You spend two hours in Canva. Clean columns, a circular photo, icons for your phone number and email, a handwritten-style font for your name. The result looks great. Then you upload it to the application portal, and the ATS software chews it up and spits out something like: "Diremail07example.com 06SeniorProjectManager2018-2023". Your beautiful layout, crushed into a jumble of characters. All the recruiter sees is an incomplete profile, misfiled, or one that never surfaces in the results.
An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) doesn't see your resume the way a human does. It parses it: extracting text, guessing at sections, and sorting your information into fields. When formatting confuses it, it gets things wrong or simply gives up. Here are the eleven layout traps that most often sabotage this extraction process, ranked from most destructive to most subtle.
Columns: Pretty on Screen, Unreadable by the Machine
This is the number-one mistake. A two-column resume (skills on the left, experience on the right, for example) looks organized. But many ATS engines read a page left to right, line by line, with no understanding that two separate blocks exist. The result: the first line of the left column gets glued to the first line of the right column. Your dates land in the middle of your skills, your job title gets mixed up with your address.
Stick to a single column, top to bottom. It's less "designed," but it's the only structure a parser reads without stumbling. If you're attached to columns for a version you hand directly to a recruiter, keep two files: a single-column ATS-friendly version for online portals, and a graphic version for direct contact.
Tables: Your Worst Invisible Enemy
Many "clean-looking" templates actually hide tables underneath: a grid of cells used to align dates and job titles. To the eye, they're invisible. To a machine, they're chaos. Depending on the engine, the ATS reads cells out of order, merges their content, or skips entire cells altogether.
Want to neatly align your dates to the right of your job titles? Use tab stops or aligned paragraphs — never a table cell. If you built your resume in Word from a template, check it: open the toolbar, look under Table, and search for invisible borders. You might be surprised.
Putting Vital Information in the Header or Footer
It seems like the logical move: putting your name, phone number, and email in the document's header. Except many ATS platforms don't extract content from header and footer zones at all. Your primary contact information becomes invisible to the system. The recruiter finds you interesting, clicks to call you back, and finds no phone number.
Your contact details need to live in the body of the document, at the top, as regular text. Not in a header zone, and not in a floating text box.
Icons and Symbols Instead of Text
A little envelope icon next to your email, a phone handset before your number, a LinkedIn pictogram: it's cute, and it's meaningless to an ATS. Worse, some icons are actually images, so the text next to them may be read as a caption or lose its context entirely.
Spell out the labels in full: "Phone: (555) ...", "Email: firstname.lastname@...", "LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/...". You can keep a decorative symbol alongside it, but the text alone needs to be enough.
The Photo: Neutral for the ATS, Risky Elsewhere
The ATS doesn't read your photo — it's an image, and the parser ignores it. The real problem arises when the photo is embedded in a block that disrupts the layout around it, or when the entire resume is actually one big image (more on that below). In France, a photo is still culturally accepted, but it adds nothing to your machine readability and can introduce bias. If you keep one, place it neatly at the top, without letting it distort the flow of the text.
Fancy Fonts and Overly Thin Characters
A handwritten-style or heavily stylized font may not be recognized character by character during extraction, especially if it isn't properly embedded in the file. Stick with safe, universally readable choices: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, Garamond. Body text between 10 and 12 points. Avoid extra-light weights that render letters too thin — a scan or file re-conversion can swallow them whole.
The Entire Resume Exported as an Image
This is the ultimate trap, and the most common one with consumer design tools. You export your masterpiece as a PNG, JPG, or a "flattened" PDF where every page is actually an image. The ATS then has zero text to extract. Nothing. Your application is, at best, filed as blank; at worst, automatically rejected.
Simple test: open your PDF and try to select a line of text with your mouse. If you can highlight the words, it's real text. If nothing gets selected, it's an image — redo the export.
Floating Text Boxes
In Word or other layout tools, you can insert "text boxes" that you move freely around the page. Visually convenient. For an ATS, these boxes are often read out of order, or not read at all, because they aren't part of the document's main text flow. All your content needs to sit in the standard body, top to bottom.
Overly Creative Section Headings
"My Journey," "Where I've Shone," "What I Bring to the Table": charming, but the ATS is looking for standard labels to sort your information into the right fields. Use headings the machine recognizes: "Work Experience," "Education," "Skills," "Languages". Save your creativity for the content of your sentences, not for section names.
Exotic Bullets and Special Characters
Standard bullets (round, dash, square) pass through fine. Decorative bullets pulled from an icon font, fancy arrows, or rare Unicode symbols, on the other hand, can turn into empty squares or question marks after extraction. The same goes for long strings of vertical bars or stars meant to rate your skill level: an ATS reads "●●●○○" as noise. Write "English: fluent (C1)" instead.
The Wrong File Format
Too many candidates agonize over PDF versus Word without knowing which one the ATS actually prefers. Here's how to settle it.
| Format | ATS Risk | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Text-based PDF (selectable) | Low — read by nearly all modern ATS platforms | Recommended default format |
| Image / flattened PDF | Critical — no extractable text | Avoid at all costs |
| .docx (Word) | Low if the layout is simple; complex layouts sometimes render poorly | Good alternative if the posting requires it |
| .doc (legacy Word) | Medium — sometimes misread by newer tools | Avoid; convert to .docx |
| .pages / .odt | High — often unsupported | Export to PDF or .docx |
| PNG / JPG | Critical — pure image, zero text | Never send |
Bottom line: a PDF with selectable text remains the safest choice in the vast majority of cases. When a job posting explicitly requires Word, provide a single-column .docx, with no tables or floating text boxes.
How to Check Whether Your Resume Passes the Test
The quickest method is still the copy-paste test: open your file, select all, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor (Notepad, or TextEdit in plain-text mode). Read what comes out. If the order makes sense and nothing is missing, an ATS will handle it fine. If it's jumbled or cut off, you've found your problem.
To take it further, you can test your resume's ATS readability directly, and start fresh from a solid foundation by browsing our resume templates by profession, already designed to be read by machines and humans alike.
Frequently Asked Questions
PDF or Word for an ATS?
A PDF with selectable text is the safest choice: it's read by nearly all modern ATS platforms and preserves your layout. Choose .docx (Word) only if the job posting explicitly requires it, and in that case, keep the layout simple — single column, no tables. Absolutely avoid "image" (flattened) PDFs, which ATS platforms cannot read.
Can You Put a Photo on a Resume Read by an ATS?
Yes — the ATS simply ignores the photo since it's an image: it doesn't interfere with text extraction as long as it doesn't disrupt the layout around it. In France, a photo remains widely accepted. Keep in mind, though, that it adds no value from the machine's perspective and can introduce bias during human review.
Do Two-Column Resumes Pass ATS Screening?
It's risky. Many ATS platforms read the page line by line, left to right, which scrambles the content of the two columns together. A single-column layout, top to bottom, is far more reliable for ensuring your information gets extracted in the right order.
Which Font Should You Choose for an ATS Resume?
Stick with a standard, universally recognized font: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia, or Garamond, at 10 to 12 points. Avoid handwritten-style, fancy, or overly thin fonts, which can be misread when the ATS extracts your text.
