Why two columns break
Software that reads a resume does not see a layout. It pulls text out in roughly the order the characters were placed on the page, then guesses at structure. A two-column design puts a skills sidebar and a job entry on the same horizontal band, so the extractor reads straight across both of them.
What comes out is a line like “Skills Senior Analyst, Kotak Mahindra Python SQL Mar 2021”. The job title is welded to a programming language, the employer sits between two skills, and the date belongs to nothing. No human ever opens that record, so nobody tells you it happened.
You cannot spot this by looking. The PDF renders perfectly in every viewer, which is exactly why the template looked worth paying for. Select all the text in a two-column resume, paste it into a plain text editor, and the mess on screen is close to what the parser received.
What the parser is looking for
Sections are found by matching headings against a known list. “Experience”, “Work Experience”, “Education”, “Skills”, “Projects” and “Certifications” appear on every list. “My Journey”, “What I Bring” and “Beyond Work” appear on none, so everything underneath them lands in an unclassified bucket or is dropped.
Page headers and footers are the second trap. Many extractors strip those regions on the fair assumption they hold page numbers. Put your phone number and email in a page header and they can disappear, leaving a resume with no way to contact you. This builder writes contact details into the body and uses no header or footer region at all.
Dates matter more than people expect. Use one format throughout, such as Mar 2021 to Aug 2024, and keep entries in reverse chronological order. Mixed formats force the parser to guess your total years of experience, and that guess is what gets measured against the minimum in the job requisition.
Bullets that survive the filter
Keyword matching is literal. A filter searching for “Microsoft Excel” gives you no credit for “MS Excel”, and one set to “React.js” can miss “ReactJS”. Where a tool goes by two names, use both once each: the full name in your skills line, the short form in the bullet where you actually used it.
Open each bullet with a verb and close it with a number. “Rebuilt the GST reconciliation process, cutting month-end close from nine days to three” and “Renegotiated two vendor contracts, saving ₹4.2 lakh a year” both survive a ten-second skim. “Responsible for various finance activities” matches nothing and says nothing.
Length follows experience. Under eight years, one page. Beyond that, two pages is normal and a third is rarely reached. Cut the objective statement, the declaration line and the full postal address, none of which a recruiter uses. That space buys you two more bullets that do actual work.