Many applications are never opened by a human. The Applicant Tracking System runs your document through a parser, and if the parser fails, your candidate profile is incomplete, and incomplete profiles can drop out of recruiter searches. In the files people scan with our tool (counted in our ATS data report, a self-selected sample), the same parsing failures show up again and again. Here's what they look like, why they happen, and how to fix each one.
For how often each of these turns up in real files, see what broke in 8,220 resumes in October 2026.
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 a parser converts your document to plain text, it may read straight across the page, top-to-bottom, left-to-right. A two-column layout can then be 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. Text extraction usually strips table structure. What was visually a clean grid can become 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
The nuance, which tables actually break versus which survive, is tested in do ATS read tables in a resume: a simple skills grid came through fine, but layout tables scrambled and dense cells glued together.
Use Word's tab stops or paragraph alignment, not table cells.
3. Headers and footers
Symptom
The parsed profile has no name or contact info where your details should be, or the same contact line appears several times.
Why it happens
Header and footer regions usually hold "page furniture" such as page numbers and file names, so some parsers treat them as boilerplate and may skip them. Others read them: in our own parsing benchmark, an email in a running page header was extracted three times, once per page, rather than dropped. Either way, a name, phone or email that lives only in the header (a common template choice) is unpredictable.
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
Parsers typically identify section boundaries by looking for standard headers: "Experience," "Education," "Skills," "Summary." If you used "My Career Story" or "Where I've Been" or "Knowledge Base," the parser may fail to find a section header and treat 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
A parser reads the text layer of the file, not the font's look. Trouble starts when a font is embedded in a PDF without a proper character map, or uses ligatures (fi, fl, ff combinations) stored as single glyphs. Then the extracted text can contain boxes or missing letters. Decorative fonts such as Avenir, Montserrat, Proxima Nova and Poppins are more likely to cause this in some export paths than common system fonts.
Fix
Switch to a common, widely supported 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. Most parsers don't run optical character recognition (OCR), they only extract the text layer. Anything that's part of an image is invisible to them.
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
Some systems advertise semantic matching, but many searches are still literal, and acronyms are an easy miss. 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 means a search for either form finds you.
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, and your content finally gets a fair reading.
One last thing
If you've been applying without callbacks, the issue may well NOT be your qualifications. One or more of the parsing failures above is one of the first things to rule out. 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.
We put these failure modes to the test, see exactly which layouts our own parser flagged in our 2026 ATS parsing benchmark. And if you want to know how often each one actually occurs in the wild rather than in a test file, our ATS Data Report counts them live across every resume run through our scanner.
The header/footer failure gets a full test-backed treatment in do ATS read headers and footers? And when the live counts were posted to r/resumes, 447,000 people saw them and asked a hundred questions; the twelve most common, with answers, are in resume parsing questions answered.
→ Run a free ATS scan now and find out which of these 10 issues are affecting your resume