Most resume advice is about wording. Format comes first, because a layout can hide your best sentences from the software that decides whether a person ever reads them.
Screening software does not read the way you do. It opens the file, pulls the characters out, and tries to work out which characters belong to which part of your history. Where you see a tidy page, it sees a stream of words in whatever order they sit in the file. Anything outside that stream gets lost, or gets attached to the wrong heading.
Here are six layouts that cause the most damage, and what to use instead.
1. Two column layouts
The left column usually holds contact details, skills or dates, with the main history on the right.
Many readers work across the page, line by line, joining whatever sits on each line. Your phone number ends up glued to a job title, or your skills list ends up inside your employment history. Dates get separated from the roles they belong to, and dates are what make a career timeline readable in the first place.
Use one column, down the page, one item at a time. It will look less designed and it will read correctly.
2. Tables
Tables feel safe because the document looks ordered on screen, and they are the second most common way people lose information.
In many files each cell is stored as its own small block. The reader either skips the table or collects the cells out of order. A table you used to line your job titles up against your dates can come out as a run of dates followed by a run of titles, with nothing to match them together.
If you want alignment, use a tab stop or a single space. Not a border.
3. Text boxes and shapes
A text box floats above the page rather than sitting in it. The reader handles the page first and the boxes afterwards, in the order they were drawn, which is rarely the order you see on screen.
The bad case is a text box holding your summary or your contact block. The reader can miss it entirely, and then your email never makes it into the employer's system.
Keep everything in the main body of the document.
4. Headers and footers
Page headers and footers are for page numbers and document titles, not for contact details. Some readers skip that area on purpose, because it rarely holds anything worth filing.
If your phone number lives in the footer, expect it to be missing from the record. Put your name at the top of the body in one clear size, with email, phone and city underneath it.
5. Images, logos, icons and skill bars
Anything that is a picture is invisible to a reader that is looking for text. A logo standing in for a certification, a graph showing your skill level, a photograph, an icon beside each contact detail: none of that can be read.
Skill bars are the sneakiest of the group, because they look informative to a person and say nothing to software. They also tell a recruiter less than a written list of the tools you actually use.
Replace every image with words. If you hold a certification, write its name. If you use a tool, name it.
6. Decorative fonts and unusual characters
Some fonts and design choices swap plain characters for special ones. Letter pairs merged into a single shape, bullets drawn from a symbol font, numbers set inside a circle. Any of these can come out as odd marks, or as nothing at all.
A font that is not embedded can also be substituted when the file is opened on another machine, and a tidy two page resume reflows into three.
Use a common, plain font. Calibri, Arial, Georgia, Times. Use ordinary round or square bullets, not a special character standing in for one.
The two minute test
Open your resume file, select everything on the page, copy it, then paste it into a plain notes app. What you see there is roughly what the software sees: no columns, no colour, no layout, just characters in order.
Read what came out. If your email is present and on one line, your job titles sit with the right employers, and your dates stayed next to them, the format is probably fine. If sentences are scrambled, if dates float loose above the roles they belong to, or if something clearly visible on the page is missing from the paste, the layout is the problem. Rewriting the words will not fix it.
Fix the layout, then run the paste test again. A plain one column document is the safest choice in almost every case.
The other half of this, whether your wording covers what one particular advert asks for, is much harder to judge by eye. The free checker at resumeon.io/tool/ats-checker reads your resume and the advert together and lists the keywords it found and the ones that are missing. Run that once your format is clean.
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