Why ATS Software Rejects Your Resume
When you apply for a job online, a person is usually not the first to see your resume. Software reads it first. It is called an ATS — an Applicant Tracking System. If the ATS can't read your file cleanly, your resume can be dropped before anyone looks at it.
What trips up the software
Most problems come from how the file is built, not what it says:
- Columns and tables — the parser reads left to right and mixes your text into nonsense.
- Text inside images — a resume saved as a picture has no readable text at all.
- Headers and footers — key details placed there are often skipped.
- Odd fonts and symbols — fancy glyphs can turn into blank boxes or wrong letters.
- Graphics and icons — these add nothing the parser can use and can break the layout.
Why a good-looking resume can still fail
A design that looks sharp to you can read as scrambled text to a machine. You never see this. You just get silence, and assume no one was hiring. In reality the file never made it to a recruiter in a readable form.
Rebuild it so machines can read it
The goal is a clean, simple layout that both people and software can read. Orilami's ATS Resume Sanitizer studies how systems like Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse and Lever read resumes, then rebuilds yours into a clean PDF, DOCX and Markdown. It flattens columns, fixes broken fonts, and runs a check to show how well the result reads. It all runs in your browser, so your resume and personal details stay on your device.
Who needs this
Beyond job seekers, this helps people who handle other people's resumes: career coaches, recruitment agencies and HR teams. A resume holds names, phone numbers, addresses and work history — real personal data. Processing it on their own device, not uploading it to a web service, keeps that data private.
Keep two versions: a pretty one to send by hand, and a clean one for online forms. The clean one is what gets you past the software.