How to write a CV that applicant tracking systems can read

What an ATS actually is

An applicant tracking system is the tool an employer’s applications land in. It does three things. It files: it cuts your CV into fields — name, roles, dates, qualifications, skills. It searches: the recruiter types words into a search box and sees only the candidates who contain them. And depending on the tool, it ranks, scoring each application against the ad.

Everything that matters to you happens at the first step. A badly parsed CV is not a badly scored CV: it is a CV with an empty experience section and no qualifications, which therefore surfaces in no search at all. The recruiter did not reject it. They never saw it.

Who uses an ATS in Morocco

Not everyone, and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it. In practice, in Morocco, there are four situations.

• Large employers and offshoring. Banks, telecoms, industry, mining groups, and above all the customer-contact centres of Casablanca, Rabat, Fez and Tangier, which receive volumes no team reads by hand. Tooled screening is the rule there, not the exception.
• Recruitment agencies. Their asset is a candidate database reusable from one assignment to the next. Your CV is indexed there to be found again in six months, on a search you know nothing about — one more reason for it to parse cleanly.
• Job boards. ReKrute, Emploi.ma, Marocannonces, Indeed, LinkedIn. Here the filter runs first on the fields of your profile and only then on the text of the attached CV. A half-filled profile on a Moroccan job board costs you more applications than an imperfect CV does.
• Small firms and email applications. A large part of the Moroccan market, where a person opens your CV — often the owner. No ATS at all. The same rules do no harm there: a single-column CV with clean sections reads very well to the eye.

ANAPEC, the national employment agency, is a separate case. You fill in a structured profile on its platform, and those fields are what get queried — not the layout of a PDF. Content counts; graphic design counts for nothing.

Keywords: where to find them, how many to cover

An ATS compares strings. The keywords in an ad are therefore to be taken literally, and they are almost always in the same places: the job title, the "requirements" list, and the tools named by name.

1. 1.Read the ad again and pick out everything that is a noun: a tool (Excel, SAP, Salesforce, AutoCAD), a method (Agile, Lean, HACCP), a qualification, a language with its level, a job title.
2. 2.Drop anything you could not defend. A keyword added without the skill behind it gets you through the filter and loses you the interview — a bad trade.
3. 3.For what is left, find the place in your CV where it is already true, and replace your wording with theirs.
4. 4.Anything with no natural home inside a role goes into a short "Skills" section at the end.

Photo, personal details, languages: Moroccan conventions

Three questions come up in every Moroccan application, and none of them has the answer you will read on a British or American careers site.

• The photo. Still common and still expected in Morocco, including at large employers. It bothers no parser as long as it is an image placed beside the text rather than a whole CV turned into a picture. Put it next to the contact block, never inside a page header.
• Personal details. City and date of birth: normal. National ID (CIN) number: only if the ad asks for it — this is not a detail to circulate on a document you send to thirty employers. Marital status and number of children: pointless, and increasingly poorly received.
• Languages. The most heavily filtered section in the Moroccan market, particularly in offshoring and customer service. One line per language, an explicit level, and Arabic and French spelled out even when they feel too obvious to mention: the recruiter searches for them by name.

A driving licence and a note on mobility — "available across the Casablanca–Rabat corridor" — are worth including when the role requires them, and worth nothing otherwise.

Length, language, file format

One page under five years of experience, two beyond it. A third page is almost never read, and it dilutes the first two.

The language of the ad, not yours. A post written in French expects a CV in French; a contact-centre role for a British account expects a CV in English. Answering an English ad in French casts doubt on the level you claim three lines further down.

PDF, unless told otherwise. A PDF whose text can be selected is read by every current ATS and does not reflow from one machine to the next. When an ad explicitly asks for a Word file, send a Word file: it is asking because its tool wants one.

Testing your CV in three minutes

1. 1.Open your PDF, select all, copy, and paste into an empty text editor. What you see is, near enough, what the ATS sees.
2. 2.Check the order of the lines. If they arrive interleaved, your layout is in two columns or inside a table.
3. 3.Check that nothing is missing: name, phone, email, every job title, every date.
4. 4.Count how many of the ad’s words appear in that plain text. That is your real coverage — not the one you imagine.

If the paste comes out empty, your CV is an image and none of the rules above apply yet: it has to be rebuilt in a tool that produces text.

What an ATS-ready CV does not do

It does not get you hired. It gets you into the list. What decides the rest is substance: does what you have done answer what the ad asks for, and is it written in a way that can be checked — a scope, a number, a result.

And a CV embellished to cover a keyword is paid for later. The filter passes; the interview does not. It is the one rule on this page that has nothing to do with technique.

Frequently asked questions

Going further

The guides take each of these points in turn, written for the Moroccan market.