I've looked at a lot of resumes over the past year, and the same formatting problems keep showing up. People follow the basic advice: no images, keep it clean. But there are a dozen smaller things that still trip up ATS systems and most articles don't cover them.
This is the checklist I'd hand someone before they hit apply on their first batch of applications.
the formatting mistakes that actually cost you
Let's start with the basics, then get into the stuff that doesn't get talked about enough.
File format matters more than most people think
Save as .docx or plain PDF. PDF is fine for most modern ATS, but a few older systems (Taleo being the main offender) have trouble parsing it. If you're applying to large enterprise companies that still run Taleo, keep a .docx version ready. I wrote about this in the Workday and enterprise ATS guide, the file format thing comes up there too.
Single column only
Two-column layouts look polished on screen. ATS reads them left-to-right, top-to-bottom, which means it smashes your two columns together into nonsense. Your skills section ends up mid-sentence inside your job description. Skip the two-column design entirely.
No text boxes
Microsoft Word's text boxes are invisible to most parsers. Whatever you put in there, the ATS just skips it. This catches people off guard because the resume looks fine as a PDF.
No headers or footers for contact info
Your name, email, and phone number should be in the main body of the document, not in the Word header. ATS parsers often ignore header and footer sections completely. I've seen resumes where the candidate's name never made it into the parsed record because it was in the header.
Standard section labels
Label your sections exactly: Work Experience, Education, Skills. Not "Professional Journey" or "Where I've Been." The parser is looking for those exact phrases to categorize your content. Creative labels cause it to dump your work history into the wrong bucket or miss it entirely.
Fonts: boring is correct
Arial, Calibri, Garamond, Georgia, Times New Roman. That's your list. Specialty fonts don't always render correctly during parsing, which can turn your text into garbage characters. Not worth the risk.
Bullet points: keep them simple
Use the standard round bullet point from your word processor. Fancy symbols, checkmarks, arrows, or custom glyphs often get parsed as a question mark or stripped out entirely. It's a small thing that adds up when every bullet in your work history gets mangled.
Page length: one page isn't a rule
There's a persistent myth that resumes must be one page. ATS doesn't care about page count at all. Two pages is fine for anyone with five or more years of experience. What matters is that every line is relevant. Three pages of filler is worse than one page of substance, but there's no magic cutoff.
the checklist
Here it is in one place. Go through this before your next application batch:
- [ ] Saved as .docx or standard PDF (not a scanned image, not a Google Doc printed with custom fonts)
- [ ] Single column layout, no two-column designs
- [ ] No text boxes anywhere in the document
- [ ] Contact info is in the main body, not in a Word header or footer
- [ ] Section labels are standard: Work Experience, Education, Skills
- [ ] Standard font (Arial, Calibri, Garamond, Georgia, Times New Roman)
- [ ] Standard bullet points only, no arrows, checkmarks, or custom symbols
- [ ] No images, no logos, no photos
- [ ] No graphical dividers or horizontal lines between sections
- [ ] Tables used sparingly or not at all (many parsers handle them poorly)
formatting is only half of it
Fixing your formatting stops you from getting filtered out for technical reasons. But ATS also scores your resume on keyword relevance, and that's a separate problem entirely.
A perfectly formatted resume that doesn't match the job's keywords will still score low. I wrote a longer piece on how ATS scoring actually works and a separate one on what resume keywords are and why they matter if you want to go deeper on that side.
The short version: your resume needs to use the same language the job posting uses. Different companies call the same skill different things, and ATS doesn't always connect the dots. "Project management" and "program management" are different strings to a parser even if they mean similar things to a human hiring manager.
If you're applying to a lot of jobs, manually rewriting your keywords for each posting gets old fast. Breeze Apply's resume optimizer handles the keyword matching automatically, rewriting your skills section and headline to mirror each job posting's language before you apply.
a quick sanity check
Before you use the checklist above, open your current resume and paste the text into a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit. Strip out the formatting and just look at the words. What you see is roughly what ATS sees.
If it reads coherently, your formatting is probably fine. If your sections are out of order, your contact info is missing, or your job titles got scrambled, you've got a parsing problem worth fixing before you send another application.
According to research from Jobscan, over 98% of Fortune 500 companies use ATS to screen resumes before a human reads them. Getting the formatting right isn't a bonus step. It's the baseline.