Section headings an ATS recognises

Why the word carries the structure

A parser slices a CV into sections by finding lines that look like headings and matching them against forms it knows.

Two things have to be true for a heading to work. It has to look like a heading - larger, bolder or otherwise styled apart from the body around it - and the words have to match something. The first is what most CVs get right by accident, because designers style headings apart as a matter of course. The second is what invented headings break.

The consequence is worse than losing a heading. Once a section is unclassified, everything inside it is unclassified: the job titles are not job titles, the dates are not attached to roles, and a recruiter's search for "experience at" a company finds nothing. Reading-order damage produces the same outcome by a different route - a heading fused with a sidebar item stops matching the dictionary just as effectively as a heading nobody has ever written before.

Colour, rules and boxes contribute nothing here, because they are drawing rather than characters. A section boundary that exists only as a horizontal line and a change of typeface exists only for humans.

The headings Appliora recognises

These are the English forms in the parser's dictionary. They are ordinary words, which is the point.

Only the four core sections are scored for coverage. An earlier version scored against all eight, so a complete, well-built CV with no Projects and no Certifications heading started at 82 and was never told why - two optional sections, silently priced.

Contact deserves its own note. It has a heading in the dictionary and the parser uses it to slice the document, but its absence is never a fault: most good CVs print the name, email and phone at the top with no heading at all, and requiring the word told a perfectly good Polish test file it was missing a section it should not have. Whether a recruiter can actually reach you is Contact details (8 points), and that check looks for the details themselves.

The headings that make a section disappear

Every one of these is a real phrase from a real CV, and every one costs the section it names.

Weak

My Journey

Stronger

Experience

Why

The commonest invented heading and the most expensive, because the experience section carries the largest share of the coverage score. Nothing about the styling is wrong; the word is simply not one a dictionary holds.

Weak

What I Bring

Stronger

Skills

Why

A heading that describes a stance rather than a section. The skills under it are still extracted as text and are no longer identifiable as skills, which also affects Concrete skills.

Weak

Where I Studied

Stronger

Education

Why

Education is a short, unambiguous, universally used word, and a personal rewrite of it buys nothing a reader notices and costs a section a parser was looking for.

Weak

🚀 Experience

Stronger

Experience

Why

The word is right and the emoji breaks the match. It is also charged to Format traps, so one decorative character costs twice.

Weak

Professional Experience & Selected Achievements

Stronger

Experience

Why

Five words and over thirty characters, so it falls outside what Appliora will even consider as a heading candidate. A compound heading tries to do two jobs and reliably does neither.

How Appliora decides something is a heading at all

The rules are conservative, because a false accusation costs more than a missed rename.

• Styled like the headings that matched. A CV's section headings all look alike, and that is the strongest signal available. Without this rule the report once told a candidate, twice, that the city his office is in was an unrecognised section heading - a 9pt line under a job title, promoted by the classifier.
• No digits. A date, a phone number, a postcode or "7,000+ units" is not a section name.
• At most four words and thirty characters. Four words covers "Education and Qualifications" with room to spare. The character limit catches what the word count misses - "Interests Financial Operations Specialist" is four words and is two columns printed on one baseline.
• Not the name at the top of page one. The biggest text on the page, first on the page, is exactly what a heading classifier reaches for and is exactly not a heading.
• When nothing matched at all, everything passes through. There is then no style profile to compare against, and every heading being unrecognised is itself the finding.

Anything rejected by those rules is simply not reported. A missed rename costs the reader nothing they did not already have; a false one costs them their trust in the whole report, and a report nobody trusts is a report nobody acts on.

What a good heading does not fix

Headings carry structure. They do not carry content, and three neighbouring checks show the difference.

Consistent dates (7 points) asks whether the dates under each heading are in a consistent format and attached to the role they belong to. A perfect set of headings with a right-aligned date band that detaches on extraction still loses those points, and it is a reading-order problem rather than a heading one.

Bullet quality (13 points) asks whether what sits under Experience proves anything - quantification, action verbs, passive voice and bullet length. Appliora needs at least 4 bullets before it will judge those ratios at all, because one passive bullet out of two is 50% and would tank a CV that simply has few bullets. The target band for bullet length is 12 to 25 words.

Concrete skills (8 points) asks whether the skills under your Skills heading are concrete. A recognised heading over five vague nouns scores the heading and not the section. The skills guide and the mistakes list both go further into the content side.

Questions people ask

Which section headings are safest?

Experience, Education, Skills and Summary. Appliora scores coverage of those four because they are what a recruiter's search actually queries and what every CV is expected to carry. Languages, Certifications and Projects are recognised, reported when found, and cost nothing when absent.

Does Appliora require a heading called Contact?

No. Most well-built CVs print the name, email and phone at the top with no heading over them, which is correct and conventional. Whether a recruiter can reach you is a separate check that looks for the details themselves rather than for the word.

Why is Work History fine but My Journey is not?

Because Work History is in the dictionary of known synonyms for the experience section and My Journey is not. A parser matches headings against a list of forms it knows. A phrase nobody else uses is invisible to it, and the section under that heading stops being an experience section.

Can a heading be reported as unrecognised when it is not a heading at all?

Appliora tries hard to avoid that. A candidate heading has to be styled like the headings that did match, be at most four words and thirty characters, contain no digits, and not be the name at the top of page one. Those rules exist because an early version told a candidate that the city his office was in was an unrecognised section heading.

Does a decorative line or a colour change count as a section boundary?

Not to a parser. Rules, boxes and colour are drawing, and drawing is discarded during extraction. A section boundary that exists only visually does not exist in the text, which is why the word matters more than the styling around it.