Spent 2 hours formatting a resume only to find out the ATS couldn't read it

I was applying for a job at a tech company in Austin last week and spent like 2 hours tweaking my resume to look perfect. Tables, icons, the whole deal. Uploaded it to their portal and got an instant rejection email. Turns out the system couldn't parse any of it because I used a template with columns. Had to start from scratch with a plain text version. Who else has had an ATS eat their nicely formatted resume?

2 comments

2 Comments

finleym431mo ago

Right there with you @angela687, my resume looked like a graphic designer's fever dream and the ATS just treated it like confetti. I think my next submission is going to be a text file with no bold or italics, just pure robot poetry. Maybe we should start a support group for people who spent hours on tables only to get ghosted by a parser.

angela6871mo ago

Spent all that time making it look pretty only for a robot to say "nah." I swear ATS systems are just judging us for trying to be creative. Guess my resume needed to be boring to be seen.