A resume that "did not get a response" usually did not get rejected by a person. It got mangled by a parser, scored low, and never made the shortlist. The fixes for the most common parsing mistakes are small and unglamorous. Here are the ones that actually move the needle.
Mistake 1: contact info inside a header or footer
Word documents have a special area at the top of the page called the header. Many designer templates put your name, email, and phone there. When the ATS parses the document, it often skips header content entirely. The recruiter ends up with a resume that has no way to contact you, and the system silently drops you.
The fix is to move the contact line into the body of the document, the first or second line under your name.
Mistake 2: skills shown as graphics
A horizontal bar chart that says "Python: 90%, JavaScript: 80%, SQL: 70%" looks fine to a human and parses as nothing. The parser sees the labels but cannot read a percentage from a colored rectangle. Worse, some parsers strip out the labels too.
The fix is a plain line, written like a sentence: "Python, JavaScript, SQL, Postgres, Docker, AWS". Put it under a heading called "Skills". The parser indexes every word.
Mistake 3: tables and multi-column layouts
If your work experience is in the right column and your education is in the left column, the parser may read them left to right, row by row. Your most recent job ends up interleaved with your university. The output is unusable. The same thing happens with invisible tables used for alignment.
The fix is to use a single column. Section headings, then content below, top to bottom. If a template insists on a sidebar, find another template.
Mistake 4: creative section headings
"Career journey", "What I bring", "My story". The parser is trained on standard headings. It does not know that "What I bring" is your skills section. When the heading is not recognized, the content underneath gets dumped into a generic "other" bucket and never indexed.
The fix is to use the dull names: "Summary", "Work Experience", "Education", "Skills", "Projects", "Certifications". You can still write the content with personality.
Mistake 5: inconsistent dates
"Jan 2021 to Present", "March 2019 to December 2020", "06/2017 - 09/2018". A parser tolerates a couple of date formats, not five. Inconsistent dates mean some roles end up with no start date or no end date, which kills your total years of experience in the scoring step.
The fix is to pick one format and apply it across every role and every degree. "MMM YYYY to MMM YYYY" is a safe choice.
Mistake 6: PDFs without a text layer
A resume exported from a slide deck, or scanned from paper and saved as a PDF, has no selectable text. The parser sees an image and gives up. If you cannot drag-select a sentence from your resume in a browser, the parser cannot either.
The fix is to regenerate the PDF from a word processor or a resume builder. The "Save as PDF" option in Word, Google Docs, or Pages all produce text-layer PDFs.
A two-minute self-check
Open your resume in a PDF reader. Select the entire page (Ctrl-A or Cmd-A). Copy. Paste into a plain text editor. Read what you get. If the order of your jobs is scrambled, if your skills appear as one long block of nonsense, or if your name is missing, the parser is going to see the same thing. Fix what reads wrong in the plain-text copy. That is the version the ATS sees.