10 ATS-killing resume mistakes Indian freshers make

Most rejection at large Indian IT companies happens before a human ever reads your resume. The Applicant Tracking System parses your PDF or Word file into structured fields, scores against keywords, and surfaces the top N. If parsing fails, you score zero.

The top 10 mistakes that cause this:

1. Canva templates with embedded graphics. They look stunning on screen, parse as one image to most ATS systems.

2. Skill rating bars ("React ████"). The bars convert to garbage characters or get stripped entirely. Use a comma-separated list.

3. Icons for phone and email. The text after them isn't extracted because parsers see the icon as a column boundary.

4. Two-column layouts. Many parsers read top-to-bottom of each column independently, scrambling your sections.

5. PDF saved as image (scanned from print). No text layer = no parsing.

6. Headers and footers. ATS often ignores them. Don't put your name there.

7. Tables for layout. Parsed as rows of garbled text in some systems.

8. Non-standard section headings. "My Journey" instead of "Experience" gets missed by keyword matching.

9. Embedded photos. Trigger image-only flagging and often violate company anti-discrimination policy.

10. Fancy fonts. Anything non-system can render as squares or get substituted. Stick to Calibri, Arial, or Times.

The fix is boring on purpose: a single column, plain text, standard section names, role keywords from the JD repeated naturally in your project descriptions.