Guide
Why an applicant tracking system rejects your resume
Usually it does not reject it. The ATS parses your resume badly, and the recruiter opens a record with fields missing while other candidates arrive complete. Here is where resume parsing breaks, and the formatting that breaks it.
What happens to your file
How an ATS reads your resume, in four steps
Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse, Lever and iCIMS differ in the details and none of them publish how they work, but the sequence is the same. Three of these four steps can lose data.
01
Text extraction
Your file is opened and its text pulled out as one stream. A resume saved as an image has nothing to pull, so it arrives empty.
02
Reading order
That stream is put in order. Two columns are read straight across, so a sidebar lands inside a job description and both stop making sense.
03
Section detection
Headings are matched against known names. “Experience” is recognized. “Where I’ve Made an Impact” is not, and everything under it goes unmapped.
04
Field extraction
Titles, employers and dates come out of each section. Mixed date formats defeat it, and nobody can filter on how long you held a role.
The same document, read two ways
What a person reads
What the parser recovered
The document looks fine. The employer sat in a table cell and the end date in a text box, so neither came through: the recruiter sees a role with no company and no end date.
Specifics
Seven formatting choices that break an ATS resume
Not a warning about “fancy formatting”. Each row is a choice that loses data, why it does, and what an ATS-friendly resume does instead.
| The choice | What goes wrong | What this does instead |
|---|---|---|
| Two columns | Read straight across both columns, so your skills list is spliced into a job description. | Single column. There is no two-column option to turn on. |
| Tables for layout | The usual trick for right-aligned dates. Cells come out in the wrong order, or not at all. | A right tab stop in Word, flexbox on screen. No tables in the output. |
| Contact details in the page header | Many parsers drop the header region before they start, so your email and phone never arrive. | Contact details sit in the body. The header holds a page number or nothing. |
| Icons for phone and email | A telephone glyph extracts as junk or as nothing, leaving the number unlabeled. | No icons anywhere. Labels are words. |
| Mixed date formats: 2021 here, 03/21 there | Date ranges stop parsing, so time in role cannot be computed. Recruiters filter on that number. | Month and year, in one format across the whole document. |
| “Current” or a dash instead of Present | Your current job reads as having no end date, which some systems treat as an unfinished record. | One option, labeled Present, the word parsers recognize most reliably. |
| A PDF exported as an image | Nothing is extractable. The application arrives blank and nothing warns you. | Export runs through the browser’s print engine, which always writes a real text layer. |