ATS resume must be simple and easy to read. Avoid any perceived unprofessional fonts – instead, focus on the content on your resume. After all, the ATS friendly fonts only help you pass the robot test and get to the human test – HR.
We’ve listed some of the most ATS-friendly fonts below to help you select the font you can use in your resume. But before that, you need to understand what makes an ATS-friendly font and why it matters a lot in your resume and resume date format.
2. Top ATS Friendly Fonts For Your Resume
1. Garamond
The Garamond font is an easy-to-read old-style font mostly used in print publishing. While this font is not technically modern, one thing for sure is that it features some contemporary interpretations, making it an excellent ATS font to use in your resume.
2. Helvetica
Helvetica is one of the oldest fonts but is still very popular in the corporate world. During its 50th anniversary, the font was chronicled by a documentary film illustrating how this font can be used in modern design. The Helvetica represents corporate dominance, making it one of the ATS-friendly fonts job applicants can leverage.
3. Times New Roman
Times New Roman is a font that you have probably come across most of the time in a word processor. Most lecturers recommend that you use New Times Roman for your assignments, showing you how powerful this font can be.
The New Times Roman font is popular and elegant, so the computer considers it readable. Because this font is considered highly professional, ATS will consider it readable, making it an excellent choice for resumes.
4. Calibri
Calibri has hit the ground ever since its release in 2007. Ideally, this font became the go-font after Microsoft Office came to light. Most people consider the Calibri font as an excellent alternative to Times New Roman.
Like Times New Roman, this font is quite familiar, and most people have used it at one point. The Calibri font is quite appealing to most recruiters’ eyes, so it is considered ATS-friendly font.
5. Cambria
Cambria is a blocky serif font, making it relatively easy to read well on the screen. This font features a box-like full stop rather than the usual circular full stops, making it a unique font.
While this font is easy to scan from a reader’s perspective, it is not available on Mac. This means you can be disadvantaged if recruiters are using Mac to review the applications. Otherwise, the Cambria font is ATS-friendly, and we highly recommend that you use it on your resume.
6. Georgia
Georgia font was explicitly made for internet use, and that’s why we couldn’t omit it from our list of ATS-friendly fonts you can use in your resume. During the 1990s, the search engines needed a font that would be readable on all screens.
From these demands, Georgia was made with the internet in mind. The Georgia font is used in most publications, including the New York Times, making it an excellent font to use when writing your resume.
7. Tahoma
You won’t believe that Tahoma has been around since Windows 95 was released – precisely, that is more than 25 years ago, and yet, this font is still one of the most popular fonts.
This font has a technical feel, making it an excellent choice for engineers. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use this font on resumes. Tahoma is ATS-friendly and, therefore, safe for use in the resume.
8. Arial
Arial is also one of the standard fonts used on the web. This font became popular when computers became an essential requirement at the workplace.
By default, Arial is the default font on Google Document, which shows how popular it has become even in this digital age. Like Times New Roman, Arial is also considered ATS-friendly and can, therefore, be used on resumes.
3. The Bottom Line
Most job seekers mostly overlook simple details like fonts and font size. However, it is essential to note that most recruiters today use ATS robots to scan through applications to save them time.
To make sure that you are a step closer to getting shortlisted for an interview, you need to make sure that your resume is easily readable using some of these ATS-friendly fonts we have discussed above.
