Canva CVs and ATS: does your Canva CV get past the screening robots?

Canva has put beautiful CVs within everyone's reach: a coloured banner, a round photo, icons, two columns. But when you apply on a careers site, your CV is first read by screening software (an ATS, or applicant tracking system), which doesn't see the design: it reads text, in a certain order. The good news: a well-built Canva CV gets through just fine. Here is how to make sure.

What an ATS robot sees of your Canva CV

The software extracts the text from the PDF, then tries to sort it: contact details, job title, experience, education, skills. Anything that isn't text (shapes, icons, skill bars, images) disappears. And when the layout is complex, the reading order can get jumbled: a line from the left-hand column ends up in the middle of a job entry.

The most common pitfalls

1. Two columns that get mixed up: skills and experience interleaved when the CV is read. The busier the sidebar, the greater the risk.
2. Contact details as icons: a phone icon without the number written as text means a lost number. Always write your email address and phone number out in full.
3. Skill bars and stars: “Excel ●●●○○” means nothing to the software. Write the level in words (“Advanced Excel”) or say what you use it for: how to replace skill bars in your skills section.
4. Overly creative section headings: “My journey” or “What I can do” aren't recognised. Go for “Work experience”, “Education”, “Skills”.
5. Text turned into an image: curved text, effects, headings laid over a photo, or a PDF “flattened” on export. For the software, those words don't exist.
6. Spaced-out letters: “E X P E R I E N C E” is sometimes read as ten separate letters, and the section is no longer recognised.

How to test your Canva CV

1. The copy-and-paste test: open your PDF, select all, and paste it into a plain text editor. What you get looks like what software reads: if the order makes no sense or information is missing, the robot loses it too.
2. The ATS CV check: upload your PDF to our free check. You see the beginning of the text as software reads it (the “robot view”), a score out of 100 and every point to fix.

Fix it without losing your design

• In Canva: standard section headings, contact details written as text, skill bars replaced by levels in words, the target job title under your name, and the essentials (experience, education) in the main column.
• Without reopening Canva (or subscribing): on Edit a Canva CV, ask for example “Replace my headline with Marketing Manager and write my skills out in full”: the AI changes the text of your PDF in place, keeping your design.
• For demanding online applications: a plain, single-column version, rewritten for the robots, as a PDF and a Word file, on AI-improved CV.

Two versions, two uses

Many candidates keep two CVs: the designed one, for sending directly to a person (email, networking, job fairs), and the plain version, for careers-site forms. The content is the same; only the presentation changes. To keep the plain version pleasant to read, see a readable CV layout. To go further on screening: our guide on ATS screening robots and the one on CV keywords.