Open a CV someone parsed through an old ATS and you'll see them: the little ▢ boxes where bullet glyphs used to be, the ¶ symbols mid-sentence, the accented French names spelled "Lefe\u0300vre." None of this is intentional. All of it costs interviews.

Most candidates use whatever special characters their template ships with and assume they'll travel cleanly. They mostly do — but mostly is not the same as always, and the gap between the two is where good CVs get filtered out.

What an ATS does to your CV

When you upload a PDF or Word file, the ATS doesn't read it visually. It runs the document through a text extractor that pulls a stream of characters from the underlying file. That stream gets stored in a database, indexed by keywords, and shown to the recruiter as plain text or in a stripped-down preview.

The characters that arrive in that text stream depend on three things:

• The font you used. Some fonts (Wingdings, Symbol, decorative fonts) encode their glyphs in private-use Unicode regions that text extractors ignore.
• The file format. PDFs export characters differently depending on the encoder. Word .docx files are more consistent.
• The ATS itself. Newer systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable) handle Unicode well. Older corporate systems still strip anything they don't recognize.

The safest assumption: write your CV so it survives the worst-case stack. The cost of being conservative is zero.

Safe characters — use freely

These travel cleanly across every ATS in common use:

• Plain Latin letters. A–Z, a–z, with one exception below.
• Numbers. 0–9.
• Basic punctuation. Period, comma, semicolon, colon, question mark, exclamation, single quote, double quote, parentheses, hyphen -.
• The at sign and ampersand. @ and & parse correctly.
• The forward slash. / is read as a separator.
• The hash mark. # is fine, useful for things like C#, F#, and as a separator.
• The plus sign. + works (C++, A+ certifications).

Nothing in the above list will surprise a modern ATS. Keep your bullets, your section headers, and your contact line built from these.

Risky characters — use with care

These work most of the time but fail on older systems:

• Bullet glyphs. The standard round bullet • (U+2022) is read by most ATS. The fancier glyphs — ▸, ❯, ►, ◆, ★ — are not. If your template uses anything other than •, swap it. Better still, use Word's or Google Docs' actual list feature; the ATS reads it as a list and doesn't need to render the glyph.
• Em dash and en dash. — and – look beautiful and parse on most modern systems. On older ones they collapse to ? or -. Use a regular hyphen-minus - for safer travel.
• Curly quotes. "..." and '...' (smart quotes) are usually fine. Straight quotes "..." and '...' are always fine. Word autocorrects to curly by default — switch it off if you want maximum safety.
• Accented characters. é, à, ñ, ü work in modern ATS and are essential for accurate name and address rendering in French, Spanish, German, and many other languages. The risk: a CV exported as a low-quality PDF can lose the accents at the extraction step. Test by uploading your CV to a free ATS-preview tool and check that your name still has its accents.
• Currency signs. $, €, £, ¥ parse correctly. The risky ones are less common signs (₹, ₩, ₽) which sometimes drop on older systems. If you have to mention currency for non-USD/EUR/GBP amounts, spell out the code ("INR 12,00,000") as a backup.

Unsafe characters — avoid

Don't use these on a CV intended for ATS systems:

• Emoji. ✅ 📈 🚀 — they may render in your eye, but in the ATS extraction they often become tofu boxes or get stripped entirely. The recruiter sees a gap where you wanted a flourish.
• Wingdings, Symbol, Webdings glyphs. These are stored as private-use Unicode and don't translate. The phone icon next to your contact info becomes a square or vanishes.
• Mathematical symbols. ≥, ≤, ≠, ∑ — rare in CVs but if you reference statistics or data work, write them out ("greater than" or use plain >= and <=).
• Box-drawing characters. ─, │, ┌ — sometimes used in tech-flavored CVs for decorative dividers. They look creative and parse as garbage in most ATS.
• Multiple-space or tab indentation as layout. Not strictly a character, but related: indentation that relies on tabs or runs of spaces often collapses in the ATS extraction. Use real list items and headings instead.

A specific note on accented letters in names

If your name is spelled with diacritics — Lefèvre, García, Müller, Søren — write it with the accents in your CV header. The ATS will store it correctly in modern systems, recruiters who reach out by email will spell your name right, and your LinkedIn name matches.

The one place to fall back on an unaccented version is your email address (most domains don't support diacritics in addresses) and the firstname-lastname slug of your LinkedIn URL.

If your name has letters not in the standard Latin block (Cyrillic, Greek, CJK, Arabic, Devanagari), most ATS will still store the characters correctly but recruiter search may not find them. Consider listing both — محمد علي (Mohammed Ali) or 张伟 (Zhang Wei) — in the header. This is a courtesy that costs nothing and helps the recruiter pronounce your name.

Testing for ATS readability

Three quick checks before you submit:

1. Open the PDF, select all, copy, paste into a plain text editor. What you see in the editor is roughly what the ATS receives. If your bullets came out as ? or □, swap the glyph.
2. Use a free ATS-preview tool (Jobscan, Resume Worded, etc.) and check the parsed output. Your name, dates, and section headers should all appear cleanly.
3. Email the CV to yourself and open it on your phone. Mobile renderers are stricter than desktop and surface encoding problems early.

A safe-default bullet structure

If you want a bullet style that survives every ATS without thinking:

• Use Word's or Google Docs' built-in bullet list feature (not typed • or -).
• Pick the default round bullet style. Skip the styled ones.
• Use one indentation level. Nested bullets sometimes flatten in the extract.
• Avoid mixing bullet types (round + arrow + square) — the ATS may collapse them to a single style anyway, but inconsistency looks unintentional.

If you're keeping your CV in a tool like Postulit, the templates are built to use plain bullets and standard fonts by default — which means you don't have to remember any of this every time you export.

A short character-safety cheat sheet

• Bullets: • (round, U+2022). Nothing fancier.
• Dashes: hyphen-minus -. Use sparingly. Skip em/en dashes.
• Quotes: straight " and '. Turn off Word's smart-quote autocorrect.
• Accents: keep them. Test the PDF export.
• Symbols: spell them out if there's any doubt.
• Emoji: never.

Special characters are a small detail with disproportionate downside. A CV that uses 12 different glyphs may look creative on screen and unreadable to the system that has to decide whether to send it forward.