Are Two-Column Resumes ATS Friendly?

It depends on how the columns are built, which you cannot see by looking at the page. You can find out in a minute, and you should before you send it anywhere.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

Why columns are a risk

A person reads a two-column page column by column. A text extractor reads whatever order the file stores the text in, and that order can run straight across both columns, line by line.

When that happens, a job title from the right column and a skill from the left end up on the same line: Senior Data Analyst SQL. Repeat that down the page and the history the parser builds is not yours.

Some systems handle columns well. Some do not. You will not know which one a given employer runs, so the safe question is not "do columns work" but "does my file come out in order".

Not all columns are the same

Real document columns, set with the column feature in Word or Google Docs, usually extract in column order. They are the least risky way to do it.

Tables are read cell by cell, row by row. A two-cell table with your whole sidebar in one cell often reads acceptably. A grid of small cells does not.

Text boxes and free-floating frames, which is how most design templates build a sidebar, are the riskiest. Their order is whatever order they were created in, and some parsers skip text boxes entirely.

How to check yours

Select all the text in the file, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. If your sections come out whole and in a sensible order, the layout is not your problem.

If lines from the sidebar are interleaved with your experience, a parser can do the same. Our free parse preview shows the extracted text from a real parser if you would rather not rely on copy and paste.

If you want to keep the sidebar

Keep the things that must survive in the main column: your name, email, phone and every job title with its dates. If the sidebar scrambles, you lose decoration, not your history.

Put only short, self-contained items in the sidebar, like a skills list or languages, each under a plain heading.

Build the sidebar as a real column or a single table cell, not a stack of text boxes.

The simplest fix

One column. Contact details, a short summary, skills, experience, education, in that order. It is less striking on screen and it removes the question entirely.

Most of what a sidebar holds fits on two or three lines under a Skills heading. The ATS-friendly structure shows the order.