MB Resume Builder
Resume landing pages
Template Guide
There is a lot of folklore about applicant tracking systems. This page sets out what genuinely breaks parsing, what does not matter as much as people claim, and how this layout avoids the failure modes that are real.
Preview
Neo Minimal
Who this template suits
This template suits anyone applying through a company careers portal, a large job board, or a recruitment agency's system — which is to say most applications to organisations above roughly a hundred people. It is deliberately plain, and that plainness is the feature.
It is a good default when you cannot tell what you are applying into. If a posting gives no signal about the hiring process, a layout that parses cleanly and reads well to a human costs you nothing, whereas an elaborate one can cost you the application.
It is a poor fit where visual judgement is part of what is being assessed — design, art direction, some marketing roles. In those cases the resume is a work sample, and a deliberately neutral layout under-sells you. Send a designed resume there and keep a plain version for portal submissions.
Before and after
This is the single most damaging formatting mistake. Several parsers ignore header and footer regions entirely, producing a parsed candidate record with no contact details — an application that cannot be replied to even if a human liked it.
Table extraction varies wildly between parsers. Some read cells left to right across rows, turning three tidy columns into an interleaved run of unrelated words. Plain lines extract identically everywhere.
Abbreviated years with apostrophes and parenthetical durations frequently fail date parsing, which can leave a role showing zero tenure. Experience filters then screen you out on a technicality.
ATS compatibility
Text in headers or footers, multi-column layouts, tables, text inside images, and non-standard section names. These are real failures that reliably lose information.
Exact font choice, whether you use bullets or dashes, and modest use of bold or colour. Any current parser handles these. Advice to strip all formatting usually produces a resume that parses fine and reads badly to the human who sees it next.
Most systems rank rather than reject, and a human reviews the ranked list. Matching the posting's actual wording helps. Pasting the whole job description in white text does not — it is detected, and it is treated as deception.
Submit PDF unless the posting asks for DOC. Modern parsers handle PDF well, and it preserves your layout for the human reader. Export from a real editor rather than scanning a printed copy — a scanned image contains no extractable text at all.
Section by section
First thing in the body: name, phone, email, city, and one link if relevant. Do not use icons alone for phone and email — an icon with no adjacent text is invisible to extraction.
Three lines at most, written for the specific role. This is the highest-value place to echo the posting's own wording, because it is near the top and read by both parser and human.
Reverse chronological, with company, title, location, and dates on a consistent line. Consistency between entries matters more than the exact order of those fields.
Grouped, plain text, no ratings. This is where literal keyword matching does most of its work, so use the terms the posting uses when they are honestly yours.
Institution, qualification, year. Keep it simple; this section is rarely the deciding factor but is often a filter field.
Mostly they rank rather than reject. Hard knockouts exist for explicit requirements — a licence, a visa status, a minimum years-of-experience field — but the common picture of a robot silently binning 75% of applicants is exaggerated. The bigger real risk is parsing badly enough that your record looks empty next to others.
Not always, but it is the format most likely to fail badly when it does. A parser that linearises columns incorrectly can interleave your sidebar into your job history, producing a jumble. Given that the upside is only aesthetic, a single column is the better trade for portal applications.
Tailor the summary and the skills ordering; keep the rest stable. That captures most of the ranking benefit for a few minutes of work. Rewriting every bullet per application is rarely worth the time and tends to introduce errors you do not catch.
Open your PDF, select all, copy, and paste into a plain text editor. That is close to what a parser sees. If sections arrive out of order, contact details vanish, or words are split apart, fix those before anything else. It takes a minute and catches the failures that matter.
Ready to build
Start with the ats-friendly resume template, tailor the content, and export a polished resume in minutes.
Olivia Grant
HR Coordinator
HR coordinator with 4 years supporting recruiting and onboarding for a fast-growing services company. Comfortable working directly with applicant tracking systems.
Cedarview Health Partners | Raleigh, NC
HR Coordinator
Bellwood Staffing | Raleigh, NC
HR Assistant