Tried two different resume formats side by side and one got me 5 interviews in 2 weeks

I spent months using a fancy two column resume with graphics and icons. Got nothing but silence. Switched to a plain text based format with clear sections and bullet points. The difference was night and day. Has anyone else found that simpler resume layouts actually work better for getting past automated systems?

2 comments

2 Comments

emerycarr25d ago

Man, I had a buddy who was an actual graphic designer and made this super creative resume with charts and a personal logo. Nothing. Dead silence for three months. He finally stripped it down to just black and white text, plain Times New Roman. Next week he had a phone screen. He said the ATS just could not read his fancy columns, it was just scrambling everything. So yeah, simple and boring wins every time for getting past the robots.

gavin_clark25d ago

Man, I had a buddy who spent two weeks making this fancy resume with columns and a little timeline graphic... nothing but silence for months. He finally copied the whole thing into a plain Word doc with just headings and bullet points, and he got a callback within a week. The ATS just couldn't read his fancy layout at all.