Most resume rejection happens before any human reads your application. The Applicant Tracking System runs your document through a parser, and if the parser fails, your candidate profile is incomplete — and incomplete profiles get filtered out. After scanning thousands of resumes, the same 10 parsing failures show up repeatedly. Here's what they look like, why they happen, and how to fix each one.
1. Two-column layouts
Symptom
The parser produces a scrambled mix of left-column and right-column content. Job titles appear next to skills from a completely different role. Bullets lose their context.
Why it happens
When the ATS converts your document to plain text, it reads top-to-bottom, left-to-right. A two-column layout gets serialized as: row 1 column 1, row 1 column 2, row 2 column 1, row 2 column 2. The visual structure (you read column 1 entirely, then column 2 entirely) is lost.
Fix
Rebuild as a single-column layout. In Word: Layout tab → Columns → One. Then redistribute content vertically. Yes, this means redesigning. Yes, your beautiful template now looks plainer. The plain version is the version that gets read.
2. Tables for layout
Symptom
Dates show up disconnected from job titles. Skills appear out of order. The parser can't align rows of related information correctly.
Why it happens
Many "modern" resume templates use tables (sometimes invisible — borderless tables) to align dates against job titles, or to organize sections side by side. The ATS strips table structure entirely. What was visually a clean grid becomes a sequence of disconnected cell contents.
Fix
Replace tables with simple text alignment. Job title and date on the same line, separated by a tab or pipe character:
Senior Analyst — Caterpillar | March 2019 – July 2025
Use Word's tab stops or paragraph alignment, not table cells.
3. Headers and footers
Symptom
The parser shows your candidate profile with no name, no contact info — completely blank where your details should be. Sometimes the resume gets discarded entirely at the upload stage.
Why it happens
Most ATS engines completely ignore the header and footer regions of a Word document. They're treated as "page furniture" — irrelevant to the document's content. If your name, phone, or email is in the header (a common template choice), the parser literally never sees it.
Fix
Move all contact information into the document body. Put your name on the first line of the actual document, with contact details directly below.
4. Custom section headers
Symptom
The parser fails to identify your "Experience" or "Education" sections. As a result, your work history might extract correctly but get tagged with the wrong section label — meaning recruiters searching for "5+ years experience" won't find you.
Why it happens
The ATS uses keyword matching to identify section boundaries. It looks for standard headers: "Experience," "Education," "Skills," "Summary." If you used "My Career Story" or "Where I've Been" or "Knowledge Base," the parser fails to find a section header and treats everything as one continuous block of text.
Fix
Use only conventional section names:
PROFESSIONAL SUMMARYorSUMMARYPROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCEorWORK EXPERIENCEorEXPERIENCEEDUCATIONSKILLSorCORE COMPETENCIESCERTIFICATIONS(if applicable)LANGUAGES(if applicable)
5. Decorative or "modern" fonts
Symptom
Some characters in your resume appear as boxes (□) or question marks. Words like "Office" might extract as "of?ce." Letterspacing seems off in extracted text.
Why it happens
Fonts like Avenir, Montserrat, Proxima Nova, and Poppins look beautiful in Word but aren't installed on most ATS server environments. When the system substitutes a different font, ligature characters (fi, fl, ff combinations) sometimes fail to render in plain-text extraction.
Fix
Switch to a universally compatible font: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Garamond, Times New Roman, or Cambria. We covered this in detail in our font compatibility guide.
6. Text inside images
Symptom
Your "Skills" section is invisible in the parser output. Or your name is in the parser output but the contact info that was visually next to it isn't.
Why it happens
Many resume templates render skills as colored circles, progress bars, or stylized graphics. These are images, not text. The ATS doesn't run optical character recognition (OCR) — it only extracts plain text. Anything that's part of an image is invisible.
Fix
List skills as text — comma-separated or bulleted. No graphic representations:
SKILLS Financial modeling, IFRS reporting, M&A integration, SAP, Oracle FCCS, Excel (advanced), SQL (intermediate), stakeholder management, team leadership, UAE Corporate Tax compliance.
7. Image-based PDFs
Symptom
The entire candidate profile is blank. The ATS shows zero extracted content from the file.
Why it happens
If you scanned a printed resume to PDF, or saved as "image PDF," the resulting file contains an image of your resume — not text. The ATS sees one giant image and gets nothing usable.
Fix
Always export from Word using "Save As → PDF" with the default text-based settings. Test by opening the PDF and trying to highlight text with your cursor: if you can highlight individual words, it's text-based. If you can only highlight rectangular regions, it's image-based.
If your only copy is an image-based PDF, retype the content into Word from scratch. Don't try to OCR-recover it — the result is usually riddled with errors.
8. Date format inconsistencies
Symptom
"Years of experience" field comes back blank. Some roles parse correctly with date ranges; others don't. The chronological order of your career looks broken.
Why it happens
Mixing date formats ("Jan 2021 – Present" in one role, "01/2021 - present" in another), using apostrophe-shortened years ("'21"), or using "Now" instead of "Present" — all confuse parsers. Some date formats parse, some don't, leading to inconsistent extraction.
Fix
Pick ONE date format and use it consistently. We recommend: January 2021 – Present or Jan 2021 – Present. See our complete guide to ATS date formatting for details.
9. Excessive special characters
Symptom
Bullets render as boxes. Text contains weird ?? or □ characters. Specific words look corrupted.
Why it happens
Custom bullet characters (✔ ► ◆ ★), em-dashes (—), curly quotes (' " ' "), arrow symbols (→ ➤), and other special Unicode characters often get stripped or replaced during ATS plain-text extraction.
Fix
Use standard ASCII characters wherever possible:
- Bullets: • or - or *
- Dashes: - (hyphen) or – (en-dash)
- Quotes: straight quotes only (' and ")
- Skip arrows entirely or write them as text: "leads to" instead of →
To turn off Word's smart-quote autocorrect: File → Options → Proofing → AutoCorrect Options → AutoFormat as You Type → uncheck "Straight quotes with smart quotes."
10. Acronyms without expansion
Symptom
The keyword-matching score is lower than expected. Your "skills" section includes terms that match the job description but the ATS isn't counting them.
Why it happens
Modern ATS engines use semantic matching, but acronyms remain a known weakness. If a job description asks for "Financial Planning and Analysis" and your resume only says "FP&A," the parser may not connect the two — even though they're identical concepts.
Fix
Spell out an acronym at least once in your resume:
- "Led FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) for the MEA region..."
- "Managed M&A (mergers and acquisitions) integration for the SPM acquisition..."
After that first mention, you can use the acronym throughout. The expansion creates the keyword bridge for semantic matching.
How to know which of these are affecting YOUR resume
Reading about parsing failures in the abstract is useful. Seeing them in your own resume is what actually motivates fixes.
ATS Verification runs your resume through an ATS-style parser and shows you what was extracted, side-by-side with your original document. The mismatches are usually obvious — and sometimes shocking. A resume that looks polished in Word might extract as scrambled text in the parser.
Most candidates have 1–3 of the failures above. Fixing them is mechanical: switch fonts, remove tables, standardize dates, move contact info out of the header. Half an hour of work. The change in callback rate after fixing is often dramatic.
One last thing
If you've been applying without callbacks, the issue is almost certainly NOT your qualifications. It's almost certainly one or more of the parsing failures above. Job seekers spend enormous energy refining content — wording, achievements, metrics — and ignore structure entirely.
The first job of your resume is to be readable by software. Get past that gate, then your content can do its work. Until then, even the best-written resume sits invisible in a database somewhere.
→ Run a free ATS scan now and find out which of these 10 issues are affecting your resume