the_tara•14d agoMost Upvoted

Spent 6 hours fixing a resume formatting issue that should have taken 20 minutes

I was uploading my resume to a job portal and the PDF kept scrambling all my bullet points into one giant paragraph. Turns out the ATS system couldn't read certain fonts, so I had to redo the whole thing in Arial. Has anyone else dealt with a resume parser just destroying your formatting for no reason?

3 comments

3 Comments

lopez.simon10d ago

Good heavens, you're saying the font you used was the actual problem? I always figured PDFs would preserve anything you put into them as long as you saved it right. That is genuinely wild to me that an ATS system can't handle something as simple as a different font.

emery_lopez13d ago

Wait, are you sure it's the ATS parser's fault and not just your resume design being too fancy in the first place? Most of those systems are built to read plain text, so throwing in weird fonts or complex layouts is kinda asking for trouble. I've seen people spend hours on "formatting" that literally nobody cares about unless they're printing it on fancy paper lol.

diana2013d ago

Huh, never thought about it that way.