CV

ATS-Friendly CV: 7 Practical Steps for the Greek Market

A practical, seven-step guide to building an ATS-friendly CV for the Greek market. Format, keywords, results, tailoring, and compatibility testing.

Dimitris Chatzigeorgiou

Career Advisor · AI Builder · 2026-04-19 · 12 min read

If you are not sure what ATS is, start with our complete guide to Applicant Tracking Systems before reading this one. In this article I want to be practical. I have reviewed thousands of CVs from candidates applying to Greek companies, Greek offices of multinationals, and EU roles hiring Greek-based talent, and the same seven issues come up again and again. If you fix these seven, your CV will reach a human recruiter in almost every case. That is the real job of an ATS-friendly CV: not to "beat" a robot, but to stop being filtered out before a person can read you.

I will walk you through each step, with the Greek market specifically in mind. Some steps apply anywhere. Others, like bilingual keywords and the Europass question, are particular to candidates targeting roles in Greece.

Step 1: Choose an ATS-readable format

Start with the container before you worry about the content. An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) parses your file into structured fields. The cleaner the file, the cleaner the parse.

Pick one of two formats. The first is .docx, which is the most reliable option across the tracking systems used in Greece, including the international ones like Workday, SuccessFactors, and Greenhouse that large Greek employers and multinationals tend to use. The second is a .pdf exported as text, not as an image. If you can open the PDF, select a line of text, and copy it into Notepad as actual characters rather than nothing, it is text-extractable. If it pastes as gibberish or nothing at all, it was flattened into an image and the ATS will see nothing.

Keep the layout single-column. Two-column CVs look beautiful on screen, but many parsers read left-to-right across the page and scramble your work history into a salad of dates and company names. Use a standard sans-serif font such as Arial, Calibri, or Helvetica at 10-12pt. Avoid tables for layout. Tables for a skills matrix or a languages list are usually fine. Tables that hold your entire CV are not.

Do not put critical information inside images, headers, or footers. Your name, phone, and email should sit in the body of the document. I have seen CVs where the phone number lived in a footer and the ATS parsed a blank contact record. The candidate thought they were being ignored. They were being invisible.

Step 2: Use standard section titles

ATS parsers are trained to recognise standard section headings. Creative names break that recognition. "My Professional Journey" is charming to you and opaque to a parser that is looking for the words "Experience" or "Work Experience".

Use these standard headings, in this order:

1. Contact details (at the top, no heading needed)
2. Professional Summary (2-3 lines, optional but useful)
3. Work Experience
4. Education
5. Skills
6. Certifications
7. Languages
8. Additional (volunteering, publications, or references available on request)

The order matters for scanning. Recruiters in Greece spend six to eight seconds on a first pass. If your most relevant experience is buried under a creative "About Me" poem, you lose that pass.

One Greek-market note. Many candidates include a photo because it used to be expected here. Photos are increasingly discouraged across the EU for bias-reduction reasons, and they do nothing for the ATS. If you are applying to a multinational or an EU-wide role, skip it. If you are applying to a very traditional Greek SME or a hospitality employer that expects one, a small professional photo in the contact area is acceptable. The ATS will ignore it either way. For the deeper take on this, see photo on CV in Greece.

Step 3: Mirror keywords from the job posting

This is the single highest-leverage step, and the one most candidates skip. ATS scoring in almost every system is keyword-weighted. The system compares the job description to your CV and counts matches on hard skills, tools, certifications, and role-specific terms.

Read the job spec twice. On the second read, highlight every concrete noun: tool names, methodologies, certifications, frameworks, industries. Those are your target keywords. Mirror them in your CV, word for word, in the contexts where they belong.

Here is a practical Greek-market wrinkle. Many roles in Greece are posted in English but operate bilingually. A "Financial Analyst" role at an Athens-based multinational might use the English tool names (SAP, Power BI, Oracle) but also expect Greek-language reporting. If the posting lists both, include both. If you worked on "τιμολόγηση" (invoicing) in a Greek SME and the multinational posting says "billing", include both terms. One will match the English-language ATS scoring; the other tells a Greek recruiter you can operate in their workflow.

Example. A junior data analyst posting lists: SQL, Python, Power BI, data visualisation, stakeholder communication, ETL. A weak CV says "worked with databases and built reports". A strong CV says "built Power BI dashboards over a PostgreSQL warehouse, ran SQL queries for ad-hoc stakeholder requests, and maintained daily ETL pipelines in Python".

Same facts. The second version uses the exact words the ATS is scoring for and the recruiter is skimming for.

Do not keyword-stuff. A wall of skills at the top with no evidence below is obvious, and it fails the human read even if it passes the machine. Keywords belong inside your bullets, supported by what you actually did.

When in doubt, you can paste the job description and your CV into our free ATS checker and see which keywords are landing.

Step 4: Write results, not duties

Most CVs I see in Greece read like job descriptions copied from an employment contract. "Responsible for managing the sales pipeline." "Handled customer inquiries." That tells the reader nothing about whether you were good at it.

The structure that works, both for ATS keyword density and for human readability, is: action verb + what you did + measurable result.

Weak: "Responsible for the sales pipeline." Strong: "Managed a B2B pipeline in HubSpot and closed new revenue across enterprise accounts in 2024."

Weak: "Handled customer inquiries." Strong: "Resolved customer tickets in Zendesk daily, maintained a high CSAT score across 18 months."

Weak: "Involved in marketing campaigns." Strong: "Launched Meta Ads campaigns for the Greek market, reduced cost-per-lead meaningfully over six months."

Notice what happens. Tool names (HubSpot, Zendesk, Meta Ads) land as keywords. Concrete scope and outcomes give the recruiter something to hold onto in the six-second scan. And you sound like someone who owned outcomes, not someone who occupied a chair.

If you do not have specific numbers, use proxies: scope ("a team of 6"), duration ("over 18 months"), frequency ("weekly reports to the CFO"), or before-and-after ("redesigned the onboarding flow, cut time-to-first-value from 3 weeks to 5 days"). Vague is the enemy. Specific always wins.

One honest note. If you are early-career and genuinely have no numbers, do not invent them. Describe the scope and the work. Recruiters in Greece are sophisticated enough to separate junior CVs from senior ones, and they will forgive a lack of metrics in an intern role. They will not forgive invented ones that unravel in the interview.

Step 5: Tailor per application (not generic)

One master CV, never sent as-is. That is the rule.

ATS scoring is calculated per application. The same CV scores meaningfully differently against different postings, because the keyword overlap is different. If you send the same generic CV to ten roles, you are betting that one of them happens to match by accident. That is not a strategy; it is a lottery.

Build a master document that contains every role, every project, every skill, every certification you have ever earned. It can be four pages long. Nobody will ever see it. Then, for each application, spend 15-20 minutes producing a tailored version:

• Re-read the job posting and re-highlight keywords.
• Reorder your bullets so the most relevant ones sit at the top of each role.
• Cut bullets that do not support this application.
• Adjust your professional summary to echo the role title and two or three core requirements.
• Check length. Final version should be one page for 0-5 years of experience, two pages for 5+ years, never three unless you are in academia or executive search.

This feels slow. It is not. A tailored application has several times the response rate of a generic one, which means you apply to fewer roles and hear back from more. The total time spent is lower, not higher.

The Europass question comes up a lot here. For a modern, tailored application, a clean one-page or two-page modern CV outperforms Europass in almost every case. If you want the full argument, see Europass vs modern CV.

Step 6: Test compatibility before sending

Do not hit Send and hope. Test.

The cheapest test is the Notepad test. Open your PDF or Word file. Select all, copy, paste into Notepad (or any plain text editor). Read what comes out. If your name, contact, experience, and education appear in a clean vertical sequence with the right content in the right order, the ATS will read you correctly. If the columns are scrambled, if the dates are floating away from the companies, if your skills section is merged into your education, that is exactly what the parser will see. Fix the file before you fix anything else.

The second test is a scored compatibility check. You can paste the job description and your CV into our free ATS checker and get back a match score, missing keywords, and specific suggestions. It takes two minutes and tells you what the ATS is actually going to see. I built it exactly because candidates were sending me "final" CVs that fell apart on parse, and I wanted a way for them to catch it before a recruiter did.

You are looking for two things. First, that the document parses cleanly. Second, that the keyword match sits in a healthy range for the role. A low score usually means you are missing core terms from the posting. A high score with no stuffing is a strong target.

Step 7: Polish headers, dates, contact info

The last step is boring, which is why it costs candidates jobs.

Check your contact block. Phone number in plain text, not in an image. Email address with no typos (read it out loud). LinkedIn URL in short form (linkedin.com/in/yourname), not the long tracking version. City and country, not full home address. If you are applying from Greece to EU roles and your Greek mobile number starts with +30, include it. Recruiters in Athens will not guess.

Check your dates. One consistent format throughout the document. "03/2022 - 06/2024" or "Mar 2022 - Jun 2024" or "2022 - 2024", pick one and use it everywhere. ATS parsers build a timeline from your dates; inconsistent formats confuse the parser and sometimes drop roles entirely.

Check your file name. CV_FirstName_LastName.pdf or FirstName_LastName_Position.pdf. Not final_FINAL_v3_revised.pdf. The file name is the first thing the recruiter sees in their inbox.

Check your spelling in both languages if you are submitting a bilingual application. Greek spellcheck in Word is reliable if you set the document language correctly. English spellcheck catches typos but not wrong-word errors; read the final version out loud, slowly.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should my CV be?

One page for 0-5 years of experience. Two pages for 5+ years. Three pages only for academic CVs, senior executive roles with a long publication or board history, or medical specialists. In the Greek market, one clean page for a mid-career candidate almost always outperforms a padded two-pager.

Can I use color and design?

Yes, in moderation. One accent colour for section headings is fine and does not affect ATS parsing. What breaks ATS is layout: multi-column designs, sidebar skill bars rendered as graphics, icons used in place of text labels. If a visual element carries information, the ATS cannot read it. Keep design decorative, not functional.

Greek or English CV?

Match the posting. If the role is posted in English (most multinational and tech roles in Athens, Thessaloniki, and remote-EU), submit in English. If it is posted in Greek (most public sector, traditional SME, and customer-facing retail roles), submit in Greek. If the company operates bilingually and you are unsure, submit both in a single PDF with the English version first. Never translate word-for-word with machine translation and send without review; Greek recruiters notice immediately.

What about employment gaps?

Address them briefly and move on. A three-line entry under Work Experience reading "Career break for family caregiving / further study / travel / health recovery, March 2023 - August 2023" is sufficient. Do not hide a gap by stretching the dates of adjacent roles; it will come up in a reference check. Recruiters in Greece in 2026 are far more accepting of gaps than they were five years ago, especially post-pandemic.

If you would rather not assemble this yourself, the AI CV Builder handles all seven steps for you: ATS-readable format, standard sections, keyword mirroring from the job posting you paste in, results-focused bullets, and a one-shot tailored PDF. One-time €14.99, no subscription.