Formatting advice for résumés tends to get dressed up as a design question — fonts, color accents, icon rows. Parsing has nothing to do with any of that. It comes down to a handful of concrete choices, most of which cost you nothing visually and remove every reason a parser might misread your history.
One column, top to bottom
Skip the sidebar. A single column means the order your résumé reads in matches the order it's stored in, which is the entire trick to reliable parsing — there's no gap between what a person sees and what software extracts. A two-column layout can look sharp on a screen, but the moment it's parsed, a line from your skills column can get glued to a line from your experience column because both sit at the same height on the page. One column removes that failure mode entirely.
This applies to more than just an obvious sidebar. Watch for subtler two-column patterns too — a header row with your name on the left and contact details right-aligned on the same line, or a skills section laid out as two side-by-side lists. Both look tidy on screen and both introduce the same left-right ambiguity a parser has to guess its way through.
Standard headings
Use "Experience," "Education," and "Skills" — not stylized alternatives like "My Journey" or "What I Bring." Parsers are built to recognize a fairly narrow set of conventional section labels; a creative heading gets treated as body text instead of a section marker, which can cause everything under it to file into the wrong field. Standard headings cost nothing in personality and buy you correct extraction.
The same logic applies one level down, to how you label each role. "Senior Engineer, Acme Corp — Jan 2023–Present" in a consistent order across every entry is easier to extract correctly than a résumé where each job varies the order of title, company, and dates. Consistency inside a section matters almost as much as the heading above it.
Selectable text, not images
Never submit a picture of a résumé or a scanned PDF, no matter how good the export looks. If the text isn't selectable — if you can't highlight and copy a line straight off the page — a parser can't read it either, and it will land in the system as an empty or near-empty record. Export directly from a text-based document, not from a flattened image or a phone photo of a printed page.
A simple check before you submit anything: open the file, try to select a line of text with your cursor, and try to search for a word on the page with your PDF viewer's built-in search. If either fails, the file is an image underneath, whatever it looks like on screen, and it needs to be re-exported from the original document rather than resubmitted as is.
Fonts, size, and page
Pick a common, embeddable font — the kind bundled with every operating system rather than a decorative download — at a legible body size. Use Letter or A4 page size depending on the region you're applying in, with margins generous enough that nothing crowds the edge. None of this is exotic; it's the same baseline every well-formatted document uses, and it guarantees the file opens and renders identically wherever it lands.
What to remove
A short list of elements to cut, because each one adds parsing risk for no real benefit:
- Tables, including ones used just to align dates or columns of text.
- Floating text boxes — content in them can be dropped from the extracted text entirely.
- Multi-column layouts, including two-column skills blocks.
- Headshots and photos.
- Icons standing in for section labels or contact details.
- Skill-meter graphics (progress bars, star ratings) — they don't parse as a skill level at all.
The one-page question
If you're fighting to fit everything on one page, tighten the writing before you shrink the type. Cut bullets that repeat the same point in different words, trim older roles down to their essentials, and remove anything that isn't earning its line. Shrinking font size or margins to force a fit is the last lever to pull, not the first — a page that's technically one page but unreadable at arm's length has traded one problem for a worse one.
A good order of operations: cut redundant bullets first, then trim older or less relevant roles to one or two lines each, then adjust spacing modestly, and only reduce font size as a last, small step if everything else still leaves you slightly over. Each step should feel like tightening, not shrinking — the page gets denser with signal, not just smaller. For the fuller argument on why this layout wins for both the parser and the human reading it, see why single-column wins.