Filed 5 applications with the same company over 18 months and got no response until I changed my resume format

I found out that my PDF resume was getting caught in their ATS system because of how I formatted dates. A guy in a LinkedIn comment last week told me to switch to a simple table layout and use standard fonts. Soon as I uploaded a new version as a Word doc, I got a screening call inside 2 days. Anyone else had a company's system totally ignore their application because of something that dumb?

3 comments

3 Comments

alice92815d ago

Wait, we're really supposed to believe that a single formatting tweak flipped a switch from zero replies to three callbacks in a week? I've seen ATS systems reject perfectly clean resumes for no obvious reason and accept janky ones, so blaming it all on a column layout feels like a stretch. Could be a coincidence, or maybe that hospital system just finally got around to looking at his apps.

brookeellis15d ago

My cousin spent 8 months applying to a hospital system in Phoenix and got nothing. Turned out their ATS couldn't read his resume because he used a column layout with his skills on the left side. He reformatted it to a straight top-to-bottom list with basic bullet points and got three callbacks in a week. That same system also apparently hates tables with borders. He had to drop all the formatting and just use plain text headers.

jordan_henderson1315d ago

Second this hard. Had almost the exact same thing happen with a company in Denver - dog food resume in two columns got crickets for months, switched to a single column with zero fancy formatting and got an interview request within 48 hours.