We parse a lot of resumes. The same nine problems account for most of the damage, and every one of them is fixable in under a minute — which is a much better return than another hour spent rewording your summary.
1. Dates written five different ways
'2021-2023', 'March 2021 to present', '03/21 – 03/23' and 'Since 2021' in one document makes it impossible to compute your total experience. Many systems then show your experience as zero years, and a filter set to '3+ years' drops you.
Fix: pick 'Mon YYYY – Mon YYYY' and use it everywhere, including education.
2. The job title is buried
'PayFast | Bengaluru | Senior Engineer | 2021' on one line reads fine to you and ambiguously to a parser. Put the title first and the company second, on their own line.
3. Creative section headings
'Where I've Made an Impact' is a lovely heading that no parser recognises as Experience. Use the boring word. Creativity belongs in the bullets underneath.
4. The skills paragraph
Skills written as prose — 'I have worked extensively with Python and some exposure to AWS' — extract badly and read worse. A comma-separated list under a 'Skills' heading solves both.
5–9. The quick ones
- Special bullet characters (✦ ➤ ✔) — some become question marks or vanish. Use • or -.
- Filename with special characters — 'Asha's resume (final)(2).pdf' breaks some upload handlers. Use asha-verma-resume.pdf.
- Scanned or photographed pages — no extractable text at all. Always export from the source document.
- Password-protected PDFs — the parser can't open it; the application dies silently.
- Two pages merged into a landscape sheet — reading order collapses. Keep portrait, one page per page.
What to do after you fix them
Re-upload the corrected file and read the parsed output rather than the score. If your last three roles, your degree and your skills all came through with the right labels, you are done — the remaining points come from content, not formatting.
Put this into practice
Build, score and tailor your resume with JotCV — free plan, no card needed.
See how your resume parses