Someone in r/resumes asked whether the Google Docs template pinned in that sub is ATS friendly. Three people said yes. I maintain a resume parser, so I went to check instead of guessing.
I filled the template in with a made-up person (John Smith, Operations Manager at Northwind Traders, Business Analyst at Globex), downloaded it three ways, and ran each file through my own checker.
Plain text 95 Parses clean
Word 60 At risk
PDF 60 At risk
Same words, same order, same person. Thirty-five points apart.
The Word and PDF reports said the same thing:
No work history section -26
Missing sections -15
Missing links -3
No work history section. On a resume whose first section, right under the contact line, is called WORK EXPERIENCE.
What the file actually says
A .docx file is a zip of XML, so you can look. Here is how the template sets its section names:
'WORK EXPERIENCE' style: none bold underlined 12pt
'EDUCATION' style: none bold underlined 12pt
'SKILLS' style: none bold underlined 12pt
No heading style. They are ordinary paragraphs that happen to be bold and underlined. To a person they look like headings. To a parser that asks Word "which paragraphs are headings?", the honest answer is none of them.
My Word and PDF readers asked exactly that question. If the file did not mark a line as a heading, the scorer did not treat it as one, so it never saw a section start, so it found no work history.
The plain text reader never had that option. A .txt file has no styles at all, so it has always decided what a heading is from the words on the line. That is why the same resume got 95 there.
The report for the live Word file still shows the gap, because the format itself has not changed:
Word file 0 headings 14 paragraphs 18 bullets
Plain text 3 headings 11 paragraphs 18 bullets
The worse part
My own guide on whether to send a PDF or a Word file used this exact behaviour as advice. A rich text test file of mine marks its headings in bold, it scored 60, and the page explained that bold is not a heading.
That was a bug written up as a lesson. My own editor's importer and my plain text reader both read a bold WORK EXPERIENCE line as a heading. Only the scorer disagreed, and I had defended the scorer.
The fix
The scorer now reads the words too. A line counts as a section heading, bold or not, when all of these hold:
- the whole line is a section name it knows, like "Work Experience", "Education" or "Skills"
- it does not end like a sentence and does not start in lower case
- it does not start with a bullet
The first rule matters most. "Experience with Kubernetes" contains a section name but is a sentence, and treating it as a heading would cut a job in half.
There is one condition, and it is the part my first correction left out: this only applies when none of the file's real headings names a section.
The reason is the opposite failure. In a file that does use heading styles, a bold "Skills:" line inside a job is a label, not a new section. When I let it switch the section anyway, every job after it was filed under skills, where nothing checks for dates, and a real problem in that resume disappeared from the report.
So if your file sets some section names as headings and only makes the others bold, the bold ones are still read as plain text. Set them all the same way.
A second bug, found while checking the first
Once the sections were found, I tried the template with short employer names, which is what most people have. "Shopify" instead of "Northwind Traders".
The template puts the employer and the dates on one line:
Shopify Jan 2015 – Sep 2017
With a long name, that line was read as the start of a new job. With a short one, the line was mostly dates, so the parser took it for another date line of the job above. The next line, Business Analyst Fort Collins, CO, then became a job of its own with no dates at all. The plain text file scored 82 for it, and Word and PDF did too once the first fix was in.
Now a dated line that opens with a capitalised name, right after the previous job's bullets, starts a new job. Short names score 95 like long ones.
The numbers now
The "after" column is the code running on the live site now, and I re-ran the template files there before writing this:
before after
Template, filled in, Word 60 95
Template, filled in, PDF 60 95
Template, filled in, text 95 95
Same, short employer names 82 95
Rich text test file 60 95
Two column PDF test file 43 68
The two column PDF still loses points, for the columns, which is the only thing that file was ever meant to show.
The empty template, as downloaded, scores 82. That is not the format. It is the "Month Year – Month Year" placeholders: with no real dates in them, the jobs cannot be dated.
So is the template ATS friendly?
Its structure is about as plain as it gets: one column, no tables, no text boxes, nothing in the page header, name on the first line. Every word came out, in order, in all three formats.
What I cannot tell you is what Workday, Taleo or Greenhouse do with it. Those parsers are closed, and nobody outside those companies can test them properly. What I can tell you is that "bold means heading" is a guess a parser has to make, and mine guessed wrong until 30 September.
If you want to make that guess unnecessary, it costs nothing:
- Use a real heading style for your section names. In Google Docs it is the dropdown that says "Normal text"; pick Heading 2. In Word, it is the Styles gallery.
- Keep each section name on its own line, and use the plain words: Experience, Education, Skills.
- If you use the template, replace every "Month Year", delete the "PLEASE DO NOT REQUEST EDIT ACCESS" line under the name, and delete the line about more templates at the bottom. My parser read the first as your headline and filed the second under skills.
The PDF or Word guide now says the opposite of what it said until 30 September, and says so on the page rather than quietly. If you want to see what a parser pulls out of your own file, the checker runs in your browser and the file never leaves it.
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