How to Fix Resume Formatting: 10 Problems That Get Resumes Rejected

Formatting is the one resume problem that can sink an application before anyone reads a word of it. A strong candidate in a two-column template can arrive in the recruiter's system with the work history and the skills interleaved into nonsense, or with the phone number missing because it lived in the page header. None of that shows up on your screen — the PDF looks fine — which is why formatting problems persist for months without the applicant knowing.

This guide covers the ten formatting problems that most often get resumes rejected, how to tell whether you have them, and the specific fix for each.

Short on time? The free AI resume fixer applies everything in this guide for you: upload your resume, paste the job description, and download a tailored, ATS-ready PDF in about a minute.

How to Tell Formatting Is the Problem

Two quick checks reveal most parsing issues without any special software.

1. The plain-text test. Open the PDF, select all, copy, and paste into a blank plain-text editor (Notepad, TextEdit in plain mode, or a browser address bar for a short section). Read what came out. If sections are out of order, contact details are missing, or the text from two columns has merged into alternating lines, an ATS will see the same thing.
2. The ten-second test. Hand the PDF to someone who has never seen it and ask them to find your current job title, your most recent employer, and your email address. If it takes more than a few seconds, the layout is making the reader work.

If the resume passes both tests, formatting is probably not what is holding it back and the issue is more likely content — the gaps covered in how to fix your resume. If it fails either, the problems below are where to look.

The 10 Problems and Their Fixes

1. Two-column layouts

The sidebar template — skills and contact details in a narrow left column, experience on the right — is the single most common cause of a garbled parse. Most parsers read left to right across the full page width, so line one of the sidebar gets stitched to line one of the main column, and so on down the page.

Fix: one column, full width, top to bottom. If you like the look of a sidebar, keep it for the version you hand to a person and submit the single-column version everywhere else.

2. Tables used for positioning

Tables are fine for tabular data but they are frequently used invisibly, with the borders turned off, to line things up. Parsers handle table cells inconsistently: some read cell by cell, some row by row, some drop the content entirely.

Fix: remove layout tables and use tab stops or right-aligned tabs for dates. In Word, Table → Convert to Text keeps the content.

3. Contact details in the header or footer

Many templates put the name and contact block in the document header. A large share of parsers skip headers and footers entirely, so the resume arrives with no phone number and no email.

Fix: put your name and contact details in the body of the document, at the top of the first page.

4. Non-standard section headings

Parsers map content to fields by recognising section headings. "Where I've Worked" or "My Toolkit" may not map to anything, and the content under them is filed as unknown.

Fix: use the conventional labels — Summary, Experience (or Work Experience), Education, Skills, Certifications. Creative headings cost you more than they gain.

5. Text inside graphics, icons, and skill bars

Anything rendered as an image is invisible to a parser: a phone icon in place of the word "Phone", a skills chart with proficiency bars, a logo with the company name in it. A photo has the same problem plus the bias concerns covered in whether to put a photo on a resume.

Fix: plain text for everything a reader needs. Skills as a comma-separated list or short lines, no rating bars — a bar labelled "Excel: 80%" tells nobody anything anyway.

6. Fonts that are decorative, tiny, or too many

Script and display fonts can be substituted or dropped when the PDF is opened on a different machine. Body text under 10 pt is hard to read on screen, and a resume mixing three or four typefaces looks unedited.

Fix: one font for everything, or one for headings and one for body. Body at 10.5–12 pt, headings two to four points larger. The safe choices are compared in the best fonts for a resume.

7. Inconsistent dates and alignment

"Jan 2022 – Present" on one role, "2020-21" on the next, "March 2019 to December 2019" on a third. Beyond looking careless, inconsistent date formats confuse parsers that calculate tenure, and misaligned dates make the reader scan every line to find them.

Fix: one format throughout — Mon YYYY – Mon YYYY is the safest — and every date right-aligned on the same tab stop. This is the item most often caught by a pass through the proofreading checklist.

8. Margins and white space

Squeezing margins to a quarter inch to fit everything on one page produces a wall of text that reads as dense on screen and prints badly. The opposite problem — a half-empty second page — reads as padding.

Fix: margins between 0.5 and 1 inch, a blank line between sections, and bullets no longer than two lines. If the content does not fit, cut content rather than white space; the priorities are in how many pages a resume should be.

9. The wrong file type or file name

A PDF exported from a design tool, or a scan of a printed page, is an image with no text layer. It looks like a resume and parses as a blank page. A .pages file or an unusual format may not open at all.

Fix: export a text-based PDF from Word, Google Docs, or a proper builder, or submit .docx where the posting asks for it. Check the PDF with the plain-text test above. Name the file sensibly — the conventions are in how to name a resume file.

10. Density that hides the content

Paragraphs of prose under each role, bullets that run to four lines, and no visual hierarchy between a job title and its description mean the reader cannot find the achievements at all. This is a formatting problem with a content cause.

Fix: job title and employer in bold on their own line, three to five bullets per role, each starting with a verb and running one to two lines. The rewriting side of this is covered in how to fix weak resume bullet points.

A Clean Format That Always Parses

If you would rather start from a specification than fix a template piece by piece, this is the shape that works in every system.

It is deliberately plain. A resume is not a design exercise; the layout's only job is to get the content in front of the reader in the order they expect. The free resume builder produces this structure by default if you would rather not rebuild a template by hand.

Fixing It in Word or Google Docs

The fastest route from a broken template to a clean document is usually not to repair the template but to lift the text out of it.

1. Copy the text into a new blank document using paste-without-formatting (Ctrl+Shift+V in Google Docs; Paste Special → Unformatted Text in Word). This discards the tables, text boxes, and columns in one step.
2. Apply styles, not manual formatting. Set Normal to your body font and size, Heading 2 for section headings, and use bold for job titles. Consistency then comes for free.
3. Set one right-aligned tab stop at the right margin and use it for every date.
4. Check the header and footer are empty. Double-click into them and delete anything there.
5. Export to PDF from the application's own export (not Print → Save as PDF, which sometimes flattens text) and run the plain-text test on the result.

Once the format is clean, the remaining question is whether the content matches what the employer asked for. Running the resume against a real posting shows the keywords and requirements the document is missing — the first comparison is free — and the structural checks in fixing a resume for ATS cover the parsing side in more depth. Credit options for further comparisons are on the pricing page.