Résumé fonts, and the thing that actually breaks
The font question is usually asked about taste and answered about legibility. The thing that actually breaks an extraction is the character map inside the file.
— if the extraction is gibberish, re-export.
Advice about résumé fonts is usually a discussion of taste dressed as a technical requirement. The technical requirement exists, but it is not about the name of the typeface. It is about whether the exported file can give the text back.
What actually breaks
A PDF stores glyphs and, separately, a map from those glyphs to characters. When a font is embedded without a usable map, the page renders perfectly and the extracted text is nonsense. Your résumé looks right on screen, and a parser receives a run of meaningless characters.
This is invisible until you check, which is why it is worth checking. Copy some text out of your exported PDF and paste it into a plain text editor. If what comes back is not what you wrote, the file is damaged.
What the check does with it
The ATS résumé checker counts characters in the extracted text that cannot be read: private-use glyphs and replacement marks. Three or more of them cost eighteen points of parseability, and the finding says plainly that some words or numbers may be corrupted before an ATS reads them. The fix it names is to export a text-based PDF with proper Unicode mapping, or to send DOCX where the PDF's text layer is damaged.
Icon fonts are the usual culprit
The little telephone, envelope and location symbols in a header are usually glyphs from an icon font. They extract as private-use characters or as nothing at all, and they are also counted as decorative characters, which costs another eight points. Plain text labels cost you no beauty worth having, and the header guide covers what belongs up there.
Choosing a typeface, briefly
Legibility at ten or eleven points on paper. A real bold and a real italic in the family, so emphasis is not synthesised. Consistent digits, because your dates and figures are the parts that get read closely. Serif or sans-serif makes no difference to an extraction; both come back identically when the map is right.
Size, spacing and the thing people do at the end
Below about ten points a printed page becomes work to read, and a reader who is working is a reader who skims. When a résumé will not fit, cut words rather than points; the length guide covers what comes off first.
Where the designs here stand
Every design in the gallery is rendered by the same engine that renders your export, so what you approve is what is built. 21 of the 37 are marked ATS-safe, and that mark is checked on the exported file rather than on the preview, which is the only place the character map can be verified. Re-run the check after you change design, since a new design means a new export.
Special characters, accents and names
Accented characters, non-Latin scripts and unusual punctuation depend on the same embedding that everything else depends on, and they are the first things to break in a badly exported file. Check your own name in the extracted text: if an accent has become a question mark or a box, the export is damaged and everything else in the file is suspect too.
The same applies to the en dash used in date ranges and to typographic quotation marks. Plain hyphens and straight marks are never wrong, and they survive everything.
A two-minute test
Open the exported PDF, select the whole page, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. Read what lands. This takes two minutes, needs no tool, and catches both of the failures on this page at once: a damaged character map shows up as nonsense, and a scrambled reading order shows up as sections in the wrong order. Then run the check for the parts a paste cannot measure, such as whether your headings are recognised and whether the evidence is there.
Two fonts, at most
One for headings and one for body text, or one family used at two weights. More than that and the page starts to look assembled, and each additional family is another embedding that can fail on export. Where a design already sets its own typography, leave it alone: the 37 designs in the gallery are authored pages whose type is part of the design rather than a default waiting to be overridden.
Test the text layer
The report counts unreadable glyphs in the extracted text and says so plainly when it finds them.
Open the ATS checkerRead the format guideQuestions
- Which font should I use
- One that is legible at ten or eleven points and that your exporter embeds properly. The typeface's name matters far less than whether its text comes back out of the file.
- What is a damaged text layer
- A file where the page looks correct but the extracted characters are wrong, because the font was embedded without a usable map from glyph to character.
- How would I notice
- Copy text out of the PDF and paste it somewhere plain. If it comes back as nonsense, the map is broken. The check here also counts unreadable glyphs and deducts eighteen points of parseability at three or more.
- Are icon fonts a problem
- Yes. Icons drawn from a font extract as private-use characters or as nothing, and enough of them look like a damaged file. They also cost eight points as decorative characters.
- Serif or sans-serif
- Either. Both extract identically. Choose on legibility at the size you are printing.
Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.