The best fonts for a resume (and the ones that break parsing)

Font choice is the most over-discussed and least consequential resume decision — with two exceptions that genuinely destroy applications. Here's the short version of what matters, and the longer version of the two things that actually break.

The rule#

Any common, widely installed, non-decorative typeface is fine. That's the whole rule. Serif or sans-serif, Georgia or Calibri, the parser doesn't care and the recruiter won't notice.

Pick one. Use it for the entire document. Two fonts is a design decision you have to justify; one font never needs defending.

The two failures that actually matter#

Icon and glyph fonts

The genuine resume killer. Template designers use icon fonts — Font Awesome and similar — to draw the little phone, envelope and pin symbols beside your contact details. Those glyphs occupy characters in a private-use area of unicode, so when a parser extracts the text it doesn't get an icon. It gets a control character, a question mark, or an invisible symbol welded onto the front of your phone number.

The fix costs nothing: delete the icons. They add no information — a reader knows an email address when they see one.

Text that isn't text

The second failure isn't about the typeface at all: it's fonts that got outlined or rasterized on export. Design tools frequently convert text into vector shapes or a flat image, which looks identical and contains zero extractable characters. See PDF vs DOCX for the export settings that avoid it, and always run the select-the-text test on the final file.

Size, spacing and margins#

The settings that keep a resume readable to both audiences:

If you're at 8pt with quarter-inch margins to make things fit, the problem isn't typography — see how long a resume should be.

Bullets, dashes and special characters#

Use a standard bullet (•) or a hyphen (-). Both extract cleanly everywhere.

Decorative bullets — arrows, stars, checkmarks, anything from a dingbat font — are the same problem as icon fonts in a smaller package. Em-dashes, en-dashes and curly quotes are all fine; they're standard unicode and every parser handles them.

One genuine edge case: if your name contains characters outside basic Latin, keep them. Modern parsers handle unicode names correctly, and transliterating your own name to appease software from 2009 is not a trade worth making.

What about bold, italics and colour?#

Bold is useful and safe — use it for headings, job titles and company names. Italics are safe and easy to overuse. Colour is fine in moderation; a single dark accent for headings reads as considered, and anything lower-contrast than dark grey on white starts to fail both printing and accessibility.

None of these affect parsing. They affect the six seconds a human spends deciding where to look, which is a real thing to design for — just not the thing most font debates are actually about.

The honest priority order#

Font is worth about five minutes. In the Merit Score, the whole ATS-format axis carries 6% and is relevance-gated, and typeface is a small part of that 6%. The order that actually moves outcomes: keyword coverage, then quantified evidence, then structure, then typography.

Pick Calibri, delete your contact icons, and go spend the afternoon on your bullets. Or run the free checker first — it will tell you whether your font is doing any damage in about the time it takes to read this sentence.