ATS-Friendly Cover Letter: 7 Rules + Free Template (2026)

Your cover letter has to get through two things: a filing system and a person.

At most large companies, applications land in an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, before anyone opens them. What happens in there is set by the employer and is not visible from the outside. What you control is the document you send and the words in it, and that turns out to be most of the job. The letter that works least often is the one you sent to the last job too. In 266 real cover letters we analyzed, 86.8% of job titles appeared only once, proof that the same letter rarely fits two postings. Source: The Cover Letter Reality Report, GenerateCoverLetter.com.

This guide covers the seven rules that keep a cover letter simple to handle and specific to the posting, and ends with a copy-paste template.

Quick answer for anyone in a hurry: An ATS-friendly cover letter is a plain one. Single column, standard font, no tables or images, real selectable text saved as .docx or .pdf, the exact job title and the posting's own phrasing for the skills you genuinely have, and 250 to 400 words.

What an applicant tracking system is

An Applicant Tracking System is software employers use to collect, store, and organize job applications. When you hit Apply on LinkedIn, Indeed, Workday, Greenhouse, or almost any company career page, your application lands in one.

Workday, Greenhouse, and Lever are the common ones at large employers. Smaller companies use Breezy, Teamtailor, Ashby, Recruitee, and dozens of others.

What each one does with a cover letter, whether it presents it to a recruiter at all, and what part it plays in who gets called, is configured by the employer and is not observable from outside the company. Anyone quoting you an exact percentage that gets you filtered out is guessing. So this guide does not promise to beat a system nobody outside it can see. It covers the two things you actually control: sending a document that is simple to handle, and using the language the employer already used.

What the postings themselves ask for

Instead of guessing at software, we counted what employers wrote. Across 219 real job postings applicants pasted into our tool, six terms recurred across the widest share:

• team / teamwork (72% of postings)
• communication (66%)
• management / manage (62%)
• Excel / spreadsheets (38%)
• attention to detail (30%)
• problem-solving (28%)

Source: The Cover Letter Reality Report, GenerateCoverLetter.com.

Most of them are soft skills, and that is the part people get wrong. The instinct is to load a letter with tools and certifications, then leave the collaboration line as filler at the end. The postings point the other way. Prove the soft skills with the same specificity you would give a tool: name the collaboration, the stakeholder, the outcome.

For the breakdown by field, with the sample size behind each one, see cover letter keywords by field.

The 7 rules of an ATS-friendly cover letter

Rule 1: Use a single-column, left-aligned layout

No tables. No columns. No text boxes. No critical information stranded in a header or footer. A cover letter has no need for any of it, and a single column of plain text is the version that survives being copied, converted, and pasted into whatever comes next.

Your cover letter should read like a well-formatted letter from 1995, contact info at the top, greeting, three to four paragraphs of prose, closing, signature. Nothing fancier.

Rule 2: Stick to ATS-safe fonts

Safe: Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Helvetica, Georgia, Garamond, Times New Roman, Verdana.

Risky: Anything with decorative ligatures, script fonts, or custom-designed typefaces. A font that is not installed on the machine opening your file gets substituted for one that is, and you do not get to pick the replacement.

Body text should be 10-12pt. Headings should be 12-14pt. Anything smaller is a strain to read.

Rule 3: Save as .docx or .pdf

Both are standard, and if the posting names one, use that one. What matters more than the choice is that the file holds real, selectable text. Open your finished letter and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If you cannot, nobody downstream can either.

Never submit Pages files, scanned PDFs of printed letters, image files such as .jpg or .png, or rich-text formats with uncommon encoding.

Rule 4: Use the posting's own terms for the skills you have

This is the part most people skip, and it is what makes a letter read as written for this job rather than posted to a hundred.

Open the job description. Identify:

• Hard skills like Python, SQL, Salesforce, Adobe Creative Suite, or GAAP
• Certifications like PMP, CPA, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, or Six Sigma
• Tools and platforms like Jira, HubSpot, Figma, or QuickBooks
• Role-specific verbs such as managed a team of 10, led cross-functional initiatives, or reduced customer churn
• Industry language like B2B SaaS, fintech, or omnichannel retail

Pick the 8-12 that appear most often or feature most prominently in the job description. Work 5-8 of them into your cover letter naturally. Do not force them into bullet points. Write sentences that weave them in.

Bad:

I have experience with: Python, SQL, Tableau, Salesforce, HubSpot, GA4, Figma, Jira, Confluence, and Asana.

Good:

In my current role, I use Python and SQL daily to pull customer data from Salesforce into Tableau dashboards that help our product team prioritize their Jira backlog.

The second version carries the same terms and also demonstrates competence and fit. The first is a list. The second is evidence.

Rule 5: Use the exact phrasing from the job description

If the job description says cross-functional collaboration, do not write I work well across teams. Write cross-functional collaboration. Their wording is a choice they made, and echoing it back costs you nothing.

Scan the job description for three to five phrases that seem distinctive, the ones that feel like internal company language, and mirror them back. Recruiters notice this too. It reads as someone who actually read the job posting.

Rule 6: Skip graphics, logos, and fancy design elements

Your company logo at the top of the letter? Skip it. Icons next to your contact info? Skip them. A decorative divider between paragraphs? Skip it.

Every graphic element is one more thing that can go wrong when a document is copied, converted, or printed, and none of it makes your case for you. The safe bet is to include nothing visual at all. Save the beautiful design for your portfolio website.

Rule 7: Keep it between 250 and 400 words

Length is a human problem, not a technical one. A 600-word cover letter that requires scrolling gets skimmed. A 300-word letter that fits on one screen gets read.

250 words is tight but punchy. 400 words is the upper edge. Past 400, you are losing the reader.

The 250-to-400 range holds across most roles. For the word counts by experience level and the data behind them, see our guide to the right length for a cover letter.

The ATS-friendly cover letter template (copy and paste)

Here is a template that satisfies every rule above. Swap the bracketed sections for your details.

[Your Full Name]
[Your City, State]
[Your Email]
[Your Phone]
[Your LinkedIn URL]

[Date]

Dear [Hiring Manager's Name or "Hiring Team"],

I'm writing to apply for the [exact job title from the posting] role at [Company Name]. After reading your job description, I'm confident my background in [2-3 keyword skills from the posting] aligns closely with what you're building.

In my current role as [your job title] at [current company], I [specific accomplishment using a keyword from the job description]. This experience taught me [relevant insight], which I'd bring directly to the [team or department name] at [Company Name].

Beyond the day-to-day, I've [second accomplishment incorporating another 1-2 keywords from the job description]. I'm drawn to [Company Name] specifically because [one genuine sentence about what you like about the company, the product, or the mission, based on actual research, not flattery].

I've attached my resume for your review and would welcome the chance to discuss how my experience with [keyword] and [keyword] could contribute to [specific team goal or initiative mentioned in the posting].

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
[Your Full Name]

Copy that, swap the bracketed placeholders for your details, and you have a letter that is plain to handle and specific to the job.

The faster way: let a tool handle the keyword matching

Manually scanning a job description for keywords, weaving them into natural sentences, and doing it for every application you send gets exhausting by application five. Most people give up and send the same generic letter to every job, and a generic letter reads as generic to whoever opens it.

GenerateCoverLetter analyzes your resume against any job description, pulls the terms the posting actually uses, and writes a letter that works the relevant ones into natural sentences. You see your keyword coverage against that posting before you hit download, so you can tell what made it in and what is still missing.

See your match score free on any job, no account needed.

Common questions about ATS-friendly cover letters

Do employers use software to handle cover letters?

Many do, particularly large ones. Applications usually land in an applicant tracking system before a person opens them. What any given employer's setup does with a cover letter is not visible from the outside and differs from company to company, so the practical response is the same either way: send a simple document and use the language of the posting.

What file format is best for an ATS-friendly cover letter?

PDF and DOCX are the two formats employers ask for, and if the posting names one, use that one. What matters more than the choice is that the file holds real, selectable text. Open it and try to select a sentence. Avoid scans of a printed letter, screenshots, images of text, and Pages files.

How many keywords should an ATS-friendly cover letter include?

There is no number worth chasing. Pull the eight to twelve terms the posting leans on hardest, then work in the handful that genuinely describe your experience. Three to five used naturally in context beat twelve crammed into bullet points.

Should I use tables or columns in an ATS cover letter?

No. A cover letter has no need for them, and a single column of plain text is the version that survives being copied, converted, and pasted into whatever comes next. Left-aligned text in a standard font like Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman, or Helvetica.

Do I need a different cover letter for every job?

Effectively yes. In 266 real cover letters we analyzed, 86.8% of job titles appeared only once, so the same letter rarely fits two postings. You do not need to rewrite from scratch, but you do need to swap in the specific skills, tools, and phrases from each job description.

What ATS platforms are most common?

Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo, and SmartRecruiters are common at large employers. For mid-market and smaller companies, Breezy, Ashby, Teamtailor, Recruitee, JazzHR, and Workable. How each one is configured is up to the employer, so the rules above are written to be safe anywhere rather than tuned to any one of them.

Does a typo matter?

Yes, once a person reads it. A typo in the opening line is the kind of thing a recruiter remembers, and misspelling the company name is worse. Proofread, then read the letter out loud once before you send it.

Is a cover letter even necessary?

Often, yes. Plenty of postings still ask for one, and plenty of hiring managers will not review an application that arrives without it. It is also the only part of the application where you get to say why this job, in your own words.

About the author: Alex Sandor is the founder of GenerateCoverLetter.com, an AI cover letter platform built to help job seekers write letters matched to the job in front of them. Connect on LinkedIn.

Related guides:

• Best AI Cover Letter Generators in 2026
• Cover Letter Length: How Long Should It Actually Be?
• How to Generate a Cover Letter From Your Resume and Job Description
• Browse cover letter examples by job title
• Data analyst cover letter example
• Software engineer cover letter example
• QA engineer cover letter example
• Database administrator cover letter example

Last updated: July 16, 2026.