Why columns, colors, and headshots break the scanning software
Okay you guys. New module. This one's called "Keep It Plain So a Human Sees It," and I want to start with the thing that made me actually mad the first time I learned it.
Somebody in a class a while back handed me her résumé to look at. Two columns, a gray sidebar with her skills in it, a little headshot in the corner. It looked nice. She'd clearly spent hours on it. I told her to delete all of it.
She was not thrilled with me. Fair.
Here's why I said it anyway. Most companies past a certain size don't have a human being reading résumés first. They run them through software that scans the document and pulls out your information — your job titles, your dates, your skills — and drops it into a format the hiring manager actually looks at. That software is called an ATS, an applicant tracking system, and it is not smart. It's looking for plain text in a predictable order. Give it a two-column layout and it gets confused about what order to read things in. It'll mash your dates into your job titles, or skip your most recent job entirely, or just choke and dump half the page into a garbage field nobody opens.
Your résumé can be genuinely well-designed and still come out the other side looking like alphabet soup. The software doesn't know it's pretty. It just knows it can't parse it.
So: columns are out. Graphics are out. Text boxes are out. That fancy skills bar that shows "Excel: 80%" with a little progress graphic — out, and also nobody knows what that means anyway, 80% of what. Headshots are out too, for a second reason on top of the parsing problem: a lot of companies actively don't want a photo on your résumé because it opens them up to bias claims, so some systems are set to auto-reject any résumé that has an image file embedded in it. You're not helping yourself. You're giving it a reason to say no before a person ever sees your name.
I'll be honest, this is not my strong suit. I've told people straight out I don't have a great eye for design. My résumés are plain because that's genuinely the best I've got — but it also happens to be exactly what works, so for once my limitation and the actual advice line up.
What to do instead
This part's simple, which is the whole point.
- Use a plain word processor, not a template site. Open a blank document. Left-aligned. One column, top to bottom, the whole way down.
- Stick to standard section headers. "Experience." "Education." "Skills." Don't get clever and call it "My Journey" or whatever — the software is matching words, and cute headers don't match anything it's looking for.
- Use a normal font. Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman. Something boring the system has seen ten thousand times.
- Save it as a .docx or a plain PDF, not a design file. If you built it in Canva or some template tool with a bunch of graphics, export it and then open the export to check it didn't scramble.
- Read it back top to bottom like a robot would. If you can't tell what order the information goes in without the visual layout helping you, the software can't either.
That's it. That's the whole system. Boring on purpose.
Now, I know some of you are thinking, but doesn't it need to stand out? Here's my honest opinion: it doesn't need to stand out, it needs to get read. Those are different goals and people mix them up constantly.
Which gets me to the cover letter thing, because it's the same lesson wearing a different hat. A while back I applied to a job and wrote a cover letter I was proud of. Spent two hours on it. Nice paragraphs, good flow, made a real case for myself. Nothing. Silence. A couple weeks later I applied to an almost identical job and wrote three plain sentences — who I am, what I've done, why this job. Got a call the next morning.
I think about that a lot. I put more effort into the one that failed. The plain one won because it was easy to read fast, not because it was impressive. Same exact principle as the résumé formatting. Effort and polish are not what gets you through. Clarity is.
One real caution while we're here: if you're applying somewhere and the application portal has its own upload field that says "resume," always use that field, don't paste your résumé into a giant text box on the company's site, because that's a second place formatting can get eaten. Upload the actual file.
Before next time
Pull up your résumé and count your columns. If it's more than one, that's your assignment: strip it down to a single column before we meet again, even if it feels like you're wrecking something you worked hard on. You are. That's fine.