ATS-Friendly Resume Formatting That Won’t Get You Rejected

You’re not getting rejected because you’re unqualified. You’re getting rejected because a cranky piece of software can’t read your pretty resume.

And the software wins.

I’ve watched brilliant candidates vanish inside applicant tracking systems because they used a stylish two-column resume layout they found on social media. It looked gorgeous. It also looked like gibberish to the ATS.

So let’s fix that.

The Ugly Truth: ATS Doesn’t Care About Your Aesthetic

Here’s the part nobody wants to hear. The more “designed” your resume looks, the more likely it is to break in scanners.

Applicant tracking systems are basically pattern-matching robots. They look for text in certain places, try to map it to fields like "Name," "Work Experience," "Skills," and then decide where you rank. That’s it. No taste. No appreciation for color gradients.

I’ve tested hundreds of resumes inside various ATS setups. The ones that consistently pass applicant tracking systems share a few boring traits:

• Single column
• Simple formatting
• Standard fonts
• Clear section headings
• No cute icons, graphics, or text boxes

Here’s the kicker. The resumes that get interviews are not the most beautiful. They are the most readable to a machine.

If you care more about typography than text parsing, you’re playing the wrong game.

Fonts, Sections, And Other Things The Robot Actually Understands

Let me start with fonts, because I’ve seen people throw away opportunities over typography.

Safe fonts that won’t sabotage you

Use fonts that look like they came pre-installed on an office computer. Because they did. That’s what ATS parsing is built around.

Safe choices:

• Arial
• Calibri
• Helvetica
• Times New Roman
• Georgia
• Verdana

Skip the script fonts. Skip the thin lines. Skip anything that looks like it belongs on a wedding invitation. The ATS might technically read them, but recruiters will hate you for making their eyes work overtime.

Font size? Keep it sane. Around 10–12 for body text, 12–14 for headings. No micro-text to cram everything onto one page. If a human has to zoom to 150%, you’ve already lost.

Section headings that actually map correctly

This part is non-negotiable. The ATS looks for standard section names. If you get too creative, you confuse the parser.

Use clear, boring headings like:

• Summary or Professional Summary
• Skills
• Work Experience or Professional Experience
• Education
• Certifications (if relevant)
• Projects (if relevant)

Don’t rename "Work Experience" to "Career Journey" or "What I’ve Been Up To". I saw someone do that once. The ATS filed all their experience into the void. The system literally thought they had no work history.

You can add nuance in the content under the headings. The headings themselves should be robot-friendly.

Basic structure that almost always parses cleanly

If you want a simple ats friendly resume structure that almost every scanner can digest, use this order:

1. Name and contact info
2. Summary
3. Skills
4. Work Experience
5. Education
6. Certifications / Projects (optional, depending on your field)

No columns. No sidebars. No fancy timelines. One vertical flow from top to bottom.

Columns, Tables, Icons: The Formatting Graveyard

Let’s talk about the resume formatting choices that look good on screen and then die instantly inside an ATS.

Columns: The silent killer

Recruiters love to say, "Keep it clean and simple." This is why. Many ats resume templates with two columns are a trap.

Here’s what often happens:

• Left column: Skills, contact info, links
• Right column: Work experience, education

Looks neat. Until the ATS reads across the page in the wrong order. It might read the left column all the way down, then the right, or try to snake back and forth.

So your experience bullet points might get mixed with your skills list. Your phone number might appear in the middle of your job description. I’ve literally seen an ATS spit out something like:

"Java, Python, Email: john.doe@mail.com, Led cross-functional teams to deliver…"

You know what that looks like to a recruiter skimming parsed text? A mess.

If you care about consistency, stick to a single column layout. One stream of text from top to bottom.

Tables: Fine for humans, confusing for machines

Tables are a gray area. Some modern systems can handle them, some choke on them, some flatten them into nonsense.

If you absolutely insist on using a table (I still don’t recommend it), keep it extremely simple:

• No merged cells
• No nested tables
• No colored backgrounds

But my honest take? Don’t. Just format using simple headings and bullet points. Your resume formatting should never rely on a grid to make sense.

Icons, graphics, and other visual junk

I know the temptation. Little phone icon. Little email icon. Cute location pin. Maybe a bar chart for skill levels.

Stop.

Icons often live inside text boxes or shapes, and many ATS tools ignore those elements completely. Or worse, they interpret them as random characters.

Recruiters do not care that you put a phone icon next to your phone number. They care that your phone number is actually visible when the ATS parses your file.

Same with skill bars, star ratings, and circular infographics. You know what an ATS sees when you put "Python ★★★★☆"? Maybe "Python". Maybe nothing. The stars are meaningless.

Write the skill as text. Rate your level in words if you need to: "Advanced," "Intermediate," "Basic." No graphics.

DOCX vs PDF: The File Type Debate That Actually Matters

Here’s the argument I hear weekly: "But PDFs look cleaner!"

Sure. But that’s not the only point.

Older or stricter ATS setups can struggle with certain types of PDFs, especially if:

• The PDF was exported incorrectly
• The text is outlined or flattened
• The file started as a design file or image

I’ve seen people upload a beautiful PDF that was basically one big image. The ATS saw… nothing. Blank. Zero experience. Zero skills.

If the job portal explicitly says "PDF or DOCX accepted," I still lean DOCX for safety, especially when you don’t know what system sits behind the upload form.

So here’s what I tell candidates:

• If the system accepts DOCX, use DOCX for maximum ATS compatibility.
• Keep a clean PDF version if you’re sending directly to a human by email or uploading to a system you know parses PDFs correctly.

Never upload a scanned resume. If you printed it, signed it, scanned it, and turned it into a PDF, that is now an image to the ATS. And an image of your resume is just a pretty tombstone.

Headers, Footers, And Other Places Your Info Goes To Die

This part hurts, because it feels logical until you see how ATS tools behave.

A lot of people like to tuck their contact info into the header or footer section of Word. It looks clean. It saves space.

Many ATS tools either:

• Ignore headers and footers completely
• Read them unreliably

So your name might come through. Your phone number might not. Or your email disappears. Or your location vanishes.

I saw a candidate wonder why no one ever called him, even though he kept applying to jobs he was obviously qualified for. We pulled his parsed resume from the ATS. Name? Present. Experience? Present. Email and phone? Missing.

He’d parked both in the header.

Do this instead:

Put your full name and contact info at the top of the main body, not in the header or footer. Simple text, like this:

John Doe
City, State | Phone: 555-555-5555 | Email: john.doe@mail.com | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johndoe

All in the main document body. No text boxes, no shapes, no fancy layout.

Footers? At most, use them for page numbers. And even that is optional.

The ATS-Friendly Layout I Keep Coming Back To

Let me give you a resume layout that has survived more ATS tests than I can count. Is it flashy? No. Does it work? Relentlessly.

Here’s the recommended structure in plain language.

Top section: Contact and title

John Doe
City, State | Phone | Email | LinkedIn URL

Job Title You’re Targeting
(Yes, write the role you’re going for, if it fits your background.)

Summary: 3–4 lines, not your life story

Write a tight paragraph that hits:

• Your role and level
• Your key strengths
• Your industry or domain experience
• One or two proof points (years, impact, tools)

Example:

"Senior Data Analyst with 7+ years of experience turning messy operational data into clear, revenue-focused insights. Strong track record building dashboards, optimizing reporting workflows, and partnering with cross-functional teams. Advanced skills in SQL, Python, and Tableau, with experience in ecommerce and subscription businesses."

No fluff. No "hardworking team player." Just evidence.

Skills: Grouped, scannable, no gimmicks

Use simple grouping and plain text. Something like:

Skills
Data: SQL, Python, R, Excel, Tableau, Power BI
Methods: A/B testing, forecasting, cohort analysis, data visualization
Tools: Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt, Git

No columns needed. Just line breaks. If you want, you can use bullet points, but keep it text-only.

Work Experience: The part the ATS and humans both care about

This is where most people mess up, not with content, but with layout.

Format each role like this:

Company Name, City, State
Job Title
Month Year – Month Year

Then bullet points underneath. Simple bullets using the standard bullet function in Word or Google Docs, not custom icons.

Here’s a sample excerpt that parses cleanly in most systems:

ABC Corporation, New York, NY
Senior Data Analyst
June 2019 – Present

• Led development of automated dashboards in Tableau, reducing manual reporting time by 40% and improving executive visibility into weekly KPIs.
• Collaborated with marketing and product teams to design and analyze A/B tests, contributing to a 15% increase in email conversion rates.
• Built SQL data pipelines to consolidate data from 5+ sources, improving data accuracy and enabling self-service analysis for business partners.

Nothing fancy. Just clean, structured text the ATS can map to a job, dates, and bullet points.

Repeat that format for previous roles. No side-by-side dates. No vertical lines. No icons.

Education and certifications

Same formula.

Education
University Name, City, State
Degree Name (e.g., B.S. in Computer Science)
Month Year – Month Year

Certifications
Certification Name, Issuing Organization, Year

Again, no need for columns or tables. Just stacked text.

The Do’s And Don’ts That Separate Interviews From The Void

Let’s strip this down to concrete ats friendly resume do’s and don’ts, the stuff I wish people would follow before they upload anything.

Do:

• Use a single-column resume layout, top to bottom.
• Stick to standard fonts like Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman.
• Use clear section headings: Summary, Skills, Work Experience, Education.
• Save as DOCX when in doubt to pass applicant tracking systems more reliably.
• Put your contact info in the main body at the top, not in headers or footers.
• Use bullet points with simple, consistent formatting.
• Write out acronyms and keywords that match the job description, naturally.

Don’t:

• Don’t use two-column templates, sidebars, or creative layouts.
• Don’t put anything important in text boxes, shapes, headers, or footers.
• Don’t rely on tables for structure, especially complex ones.
• Don’t use icons, graphics, logos, or skill bars.
• Don’t upload scanned PDFs or resumes made as images.
• Don’t rename sections with quirky titles the ATS won’t recognize.

Yes, it sounds restrictive. It is. But that’s how you get through the filter.

Your Resume Isn’t A Portfolio, It’s A Parsing Exercise

Here’s the mental shift.

Your resume is not a design portfolio. It is a structured data file wearing a business suit.

You can still show personality in how you write your bullets, what results you highlight, how you frame your story. That’s human. That matters.

But the skeleton of your resume, the resume formatting, the ats resume template you choose, that has to be boring enough for a machine to digest without choking.

If you want to stand out, don’t reach for more colors or extra columns. Reach for sharper achievements, stronger verbs, clearer impact.

The robots don’t care about pretty. They care about structure. Get that wrong and you’re invisible.

Get it right and suddenly recruiters start saying something you haven’t heard in a while: "Let’s talk."