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.
Tables are the quiet version of the two-column problem. The resume still reads roughly top to bottom, so nothing looks obviously broken — but the values inside each row can arrive attached to the wrong thing.
Why cells shuffle
A PDF table has no rows and no cells. It has text drawn at coordinates, plus some lines drawn around it. The generator writes those text runs in whatever order suits it, which is frequently column by column rather than row by row.
A parser reconstructing the page has to decide whether two runs on the same baseline belong together or are separate fields. It often decides wrong. The classic result: every job title in one block, every date range in another, then the two get paired by position — off by one.
The layout that causes it
The most common offender is a two-column table used to right-align dates:
Operations Manager, Northgate 2021 – Present
Logistics Coordinator, Bayline 2018 – 2021It looks clean. It is also the exact structure that produces Operations Manager, Northgate 2018 – 2021 when the parse slips.
The fix
Put the date on the same line as the title, separated by punctuation rather than by a tab stop or a table cell:
Operations Manager — Northgate Logistics — Mar 2021 to Present
Logistics Coordinator — Bayline Freight — Jun 2018 to Feb 2021If you want the dates right-aligned for visual rhythm, you are trading a real parsing risk for a small aesthetic gain. It is not a good trade.
Also worth removing: skills laid out in a grid of table cells, and education blocks where the institution, degree, and year each sit in their own column.
Does this apply to Word documents too?
Yes, though less severely. A .docx table has genuine structure, so a parser that reads the XML can recover the rows. Many parsers convert to text first and lose it anyway. Since you cannot know which system will receive the file, do not depend on it.