Not rejected, but often garbled. ATS software does not auto-reject on formatting; it parses your resume into fields, and multi-column layouts can scramble the reading order so your extracted record comes out shuffled. The recruiter then sees the shuffle, and the shuffle is what gets judged.
The danger was never a machine saying no. It is a machine transcribing badly and a human reading the transcription. When a parser reads across columns instead of down them, dates detach from jobs and skills wander into the wrong sections.
A single column removes the risk for free, and it costs you nothing a recruiter cares about in the roughly 7 seconds of first scan. If you love your two-column design, keep it for the version you hand to humans directly and send the single column through application portals.
“Nobody rejected your two columns, they just read them in an order you did not plan on.”
Gabe, Pursuit's truth-teller
Gabe reads your resume the way a recruiter would and tells you the impression you leave. No signup, nothing stored.
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