Creative Headings: The Triumph of Standardization

"My Journey", "What I Bring", "Where I've Made an Impact": creative headings feel more personal than "Experience" and "Skills". For an applicant tracking system they are a gamble. CV section headings are the signposts a parser uses to split the extracted text into sections, and many parsers recognise them by name.

This is the last part of a series on how parsers read CV files. The first part on ATS text extraction covers what the parser receives; this one covers how it finds its way around that text.

What a parser does with headings

After extraction, the parser has one long run of lines. To fill fields such as job title, employer, dates, degree and skills, it first has to know which lines belong to which section. The usual method is to look for short lines that match a list of known heading words and their common variants, and to treat everything up to the next recognised heading as that section.

When a heading is not recognised, the content below it does not disappear, but it loses its label. Depending on the system, it may be stored as unclassified text or folded into the section above. Roles listed under "My Journey" can then be missing from the experience fields, even though every word was extracted correctly. Some systems use language models or looser matching and cope better, but you cannot tell in advance which kind will read your CV.

Headings that are widely recognised

None of these is clever, and that is the point. They are the plain, conventional words that heading lists are built around.

Before and after

Extracted text with creative headings:

My Journey
Senior Analyst, Harbour Bank
03/2021 – present
What I Bring
SQL, Power BI, stakeholder workshops
Where I Learned
BSc Economics, Westbridge University, 2017

The same CV with standard headings:

Work Experience
Senior Analyst, Harbour Bank
03/2021 – present
Skills
SQL, Power BI, stakeholder workshops
Education
BSc Economics, Westbridge University, 2017

Nothing about the content changed. The second version simply tells the parser where each section starts.

Formatting that keeps headings readable

• Put each heading on its own line, with nothing else on that line.
• Keep it short: a few words, no full sentence, no full stop at the end.
• Type it as text. A heading inside an image, a text box or the page header may not reach the parser in the right place.
• Avoid wide letter-spacing such as "E X P E R I E N C E", which can extract as single letters.
• Capitals are fine; "EXPERIENCE" and "Experience" are usually read the same way.
• In a two-column layout, a sidebar heading can land on the same line as text from the main column. See two-column CVs and ATS.
• Write the headings in the language of the CV, and do not switch languages from one heading to the next.

Where creativity still fits

The headings are the frame; the content inside them is where you stand out. A specific summary, concrete bullets with results and a clear list of tools do more for you than an unusual heading ever could, and none of them puts the structure at risk.

Check your own headings

Paste your CV text into the quick test. Its structure check reports when it cannot find an Experience, Education or Skills heading. In the full analysis, the parser view shows which experience entries, education and skills were actually extracted, so a section that lost its label stands out.