7 formatting mistakes that get your resume filtered out by ATS.

1. Your name and phone number are in the header or footer.

This mistake has the worst consequence, as it creates a candidate record for an employer with no contact information. ATS does not read headers and footers, so keep these details in plain text within the body of the resume. If you include your address, only include your city and state.

2. You exported a picture of a resume, not a document.

Image uploads fail outright. Only uploads with text layers can be understood by ATS. To check whether your file contains a text layer, open it and try to highlight the text. If nothing selects, no system will read it.

3. Your text lives in text boxes and stacked layers.

ATS doesn’t often read text box contents because it isn’t designed to extract content from these boxes. Keep your content out of any stacked layout elements.

4. Your 2-column layout puts contact details in the narrow column.

Columns don't get you rejected, but they raise the odds that specific fields will be imported as a jumbled mess. However, strong efforts attempt to improve reading-order accuracy. For example, Textkernel noted a column-separator performance increase from 60% to 82% in column extraction, and in 2021, Microsoft Research built a 500,000-document dataset to teach models reading order that measurably improved commercial OCR engines.

Even after Textkernel’s improvements, roughly 1 in 10 resumes in their own evaluation still render poorly. Minimize your risk by designing your ATS resume without the two-column layout.

5. Your section headings are creative.

Creative section headers will work against you with ATS. As much as you might want to express yourself with wordplay, stick to recognizable, standard section labels like “Professional Summary,” “Work Experience,” “Education,” and “Skills.” Non-standard headers like “Achievements and Wins” or “My Success Stories” may get silently misfiled.

6. You adjusted letter spacing or used an icon font.

Design-tool users love to track text to adjust a line, but Greenhouse recruiting notes that “while it may appear cohesive to the naked eye, the parser won’t recognize the separate letters as a single word.” Letter spacing breaks parsing because the parser reads gaps to find word boundaries, and tracking widens those gaps until each letter looks like its own word. Similarly, ATS can struggle with custom or decorative fonts, which may map to private-use codepoints without Unicode and render inaccurately. Common fonts such as Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Calibri are the easiest for optical recognition software. Also avoid mixing fonts and excessively using italics or underlines.

7. Your job titles and employment information are incomplete, and your dates are inconsistent.

Greenhouse recruiting cites that job titles should never be shortened, such as “Sr. Account Exec” instead of “Senior Account Executive.” Additionally, company names should include identifying words such as Inc., Co., LTD, or LLC, and dates should always be formatted consistently.