Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are not reading your resume the way a person does. They’re parsing it — extracting text, matching keywords, and scoring your application against criteria before it ever reaches a recruiter’s inbox. Most candidates don’t know this. The ones who do often still make the same formatting mistakes.
Here are the five most common ones I see in IT professional resumes, and what to do instead.
1. Using tables or text boxes for layout
Tables and text boxes look clean in Microsoft Word. ATS systems cannot reliably read them. Content inside a table or text box is often scrambled or skipped entirely when parsed. This means your contact information, your job titles, your skills — any of it could disappear from the ATS version of your resume.
Fix: Build your resume with standard paragraph text and section headings only. If your template uses columns for your contact info or skills, remove them. Single-column layouts parse reliably.
2. Saving as .docx when the job posting asks for PDF, or vice versa
This sounds obvious but it trips people up constantly. Some ATS systems parse .docx files better than PDFs. Others do the opposite. When the job posting specifies a format, use it. When it doesn’t specify, .docx is the safer default for ATS, though some modern systems handle both equally.
Fix: Read the application instructions. Submit the format requested. If none is specified, submit .docx unless you have a specific reason not to.
3. Putting critical information only in headers or footers
Page headers and footers in Word documents are a common place for contact information — name, phone, email, LinkedIn. The problem is that many ATS systems extract only the body content of a document, not the header and footer sections. Your name and contact details may simply not exist in the parsed version.
Fix: Keep your contact information in the body of the document, not the header or footer. You can still have a visually formatted top section — just make sure it’s body text, not a Word header field.
4. Missing or inconsistently formatted dates
ATS systems try to calculate your tenure at each role. If your dates are formatted inconsistently — some as “Jan 2020” and others as “2020” — or if you’re using non-standard formats, the ATS may misread your timeline or flag your application as incomplete.
Fix: Use a consistent date format throughout. Month Year (e.g., January 2020 or Jan 2020) is standard and reliably parsed. Apply it to every role entry.
5. Keyword mismatches with the job description
ATS systems score your resume against the keywords in the job posting. If the posting says “Microsoft 365” and your resume says “Office 365,” that may not match. If the posting uses “network operations” and your resume says “NOC,” same problem. This is especially common in IT roles where the same technology has multiple names.
Fix: Read the job description carefully and mirror its specific terminology in your resume where accurate. Don’t stuff keywords — use them naturally in context. And include both the acronym and the full term when relevant (e.g., “Network Operations Center (NOC)”).
The bottom line
ATS filtering is a real barrier, but it’s a solvable one. The mistakes above are mechanical — they don’t reflect your qualifications, they just affect how your document is read by a machine. Fixing them doesn’t require a complete rewrite. It requires a careful formatting review with ATS parsing in mind.
If you’re not sure whether your current resume has these issues, the ATS Scorecard at Signal Pathway Careers is a $39 diagnostic that checks your resume against these standards and tells you exactly what needs to change.