Are two-column resumes really a problem for tech roles specifically?

They're a formatting risk for every field, but they show up disproportionately on engineering and design resumes, where a sidebar of tools and languages feels natural to lay out visually. Of ResuMakeAi's six templates, only Modern renders two-column; the other five, including Creative, are single-column, specifically to avoid this risk.

Should I list every language and framework I've ever touched?

No. A long, undifferentiated list reads as padding to both an ATS keyword match and a human reviewer, and it's genuinely less useful than a shorter list where every item is backed by a real bullet somewhere on the resume.

Does a GitHub link actually get checked?

By a human reviewer at the interview stage, often yes. By the ATS parsing your resume on submission, no, it typically only extracts your resume's text content, not what a linked profile contains. Include it for the human who reads the shortlist, not as a substitute for what's actually written on the resume itself.

How is this different from a general 'resume mistakes' list?

It's specific to the failure modes that show up disproportionately in tech hiring: two-column skill sidebars, tool-name lists with no proof, and screening pipelines (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS) that specific companies commonly use, not a general list of resume problems.

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How Tech Recruiters Actually Screen Resumes

November 3, 2026

Tech hiring runs through the same kind of applicant tracking software everyone else's resume does, but the specific ways a technical resume gets flagged or ranked lower are different from a general “resume mistakes” list. Three come up constantly.

The two-column sidebar problem

A skills sidebar down the left or right edge of the page, tools and languages stacked in a narrow column next to the main content, is a genuinely common engineering-resume layout. It's also a real parsing risk: many ATS platforms read a page in a single left-to-right, top-to-bottom pass, and a two-column layout can interleave the sidebar's text into the middle of an unrelated bullet point, or drop it from the extracted text entirely. Of the six templates in ResuMakeAi's builder, only Modern renders genuinely two-column, the other five are single-column bodies specifically to avoid this. See best resume format for 2026 for the full per-template breakdown.

A skills list nothing else on the page backs up

“Python, React, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform” as a standalone line matches keywords, but it doesn't demonstrate anything, and an increasing number of screening steps (including a human recruiter's first pass) specifically look for whether a listed skill also shows up in context somewhere in the experience section. A tool named once in a bullet describing what you actually built with it does more work than the same tool sitting alone in a list.

Exact terminology over close synonyms

This applies everywhere, but it's sharper in tech because the terms are more precise: “CI/CD,” “microservices,” “infrastructure as code” don't reliably match against a resume that says “automated deployments,” “modular services,” or “scripted server setup,” even though a human engineer would read them as the same thing. If a posting names a specific tool or pattern, match its exact wording, not a paraphrase. See how to tailor your resume to a job posting for the full keyword-matching process.

What actually helps

Check your resume against a specific job posting rather than a generic template, since the exact tools and terms a posting names are what a real screen (human or automated) is actually looking for. The free ATS + job match checker scores your resume against a pasted job description and flags missing keywords and formatting risk, including the two-column issue above, with no signup required. For a template built specifically around this, see the software engineer resume builder.