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Six common resume layouts can cause an applicant tracking system (ATS) to miss, misorder, or mislabel parts of your resume: multiple columns, tables used for positioning, text boxes, graphics-heavy designs, contact details placed in headers or footers, and scanned or image-only PDFs. “Break” in this context means a real risk that content is lost or scrambled. It does not mean an automatic rejection, and no source establishes a universal failure rate for any of these patterns across every platform.
What goes wrong when a parser misreads a layout
Most applicant tracking systems convert your uploaded file into text, split that text into fields such as job title, employer, dates, and skills, and then store or rank the result. The conversion step is where layout causes trouble. The University of Missouri–St. Louis Career Services puts it plainly in its ATS resume guidance: “The ATS reads the resume in plain text.” If the text that comes out is missing, out of sequence, or attached to the wrong label, the recruiter’s view of your candidacy is wrong even though the document looked fine on screen.
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Three failure types cover nearly every case:
- Missing content: text in a header, footer, text box, or image is never extracted.
- Misordered content: a parser reads across a page and interleaves lines that belong to different sections.
- Miscategorized content: a date, employer, or skill ends up under the wrong heading or in a field of its own.
The six layout patterns, one by one
1. Multiple columns
A two-column resume is easy for a person to read, because the eye finishes one column before moving to the next. A parser may not behave the same way. It can read straight across both columns, so a job title from the left column sits next to a skills list from the right. Roche’s applicant-facing parsing FAQ specifically flags this reading-order risk. The fix for the version you submit online is a single column, with sections stacked from top to bottom.
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2. Tables used for layout
Tables are often used to align dates on the right and job titles on the left, or to build a sidebar. Career-service guidance lists tables among the elements to avoid when parsing matters, because table cell boundaries can blur the order of text and the edges of sections. Use paragraph spacing and consistent heading styles to create visual separation instead. Right-aligned dates can be replaced with a plain line that begins with the date range, such as “2021 – 2024 | Operations Lead, Northwind Logistics.”
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3. Text boxes
Text boxes are a common way to place a name, a sidebar of skills, or a contact block off to one side. Several university career offices, including the University of Missouri–St. Louis, the University of Minnesota Duluth, Iowa State University, and Concordia University, identify text boxes as a risk because the content may be skipped or read out of sequence. To check your file in Word, select the box and look for its border; if you can drag it, it is a text box. Move its text into the main body, then delete the empty box. You can find the text box tool under the Insert tab in the Text Box gallery.
4. Graphics, icons, logos, and image-heavy designs
Skill-level bars, star ratings, phone and envelope icons, company logos, and infographic timelines all look useful. The problem is that information embedded in an image is not ordinary selectable text, so a parser may return nothing for it. Multiple university career guides advise keeping graphics out of an ATS-targeted resume. Replace icons with a plain label, such as “Phone:” followed by your number, and describe skills in words rather than in bars.
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5. Contact details in headers or footers
Many templates place your name, phone number, and email in the page header, where they look neat at the top of the page. The University of Minnesota Duluth’s guidance says headers and footers may be dropped during parsing. Move that information into the first lines of the main body. In Word, you can check where it lives by double-clicking the top margin: if the cursor jumps into a header area, the text is in the header.
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A scanned resume looks correct to a human reader, but a scan is a picture of a page rather than a set of characters. UC Riverside’s guide distinguishes scanned PDFs as image-based and unreadable to text parsing. A quick test: open the PDF, press Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on a Mac), and try to highlight or search for a word. If nothing highlights or the search finds nothing, a text parser has nothing to work with. Export the resume directly from your word processor rather than scanning a printout.
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Does file type matter? PDF or Word?
Career-service sources do not agree on one winning format, and they do not treat the choice as a fixed rule. The most useful guidance is to check what the employer permits and to make sure the file contains readable text.
| Source | Stated guidance on file format |
|---|---|
| University of Minnesota Duluth | ATS prefers DOCX; follow the job advertisement if it requests PDF. |
| University of Virginia | PDF, DOC, or DOCX work for most submissions; check which formats the posting allows. |
| Iowa State University | Accepts DOCX or PDF. |
| Roche applicant parsing FAQ | Recommends DOCX or PDF. |
In practice, the format the employer specifies wins. If a portal accepts both, a text-based PDF or a DOCX built with the rules above will both work. What matters more than the extension is whether the text extracts in a sensible order.
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Checking the exported file before you upload
- Export the final version in the format the posting allows. In Word, use File > Save As and choose Word Document (.docx) or PDF.
- Open the exported file and confirm the text is selectable. If it is not, re-export from the original document rather than from a scan.
- Select all text, copy it, and paste it into a plain-text editor such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit in plain-text mode on a Mac.
- Read the pasted text from top to bottom. Look for substituted characters, unusual spacing, missing words, missing bullets, and lines that have moved out of their section.
- Confirm that your name, contact details, job titles, employers, and dates appear next to the right headings.
UMSL suggests copying PDF text into Word to look for corruption such as substituted characters, strange spacing, missing words, or missing bullets. The plain-text check above follows the same idea. Both are screening steps, not guarantees that every system will read the file the same way.
Keep one simple version for online applications
- Use one column, standard section labels such as “Experience” and “Education,” and no tables, text boxes, or graphics.
- Put your essential contact information in the main body.
- Keep a separate, more visual version for situations where a person will read it directly, such as networking or a portfolio review. University of Tennessee, Knoxville career guidance describes this two-version approach: a tailored ATS resume for online portals and a more graphic version for other contexts.
- After you submit, check any fields the portal fills in from your resume. Parsers can carry over errors, and correcting them in the form is faster than discovering them later.
What the evidence does and does not establish
The guidance above converges across university career services and Roche’s applicant-facing FAQ, but it is practical caution rather than controlled testing across applicant tracking platforms. Parsing behavior can vary by vendor, system configuration, how the document was built, and how the employer’s workflow handles uploads. No published figure establishes how often these six patterns fail. A statistic about how many employers use applicant tracking software describes adoption, not whether any particular layout parses correctly, and should not be read as proof that a format breaks.
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