Seven Reasons Why Your Resume Is Ruining Your Chances Before a Person Even Sees It
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Once upon a time, my cousin handed me her resume and told me, “Just take a look at it.” She had sent out applications for almost 150 jobs in three months. She never received even a single interview call. Despite having an impressive degree, great internship experience, and thorough knowledge of her field, she wasn’t receiving any response at all.

I opened her resume, and honestly, it looked great. Two-column layout, a little skill bar chart showing “Excel: 90%,” a soft blue header with her name in a stylish font. It looked like something you’d find in a Pinterest board of “modern resume designs.”

That was the problem.

I ran it through a free ATS checker (more on that in a second), and the tool basically choked on it. Half her work experience wasn’t even being picked up. Her contact info? Missing. Her most recent job title? Read as gibberish.

She wasn’t losing to better candidates. She was losing to software before any human even opened the file.

That’s the part nobody tells you when you’re job hunting. In fact, most medium-sized or large organizations will not hire someone who will scan all those resumes. They will employ an ATS (Applicant Tracking System), such as Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, or Taleo, for that matter. And if you confuse that system, then your resume may be ignored and deemed incomplete, thus never reaching an actual recruiter at all.

I have since helped several friends of mine improve their resumes with the help of the above-mentioned checklist, and the list of errors is almost identical in every case. Here are the seven that come up over and over.

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1. Using a fancy, designer-style template

I get why people love these. They look sharp. But most ATS software reads resumes like a text document, not a magazine layout. Multi-column designs, sidebars, and creative graphics often get scrambled or skipped entirely when the software tries to pull out your name, job titles, and dates.

My cousin’s resume is a perfect example of this phenomenon: Her two-column layout made it impossible for the algorithm to read from left to right within the column and to continue down the next one, resulting in her paragraphs appearing as gibberish.

What you should do differently: Keep it to a straightforward one-column format. Bland and plain is good in this case. Use your creativity on the design for your website or LinkedIn header.

2. Adding contact information in the header/footer

Of course, I must say that this recommendation took me by surprise at first. It is quite common practice to place your name, phone number, and email in the header of the resume, where there is normally the page number. It makes your resume very well-structured. Nevertheless, this trick can be ignored by the ATS software.

It implies that the software will just look for your resume but will fail to identify your name and contacts, and it is likely that your resume will end up being in the second position or even ignored due to its incompleteness.

In other words, your name and contacts should be stated in the body of the document, right from the beginning. Your name and contacts should never be placed in the header of the document. For example, you may check it in Word or Google Docs through the View tab.

3. Saving it as a PDF with images or with some other weird format

Some individuals create their resume on Canva or Photoshop and then convert it to PDF format. Looks perfect. Except sometimes that export is basically a flattened image with text baked in—the ATS can’t read image text, only actual selectable text.

I tested this myself once by exporting a Canva resume and then trying to highlight text on it. I couldn’t select a single word. That’s a giant red flag for how a machine will read it too.

What to do instead:

  • Now go to the final version of the document, which is in PDF form, and try to select the entire sentence in the document using the mouse as a medium of help.
  • If you have been successful in doing the copying and pasting process, then you can move on to the next step.
  • But if it is an image, then you need to make sure that the document is in PDF form using MS Word or Google Docs.

4. Using tables, text boxes, and icons for your info

Little phone and email icons next to your contact details look nice to a human eye. But text boxes and tables are notorious for breaking ATS parsing. The software can lose track of what belongs where, or skip that section completely.

It is not an exaggeration to mention that I have personally seen resumes where people with five years of experience in project management were read simply as five, since the rest of the phrase was located in another cell of a table.

What should you do instead? Type all your text in normal paragraphs and bullet points. Should you need a prettier resume in case of human eyes in the future, maintain two versions—one more polished to post on LinkedIn and one for handing out on paper.

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5. Not matching the actual job description

Unlike the previous example, this doesn’t involve trying to game the system but rather being able to use the language it’s reading. Many automated tracking systems give a high score if the resume uses words relevant to the job posting. If the job posting is asking for someone who can do “customer relationship management” and your resume uses “client handling,” the software may not be able to connect them.

What I started doing was simply looking at both the job description and my resume side by side before sending out applications to see if the relevant skills and tools that the job asked for were found in the resume.

Detailed steps on how to do this:

  1. Copy the job description into a document file.
  2. Highlight any skill/tools/qualifications that are being repeated.
  3. Go back to your resume and check if those phrases match what you have listed.
  4. Use any that fit you.

Jobscan and Resume Worded are tools that help you compare the phrases, giving you an actual percentage of matches that is really quite helpful before you press the “submit” button.

6. When you send out your standard resume to everyone

This is what I used to do. I sent out one resume in one PDF format to all the jobs that I came across, even those that were slightly related. This seemed efficient. However, it made my resume generic.

After I started customizing the top one-third of my resume, the summary and first couple bullets based on the job posting itself, my response rate started to improve. It wasn’t like I was completely rewriting my resume but rather making it fit their requirements more closely.

A quick practical approach:

  • Keep a master resume containing all your work experience.
  • In this way, make copies of your master resume and customize it so that your top three or four qualifications are highlighted for that specific job application.
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    It is very important that you name the file suitably so that you do not accidentally send your master resume to the company (which has happened to friends of mine).

7. Weird section headers and formatting choices

While naming your work experience section “My Journey” or “Where I’ve Been” may sound more personal, the fact of the matter is that the ATS systems are programmed to recognize section headings like “Work Experience,” “Education,” and “Skills.” Creative headers can confuse the parsing, meaning your actual experience might not get categorized correctly at all.

Same goes for using unusual fonts that look stylish but aren’t standard — some parsers misread certain decorative fonts, turning your careful formatting into a garbled mess of characters.

What to do instead: Use conventional headers. The labels are “Work experience,” “Education,” “Skills,” and “Certifications.” Quite boring, I would say, but it is reliable, and reliability will see you through the first stage.

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How to actually make sure that your CV is ATS-friendly

Before you mail out your resume to the next fifty companies, I’ve got a little exercise that I go through myself and with any client who asks for advice:

  1. Open your CV and select all the text within the document (Ctrl+A), then copy the entire content into an unformatted notepad/document. If the case is such that you are able to read your resume in that text editor correctly, then your resume is good.
  2. Check it using any of the free checkers—from Jobscan’s resume scanner to Resume Worded. They’ll not only tell you whether there’s anything wrong with the formatting but also provide some keyword suggestions relative to a specific job opening.
  3. Check the resume on another computer and ask someone to open it on their computer prior to submitting it to rule out any surprises
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    Read the entire document from start to finish to ensure that everything has been done in proper order. In the event that the most current job you have worked in does not appear first on your resume or there is a typo with your name, the software will be able to recognize that too.

Some of the smaller things that might be mentioned:

The importance of dates is probably greater than you think. Be consistent with them (January 2022 – March 2024; no random date formats mixing). Do not send a.. pages document if you are using Mac because there is no way many ATS and recruiters will be able to open this file type. Also, make sure autocorrect did not change your company or software name to anything else.

conclusion

This is pretty much the same list my cousin used to rebuild her resume—simple format, standard headers, specific keywords, and contact information outside the headers. Within a couple of weeks, she had been invited to five interviews. She remained the same person, with the same experiences and the same skills; the only difference is that the software could now read her resume.

It is strange to realize that automated software could be the actual gatekeeper before the human eyes ever get to see your resume. However, once you learn what the software is looking for, it is quite easy to cooperate with rather than fight against.