Our scoring engine runs every resume through a nine-vendor parser simulation — the same extraction behaviors used by the major applicant tracking systems. This post is the format guidance that falls out of that testing. (For why parsers behave this way, read how an ATS actually reads your resume.)
What you designed
Columns interleaved
What the parser reads
The layout rules that actually matter
- One column. Multi-column layouts are the top parse killer: extractors read across columns and interleave your sidebar skills into your job history — exactly what the figure above shows.
- Standard section headings. Experience, Education, Skills, Summary. Parsers segment your resume by recognizing these. Where I've Made an Impact is a heading only a human can love.
- Contact info as plain text, in the body. Not in an image, not in an icon font, and not in the document header — several parsers skip DOCX headers/footers entirely, which silently deletes your phone number.
- Bullets, not tables. Table cells get read in unpredictable order. A
simple
-or•bullet survives everything. - Consistent date format.
Jan 2023 – Presenton every role. Parsers compute your years of experience from these; one Winter '23 can break the chain.
The font and file rules
Survives all nine parsers
- One standard font — Arial, Calibri, Georgia
- PDF exported from Word, Google Docs, or LaTeX
- Plain-text bullets and headings
- Phone and email typed in the body
Fails at least one
- Icon or glyph fonts (render as unicode garbage)
- Canva / Figma exports (text becomes outlines or images)
- Photos, charts, skill-level progress bars
- Contact details inside a header, footer, or logo
If in doubt about the file itself, see the full breakdown in PDF vs DOCX.
What an ATS template will not do for you
Get the format to pass, then spend your time on keywords and evidence — that's where the real weights are.
The 60-second self-test
Copy your entire resume and paste it into a plain-text editor. What you see is roughly what a parser sees. If the reading order is scrambled, your phone number vanished, or your skills merged into a paragraph of soup — the format is costing you screens.
Or skip the manual check: the free JobFitAI ATS checker runs the nine-vendor simulation on your actual file and flags every extraction failure it finds, line by line.
Written by
JobFitAI Team
The team building JobFitAI's deterministic scoring engine — nine evidence-anchored axes, a nine-vendor ATS parse simulation, and every point backed by receipts.