9 Resume Formatting Mistakes That Break ATS Parsers (And How to Fix Them)

Format & Parseability is worth 15% of your total ATS score, and it's also the category most likely to sabotage an otherwise strong resume without you ever knowing it happened — because the resume looks fine to you in Word or Canva, and the ATS sees something completely different. Here are the nine most common culprits.

1. Multi-column layouts

Two- and three-column designs look modern but many parsers read left-to-right across the full line width, not down each column — merging your skills list with your dates into nonsense strings. Stick to single-column.

2. Tables

Tables used for skills grids or work history are among the worst offenders — content inside table cells is frequently skipped entirely or extracted in the wrong order. Use plain text with line breaks and bullets instead.

3. Text boxes

Anything placed in a text box (common in template designs for the header/contact section) is often invisible to parsers entirely. If your name and contact info are in a text box, some systems will show a blank candidate name field.

4. Headers and footers

Contact information placed in a document header or footer — again, common in template designs — is skipped by many parsing engines. Always put your name, email, and phone in the main document body, top of page.

5. Graphics, icons, and skill bars

Star ratings, progress bars for "Excel: 80%," and decorative icons next to section headers parse as nothing, or as garbled special characters. If a skill only exists as a visual bar, the ATS doesn't know you have it.

6. Images of text

Logos are fine; a resume exported so that any actual content is baked into an image (common with some Canva exports) means zero text is extractable. Always verify your final PDF has a selectable text layer — try highlighting your own text in the PDF viewer before submitting.

7. Non-standard section headers

"My Journey" instead of "Experience," "What I Bring" instead of "Skills" — creative headers can fail to map to the fields the ATS expects to populate. Use the boring, standard labels: Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications.

8. Decorative or unusual fonts

Custom or script fonts can fail to render as expected text during parsing, especially in older systems like Taleo. Stick to standard fonts — Arial, Calibri, Georgia, Times New Roman — in 10-12pt body size.

9. Special characters as bullets or dividers

Fancy Unicode bullets, emoji, or decorative dividers (like ❖ or ➤) can render as broken characters or get stripped, sometimes taking the rest of the line with them. Use a plain bullet point or hyphen.

The fix is almost always the same: simplify

Every one of these mistakes comes from optimizing for how the resume looks to a human eye in a design tool, at the expense of the plain-text structure a parser needs. A visually "boring" single-column resume with standard headers will consistently outscore a beautifully designed one.

See exactly what breaks on your resume

Our ATS X-Ray extracts your resume exactly the way Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, and Taleo would, so you can catch these mistakes before a recruiter's dashboard does. First scan is free, no signup. Try it at /app.

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