How much does ATS parsing penalize modern CV layouts?

Question

I&rsquo;ve been looking into how Applicant Tracking Systems parse CVs and I keep seeing a gap between assumptions and actual behavior.In tests with different CV versions, text-first, minimal layouts seem to preserve information better than visually structured ones.I&rsquo;m curious how much real-world evidence there is behind common ATS advice versus folklore.For those who&rsquo;ve worked with hiring systems or done testing: Have you seen measurable differences in parsing accuracy based on layout?

Oras · Accepted Answer

Depends on which ATS and what you mean by `preserve information`.
Sophisticated ATSs use CV parsers such as Text Kernel, Rchili, and Dextra.
They don't just parse; they also return structured data from the CV, such as personal information, skills, work history, and dates.
Even for LLMs, I wrote a CV parser that uses Mistral OCR to extract the text and an LLM to structure the data, with great success, even for multilingual CVs.