ATS Resume Mistakes Freshers Make (and How to Fix Each One)

First, what an ATS really does (30 seconds)

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is the software companies use to collect and organise applications. It tries to read your resume into fields - name, phone number, education, skills - and recruiters then search and sort those applications, usually reading from the top of a long list. There is no single rule across systems: automated screening does happen, and settings vary by employer, but the documented everyday risk is simpler - being misread, or saying nothing a recruiter can search for. We explain the full picture in our article on ATS-friendly resumes in Bhubaneswar. Here, we go straight to the mistakes.

Mistake 1: Sending a photo or scan of your resume

Of all the mistakes on this list, this one does the most damage. Someone makes a resume on their phone, takes a screenshot or a photo of it, and sends that. Or scans a printed copy into a PDF.

To you, it looks perfect. To the software, it is a photograph - a picture with no words in it. Lever, one widely used system, says plainly that it cannot read image files at all. Greenhouse keeps the uploaded file but leaves your profile fields empty, to be typed by hand if anyone finds the time. Either way, your details may never reach the person hiring.

Mistake 2: Name and phone number in the header or footer

Many free templates put your name, phone number and email in the document's header or footer strip - the repeating area at the very top or bottom of the page. It looks neat. It is also a trap.

Greenhouse's own help pages list name and contact details placed in the header, footer or a text box among the formatting issues that break parsing, and some parsers skip those zones completely. In one parsing benchmark, every resume that kept its email and phone number in the Word header lost them in extraction - the contact details simply vanished, and the recruiter was left holding a resume with no way to call the person. Not every system fails this way, but you never know which system you are sending to.

Mistake 3: A pretty template built on tables and text boxes

The templates that catch your eye - two columns, a coloured sidebar, skill bars with stars, icons for phone and email - are often the worst built ones. A 2026 measurement of all 27 free resume templates on Microsoft's own template page found 25 of them laid out content in tables, and Greenhouse lists tables, columned layouts and text boxes among its known parsing problems.

Tables and columns can scramble the reading order in some parsers, so your degree ends up listed under the wrong year, or your skills merge into your work history. In one layout test, a resume whose name and contact details sat inside a text box lost them entirely, and the parser decided the word "EDUCATION" was the candidate's name. Results vary by system, and modern parsers keep improving - but a plain layout never loses to a fancy one.

And those skill bars showing "Python: 4 stars"? Software cannot see graphics at all. The stars mean nothing to it, and honestly, they mean little to a recruiter either.

Mistake 4: Creative section names

"My Journey." "What I Bring to the Table." "My Story So Far." Freshers pick these to stand out, and they do - for the wrong reason. Parsers look for standard labels like Education, Experience, Skills and Projects. Recruiters scanning quickly look for the same words. A section called "My Journey" can be skipped by both.

Mistake 5: One resume for every job

You make one resume and send it to fifty different openings. It feels efficient. It works against you, because recruiters search for the words in their job advertisement.

Say a Bhubaneswar company posts an accounts role asking for "Tally, GST filing, bank reconciliation". Your resume says "accounting software" and "office work". You may know Tally well - but a recruiter searching "Tally" will never see your name. Naukri's own advice to freshers is to read each job advertisement, pick out the 8 to 10 terms that repeat or appear in the requirements, and work those exact words into your resume - only for things you have genuinely done.

Here is what tailoring looks like in practice. This example is invented, only to show the difference. A B.Com fresher in Cuttack applies for an accounts trainee role that asks for "Tally, GST, Excel":

• Before: "Worked on accounting tasks in a college project." - true, but invisible to a recruiter searching "Tally".
• After: "Entered three months of purchase records in Tally and prepared a GST summary in Excel for a class project shop account." - the same truth, said in the words the job used.

Mistake 6: Keyword tricks

Once you hear about keywords, the internet offers shortcuts: paste the whole job description in white text at the bottom, or cram every skill you have ever heard of into a block. Please do not.

Recruiters see the parsed text - white words included. A wall of copied keywords reads exactly like what it is. And anything on your resume is fair game in an interview: one question about a skill you listed but never used, and the conversation is over. UC Berkeley's career advice puts it plainly - do not try to cheat the system by overusing keywords until they are meaningless.

Mistake 7: Writing only the short form of your degree

You write "B.Tech" or "MBA" or "DCA". The recruiter searches "Bachelor of Technology". No match. Or the reverse - you write the full form and they search the abbreviation.

Different recruiters type different things into the search box, and nobody tells you which one they used. The same goes for boards and universities: "CHSE" and "Council of Higher Secondary Education, Odisha" are the same thing to you, but two different search strings to software.

Mistake 8: Believing the robot rejected you - and giving up

The most harmful mistake is not on your resume. It is the story you tell yourself after silence.

The famous claim that "75% of resumes are rejected by ATS before a human sees them" has been traced to its source: a software company used it in a sales pitch around 2012 and shut down the next year without ever publishing any research behind it. The number is marketing, not measurement. What recruiters describe in these interviews is simpler and more human: hundreds of applications, limited hours, and a list they read from the top. Many applications go unanswered because people run out of time, not because a machine deleted you.

One automated filter is real: screening questions in the application form - work eligibility, location, a required qualification. Answer every one honestly and completely; a blank or wrong answer there can end an application instantly.

And on Naukri specifically, remember that recruiters also search the candidate database directly. A complete profile marked "Fresher", updated recently, shows up. A half-filled one from last year quietly sinks.

Try this on your own resume right now (60 seconds)

No tools, no score, no sign-up. Just your phone:

1. Open your resume PDF and press and hold on a word. Can you select and copy it? If not, your resume is a picture - fix Mistake 1.
2. Search the PDF for your own phone number. If the reader cannot find it, your contact line is not real text in the page body - fix Mistake 2.
3. Read your section headings aloud. If any of them would confuse a stranger ("My Journey"), rename it to the plain word - fix Mistake 4.

One minute, three checks. If your resume passes all three, it is already ahead of most photo resumes and fancy templates.

A two-minute check before every application

• My file is a real PDF exported from Word or Google Docs - I can select and copy text from it.
• My name, phone, email and city are in the page body, not the header or footer.
• One column. No layout tables, no text boxes, no skill bars, no icons.
• Plain headings: Summary, Education, Projects, Skills, Languages.
• My degree and board appear in both forms - full name and short form.
• The job advertisement's key words appear in my resume, next to things I actually did.
• Every skill listed is one I can answer questions on.
• The file name is professional: "Priya-Sahoo-Resume.pdf", not "final final new resume (2).docx".
• I answered every screening question in the form, honestly and fully.

Want a second pair of eyes on your resume?

FAQs

Sources

Checked 7 November 2026. If something here has changed or we got it wrong, message us and we will fix it.

• Enhancv, "Does the ATS Reject Your Resume? 25 Recruiters Explain What Really Happens" (2025, 25 US recruiters - small study, directional) - https://enhancv.com/blog/does-ats-reject-resumes/
• Lever, "Understanding resume parsing" (vendor documentation) - https://help.lever.co/hc/en-us/articles/20087345054749-Understanding-resume-parsing
• Greenhouse, "Unsuccessful resume parse" (vendor documentation) - https://support.greenhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/200989175-Unsuccessful-resume-parse
• UC Berkeley School of Information, "Using Jobscan for Applicant Tracking Systems" - https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/careers/students/jobscan
• NextCV, "We Measured 27 Free CV Templates Against ATS Layout Advice" (2026) - https://nextcv.net/en/blog/cv-template-ats-study-2026
• Readable Resume, "ATS Resume Parsing Test: 10 Layouts and 32 Fonts" - https://readableresume.com/research/ats-parsing-test
• ATS Parse Benchmark (header/footer contact loss) - https://bookmyjobinterview.ai/ats-parse-benchmark
• Uncharted Career, "The '75% of resumes are auto-rejected' myth, traced to its source" - https://unchartedcareer.com/blog/the-75-of-resumes-are-auto-rejected-myth-traced-to-its-source
• Naukri Campus, "Resume Keywords" - https://www.naukri.com/campus/career-guidance/resume-keywords
• ApplyVita, "Naukri and Resdex: How Recruiters Actually Search For You" - https://www.applyvita.com/ats-guides/naukri