Most resume advice repeats the same myths: "use plain fonts", "avoid tables", "don't include images". All true. But why? Understanding the parser changes how you write.
What an ATS actually does
- 1
Ingest
Your file arrives as a PDF, DOCX, or RTF — the format determines which extraction path it takes.
- 2
Extract text
PDFs run through a PDF-to-text engine (Apache PDFBox, pdfjs); DOCX files are unzipped and XML-parsed.
- 3
Structure
Named-entity recognition pulls out dates, companies, titles, education, and skills from the raw text.
- 4
Match
Your extracted fields are scored against the JD's required skills — this is where interviews are decided.
Every myth on the list above is a failure at step 2 or 3: if extraction scrambles your text or entity recognition can't find your dates, the match step runs against garbage — and no amount of qualification survives that.
The classic failure modes
Parses cleanly
- Single column, one font, standard section headings
- Plain-text phone and email in the body
- Bullet points for accomplishments
- PDF saved from a text-first editor (Word, Google Docs)
Breaks extraction
- Two-column layouts — the extractor interleaves them into nonsense
- Contact info inside an image or logo — silently ignored
- Custom glyph fonts — icons render as unicode garbage
- Headers in a text box — many parsers skip text boxes entirely
For the full prescriptive checklist — fonts, dates, file export — see the ATS-friendly resume format, and for which file type to send, PDF vs DOCX.
What to do next
Run the free MeritSlate ATS checker to see exactly which of these issues your current resume hits — it simulates nine vendor parsers against your actual file.
Written by
MeritSlate Team
The team building MeritSlate's deterministic scoring engine — nine evidence-anchored axes, a nine-vendor ATS parse simulation, and every point backed by receipts.