ATS-friendly resume formatting checklist

Updated 26 October 2026. Formatting is the set of shapes that decide whether text survives extraction. It is not the 100-point score. The score on the ResumeATS builder never looks at date style, emoji, or a pasted table. You can hold a 100 beside a red lint row. Use this list for the shapes, and use the nine-check score list when you want the points.

One column, real text

The preview is one column by construction. There is no sidebar, no text box, and no skill table. Contact details sit in the body under the name, not in a running header. That matters because header XML and PDF running headers are a common place for a phone number to disappear. Do not “improve” the export by dropping it into a two-column template afterward. The print path copies the sheet you see. If you later wrap that text in columns, you have thrown away the only layout guarantee this page makes.

The letters have to be letters. A logo image of your name does not select, and a parser that does not OCR it does not store the name. Print from the browser and select the name in the PDF. If the selection works, the text layer exists. The sheet uses ordinary fonts, not icon fonts for phone and email. Icons that are private-use glyphs often extract as empty boxes or as nothing. Write the words.

Headings the lint will accept

When the paste box is empty, the heading row passes and the note names the builder’s own labels: Experience, Education, and Skills. When you paste a file, a short line becomes a heading candidate if it is 3 to 40 characters, does not end with sentence punctuation, is not a bullet, has five words or fewer, and either is all capitals or starts with a capital. Candidates are accepted only if the lowercased line is on the safe list. The jobs labels are Experience, Work Experience, Professional Experience, Employment History, Work History, and Employment. School is Education or Academic Background. Skills, Technical Skills, Core Competencies, and Core Skills are the skills labels. Summary, Professional Summary, Profile, Objective, Certifications, Licenses, Projects, Languages, Awards, Volunteer, Publications, and Contact are accepted too, including a few longer variants such as Licenses and Certifications.

“MY JOURNEY,” “What I bring,” and “Career narrative” fail. Renaming is the fix. Changing the color of the label is not. A pasted file also needs an experience heading once the paste is at least 80 characters. A short fragment can pass without it. A full resume cannot. The section-headings guide is the longer version of this one rule.

Dates, bullets, glyphs, tables

Use one date family in the form boxes. Jan 2021 and May 2016 are the month-name family. 01/2023 is the numeric family. Do not mix them. Do not type 01/23. Present is allowed only as an end date for a current role. Empty boxes fail. The sample passes because every role and both education rows use month names, and the current role ends with Present. The date row does not read dates that appear only inside a pasted paragraph. If the boxes and the paste disagree, the next download uses the boxes.

Keep each bullet at or under 180 characters, which is the lint’s stand-in for two lines on this sheet. The check looks at form bullets and at pasted lines that start with a hyphen, asterisk, or bullet character. Split a longer line into two facts rather than shrinking the font. The score wants at least three bullets on every role and a strong verb at the start of at least 70 percent of them. Those are points. The 180-character cap is a lint row. Both can be true of a short, specific line, and neither asks you to decorate the line.

Do not put emoji, arrows, stars, or dingbats in the form or the paste. The glyph check covers arrows, miscellaneous symbols, dingbats, and emoji. A single rocket in a bullet fails the row even when the score stays at 100. The same is true of a pasted table. Two or more vertical bars on a line, a tab character, or two or more runs of two spaces mark the paste as columns. HTML table tags in the paste fail too. The builder itself has no table, so the row passes while the paste box is empty. It fails as soon as the paste looks aligned. Flatten skills to a comma list or to one skill per line with no extra spacing used as a column.

Contact and length, without confusing them with layout

Put a name, a valid email, and a phone number of at least seven digits in the Contact tab. The lint contact row and the score both care about these, for different reasons. The lint wants a record that can be filed. The score assigns 10 points to the email and 5 to the phone. City and LinkedIn are shown on the sheet and in the .txt download. They are not part of that points pair. Do not hide the phone in a header to make the page look cleaner.

Length is a score check, not a lint row: 300 to 900 words, and the counter ignores dates. The sample is 318 words. A one-page visual made by shrinking type to 8pt does not change that count. Cutting a real bullet does. If you are under 300, add a true responsibility with a number, not a block of adjectives. If you are over 900, delete a repeated tool before you delete the only line that proves it.

Run the list in this order

1. Load your content in the builder. Confirm the preview is one column and the name is selectable text.
2. Read the six lint rows: headings, dates, contact, bullets, glyphs, tables. Fix red rows before you chase the ring.
3. If you are pasting an outside file, expect short title-case lines such as your name to be flagged as headings. That flag is about the paste scanner. It is not a reason to delete your name from the form.
4. Then look at the score. Use how scoring works if a point value is unclear. Do not add a fake phone number to collect the 5 points.
5. Print or download only after the lint rows you care about are green, or after you have decided a red row does not apply because the paste box contains a file you are not sending.

A clean format does not make the bullets good. It makes the bullets available to whatever reads the file next. Tailoring, which is a different job, starts after this list passes.

Related reading: why a resume fails the lint immediately and resume date format. Check the sheet in the ResumeATS builder.

Questions

Is this the same as the 100-point checklist?

No. The score’s nine checks are email, phone, two roles, three bullets per role, action verbs, quantified bullets, eight skills, a single column, and length. This page is the lint and the layout: heading names, one date family, bullet length, glyphs, and pasted tables. A 100 does not clear those rows.

Which headings does the paste lint accept?

Standard labels such as Experience, Education, Skills, Summary, Projects, Certifications, and Contact. The full list is in the builder. Creative labels such as MY JOURNEY fail. The builder’s own preview uses Experience, Education, and Skills, and the heading row stays green while the paste box is empty.

What counts as a table in pasted text?

Two or more vertical bars on one line, a tab, two or more runs of two spaces, or HTML table tags. The sample’s plain-text download joins contact fields with bars, so pasting that download back into the lint box flags a table even though the preview has none.