"ATS-friendly" gets thrown around a lot, and it's led to some overcorrection — plenty of well-formatted resumes get treated as risky when the real list of things that actually cause parsing problems is much shorter and more specific.
Multi-column layouts are the biggest real risk
Many applicant tracking systems read a resume left-to-right, top-to-bottom, in a single pass. A two-column layout — common in visually striking templates — can get read out of order, jumbling a job title from the left column with a bullet point from the right. A single-column layout avoids this entirely.
Tables, text boxes, and headers/footers are unreliable
Content placed inside a text box, table, or the document header/footer is sometimes skipped entirely by parsing software, even though it displays fine to a human opening the file. Contact information in particular should live in the main body of the document, not tucked into a header.
Standard section headings help more than clever ones
"Experience," "Education," and "Skills" are recognized reliably. Creative alternatives like "Where I've Been" or "My Toolkit" look nice to a human reader but can fail to be recognized as the section they represent, which affects how the parsed data gets categorized.
Keep formatting consistent, not necessarily plain
A resume doesn't need to be visually bare to be ATS-safe — bold, clear fonts, reasonable use of a single accent color, and consistent bullet styling are all fine. What causes problems is structural complexity (columns, tables, embedded objects), not visual style choices like color or font weight.
Save as PDF unless told otherwise
Most modern systems parse PDFs correctly, and a PDF preserves formatting exactly as designed across every device that opens it — unlike a .docx file, which can shift its layout slightly depending on the software and fonts installed on the reader's end.
TeckForge's Resume / CV Builder uses single-column, standard-heading layouts by default and exports straight to PDF — built with these exact formatting risks in mind, and entirely free to use in your browser.
