Failure modes

What breaks a resume in an ATS

Every entry below is something a parser gets wrong, why it happens, and the change that fixes it. Ordered by how much damage it does.

• Breaks parsing

  Two-column layouts scramble your resume

  A sidebar looks organised and parses as nonsense. Here is exactly what happens to a two-column resume inside an applicant tracking system.

• Breaks parsing

  A resume with no text layer is a blank page

  Scanned, photographed, or flattened resumes contain no readable text. To an applicant tracking system the file is empty.

• Breaks parsing

  Contact details a parser cannot find

  If the email and phone fields come back empty, nobody can act on your application. Here is where to put them and how to format them.

• Risky

  Tables put your dates on the wrong job

  Table cells extract in storage order, not visual order, so job titles, employers, and dates get shuffled between roles.

• Risky

  Headers and footers get thrown away

  Several applicant tracking systems discard the header and footer regions of a page before parsing. Anything you put there disappears.

• Risky

  Creative section headings file your experience under nothing

  Parsers segment a resume by matching headings against a fixed vocabulary. "My Journey" matches nothing, so the section beneath it is never categorised.

• Risky

  Icon fonts and odd bullets extract as gibberish

  A phone icon or a decorative bullet is a character with no Unicode meaning. Parsers receive junk where you see a neat symbol.

• Risky

  Ambiguous dates produce the wrong years of experience

  Applicant tracking systems compute tenure by subtracting your dates. Mixed or year-only formats produce numbers that filter you out.

• Risky

  Skill bars communicate nothing to a parser

  Rating dots, progress bars, charts, and icons contain no text. Whatever they claim about you is absent from the parsed record.