AI assistants did the archive research and drafted this piece. Each round one model checked it against the sources and another read only the prose; neither saw the other's work. This is the twenty-ninth version, and what the earlier ones got wrong is at the end. Live commercial pages were read on 26–27, 29 and 30 August 2026 and the readings are archived; the 1998 material was read once, in an earlier round, and neither reviewer can currently re-check it.
Should your résumé have two columns? Two of these sites give the question a page of its own; two answer only inside a broader guide; the fifth doesn't use the word on either of its template pages. All five sell templates.
There are five, and one company owns them. BOLD Limited's about page shows nine brands — MyPerfectResume, Monster, CareerBuilder, Zety, LiveCareer, FlexJobs, Bold.pro, Sonara and My Perfect Cover Letter — and its timeline adds a tenth, ResumeBuilder.com, acquired in 2024. Five of them run résumé advice pages with template galleries: MyPerfectResume, LiveCareer, Monster, Zety and ResumeBuilder.com. I didn't check whether CareerBuilder or the smaller brands do. These five were picked for their owner, not their traffic, and nobody checked what a search engine would surface.
Seven findings follow. Four are about one brand. Each ends with a note saying what it isn't, and nothing here tells you whether these templates work.
1. The counter recomputes the number and not the adjective
MyPerfectResume's ATS page says to use one column. In its tips block: "Keep the layout simple. Use a single-column format with clear section headings." In a collapsed FAQ answer to "Can ATS read PDF files?": "Complex layouts, multiple columns, tables, and graphics can confuse ATS software and prevent it from accurately parsing your resume. A clean, single-column format with standard headings is always best."
Its gallery masthead says "Choose from 433 ATS-friendly templates". Tick Two Column and it says "Choose from 200 ATS-friendly templates". In the markup that masthead is one string with a number slot in it — Choose from <span>N</span> ATS-friendly templates — so the number is wired to the filter and the adjective is typed once and stands. Monster's counter carries the same adjective across the same filter, at 355 of 773. The other two carry no ATS wording: LiveCareer's reads "78 templates" of 346, Zety's "Showing 386/773 templates".
What it isn't. It isn't evidence that anyone re-certified those two hundred when you ticked the filter. But somebody chose to put ATS-friendly over a gallery that returns two-column results, and the two counters that omit it show that was a choice. Read it as a shelf label: authored once, not a per-item judgement.
2. The ATS page never mentions the workaround its sibling page recommends
MyPerfectResume's ATS page tells you what to avoid: "Avoiding graphics, tables, columns, and unusual design elements ensures your skills and experience are accurately captured," and "Avoid images, icons, and graphics. Logos, charts, icons, and photos may look appealing, but often aren't readable by ATS." It says nothing anywhere about keeping a second, display-only résumé.
Its separate two-column guide answers "How do I make a two-column resume template in Google Docs?" with: "Open a new Google Docs document, click on 'Insert' in the top menu and select 'Table.' Choose a 2×1 table to create the two-column layout." The same guide's ATS-compliance section says "Avoid using complex tables, images or graphics that may confuse the ATS system" and "Avoid using columns for important information: Keep your contact information and keywords in a single column to ensure they are easily identified by the ATS system." And in another answer: "To ensure that your resume passes ATS, an excellent option is to create a basic one-column resume that you submit with your application and a visually appealing two-column resume that you can post online." Whether the Google Docs table instruction is meant for that second document, the guide doesn't say.
What it isn't. It isn't a contradiction — the guide addresses it twice. What's left is about page architecture: a reader who lands on the ATS page alone never learns the two-document recommendation exists.
3. The About-page FAQ that answers the ATS question is collapsed
MyPerfectResume's About page carries five FAQ questions. The fifth and last is "Are your resume templates ATS-friendly?":
It is the only About-page FAQ on any of the five that answers a question about ATS. LiveCareer has no FAQ. Monster has none, and the string ATS appears zero times on its About page. Zety has eleven FAQ items, none about ATS. ResumeBuilder has fifteen; one answer, to "What is an AI resume builder?", mentions ATS in passing about keywords. The word column does not appear on MyPerfectResume's About page at all. The answer is collapsed by default; the visible page shows the question, not the answer.
What it isn't. It isn't boilerplate — it's authored prose answering a direct question, so the template-string reading from Finding 1 doesn't reach it. It also isn't a claim about columns, and treating it as one takes a step the answer doesn't take. It says designed to be easily read and accurately parse, never pass; it never repeats ATS-friendly, which appears only in the question. And it is last of five.
4. What gets a caveat of its own, and what doesn't
MyPerfectResume qualifies claims all over its site. Its Privacy Policy, under Scores, ratings and other tools, covering its résumé matching, checking and scoring tools: "Your use of these tools is completely at your own risk and provides no warranties whatsoever." Employment outcomes: "We do not guarantee employment for any user of the Site." Testimonials: "YOUR INDIVIDUAL RESULTS MAY VARY." Its résumé-parsing notifications and its application-delivery service each get their own clause — five named qualifications in all. Statistics on the About page and the gallery carry a double-dagger footnote: "Based on around 1,000 responses of a study where 287 of the respondents used a resume builder tool to build their resumes."
The template ATS claim gets no named clause and no footnote of its own. It falls under section 18 of the Terms — "THE SERVICE AND ALL THE MATERIALS, INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, AND OTHER CONTENT IN THE SERVICE ARE PROVIDED 'AS IS' AND 'AS AVAILABLE' WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND" — which by its own terms reaches the templates along with everything else. The word template appears in the body of the Terms exactly once, about billing.
Both pages carrying the template claim carry footnotes on other claims.
What it isn't. It isn't proof of anything about what the company believes. Whether the pattern reflects legal advice about which categories need disclaiming, I'm not qualified to say, and that explanation is available.
5. LiveCareer's gallery says ATS-friendly; its advice page says don't
Its ATS page, under a step headed Use an ATS-friendly resume template, ties the label to a property: "ATS-friendly resume templates offer streamlined designs and one-column text necessary for software readability." One step further down, under Stick to a simple layout, it runs a Don't use list: photos, graphics, tables, text boxes, "Two- or three-column text", acronyms by themselves.
Its gallery page says "Our templates are built with ATS-friendly formatting, ensuring your resume is easily read by screening software." That sentence sits in a benefits strip, between an ATS Resume Check Tool card and an Easy Customization card, under a heading reading ATS-Friendly Layouts. The gallery's own Layout dropdown offers exactly two options, Single Column and Two Column; ticking the second returns 78 of 346, which is also what settles what column means here — I had worried the Don't-use item described newspaper-style paragraph flow rather than a layout.
What it isn't. It isn't a self-contradicting page: the definition is on the advice page and the claim is on the gallery. And I can't fully close the scope of our templates — the sentence sits under a heading of its own, and whether that heading narrows it I can't tell from outside.
6. Zety says both things one paragraph apart
Its two-column article warns: "There's only one potential pitfall of using a two-column resume—it might not pass through some older Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). You'll have to go the extra mile to get your formatting right so that it doesn't annoy those little bots." Its key takeaway on the same page: "Remember, though, that not all resumes with columns will make it through the ATS scan."
One paragraph on, under the same subhead, the same page says: "We can't guarantee that all resume templates in the gallery below have been optimized to pass ATS scans. All of Zety's resume templates are ATS compliant." The gallery below is a curated roundup of fifteen templates, eleven of them other companies' work — but its scope is all fifteen, and four are Zety's own. Zety's filter says 386 of its 773 templates are two-column.
The second sentence is unhedged and covers all of Zety's templates, so it reaches those four as well — if ATS compliant means anything the first sentence disclaims.
What it isn't. The first of those two sentences isn't a blanket disclaimer; it covers only that roundup. And ATS compliant is defined nowhere on the page, so what the second sentence overrides is not fixed. The two sit in one paragraph with a single space between them, which is as consistent with a copy-editing collision as with a claim.
7. ResumeBuilder's template pages never say column, and its ATS page generalises both ways
The word column appears zero times on either of its template pages, and its gallery offers no layout filter — only Style and Colors. Its stock does, by eye, include sidebar-rail designs; with no layout classification and no count on them, these pages carry no pair of column statements to set against each other.
Its gallery page says: "Our resume templates are optimized for the most popular ATS, with ATS-friendly designs that help prevent your application from being filtered out before the recruiting manager even gets a chance to look at it." And its ATS page concedes ground first: "In recent years, ATS has gained the ability to scan many resume styles and templates. More than anything, these programs just seek consistent patterns of information." Then, three sentences on: "If you're creating your resume in Microsoft Word, know that ATS does not scan any text in headers, footers, charts, graphics, or text boxes. So, it's best to avoid these features or at least not use them to feature essential keywords." Between those two passages sit two more sentences, one of which reads "ATS friendly resume templates ensure your information is easily scanned and interpreted by software." MyPerfectResume names the same exception, hedged, in a collapsed FAQ answer: "Avoid headers or footers for key info. ATS may not read information in headers or footers."
The exception is bolted directly onto a sentence carrying no may and no some — ATS does not scan any text in… — three sentences after the same page has generalised the other way.
What it isn't. Optimized for the most popular ATS isn't a testing claim and names no system, so it can't be checked. Nor is the juxtaposition necessarily an error: a page can say the software has improved generally and still name something it skips, and that sentence is addressed to Word users.
What the seven are worth together
Four of the seven are one brand, so this is four observations about MyPerfectResume plus one each about three other sites. Findings 1, 2 and 7 support less than earlier drafts claimed, though each still yields something a reader can use. Finding 4 has an innocent explanation I can't rule out, though the asymmetry it records stands either way. Findings 3, 4, 5 and 6 carry the argument, and each is narrow.
What survives as a claim about these pages is this. On the pages I read, no site names a system its templates were tested against, and no page says the templates have been tested. Two sites assert the outcome, not just the design intent, over their own templates — LiveCareer in Finding 5, Zety in Finding 6. MyPerfectResume's parallel claim never gets stronger than allows, which is why it isn't in that pair. That is a claim about the pages listed at the end, not about these companies.
What the label doesn't settle
Three of the sites attach ATS-friendly to a property. MyPerfectResume: "An ATS-friendly resume is a resume that's written and formatted in a way that applicant tracking systems (ATS) can easily read, scan, and rank it," and, two sentences later, opening the next paragraph, "ATS-friendly resumes use simple formatting, standard section headings, common fonts, clear job titles, and relevant keywords from the job description." ResumeBuilder, in the very next sentence after its own definition: "Use standard fonts, headings, and formatting on an ATS-friendly resume template to ensure these automated systems can read your information." LiveCareer's is the one-column-text sentence in Finding 5. An earlier draft claimed the label was wired to nothing; it's wired to properties.
Two of MyPerfectResume's five properties you can check by opening a file — common fonts, standard section headings. Simple formatting and clear job titles are judgement calls, and relevant keywords from the job description is relative to a posting the template's author never saw.
On the six advice pages I read — MyPerfectResume's two, and one each from LiveCareer, Monster, Zety and ResumeBuilder — no applicant tracking system is named. About thirty vendor names were searched for; none appears.
What it isn't. Six advice pages are not the whole of these sites, and firms routinely do things they don't publish.
Two 1998 pages
Applicant tracking systems were once fed by a physical scanner. Resumix filed a patent on 1 May 1989 for a method of making minimally formatted documents machine-readable — one that takes the scanner as given, describing documents "digitized by an optical scanner and translated into ASCII text by an optical character reader." Granted 1992, expired 2009.
Two 1998 pages, read in an earlier round and not re-readable now; the Internet Archive's replay endpoint has returned HTTP 429 to every request I've made, though both snapshots are confirmed to exist. Online Career Center's résumé help: "…do not use bolding, italics, underlining, or tabs (use the space bar instead) because these changes will not appear correctly online." And a Joyce Lain Kennedy column on the same site: "Avoid decorative, uncommon or otherwise fussy typefaces. Don't underline — it may muddy up into a blob in a scanner's eye. Stick to white or beige paper. Steer away from italics."
Between them those two passages give two reasons, and three of the four instructions in the Kennedy passage give none. Only one reason is about optics — a scanner's eye, the one machine either passage names — and stick to white or beige paper explains nothing on its own.
What it isn't. The patent is verified; the two 1998 pages are the only period advice sources I have, and they were read once. Two short passages are also not two pages — what the rest of either page said, I can't tell you.
So what do you do
Treat ATS-friendly on a filter counter as a shelf label. That's Finding 1, and it's specific to the counters. It doesn't extend to the About FAQ or to LiveCareer's gallery sentence — Findings 3 and 5 are what those are worth instead.
The concrete don't-lists are at least specific enough to follow. Avoid tables, graphics and text boxes: MyPerfectResume, LiveCareer and ResumeBuilder each name some of those, the last of them in the passage quoted in Finding 7. Keep anything that matters out of headers and footers: MyPerfectResume and ResumeBuilder say this; LiveCareer's page never mentions headers or footers at all, and I didn't check Monster's or Zety's for it. Whether following any of it helps I can't tell you; it rests on the same untested premise as the label. The cost is low, which is the only argument I have for it.
On columns, MyPerfectResume's own guide has a workaround — one plain single-column version to submit, the designed one to post — quoted in Finding 2. Note that the sentence carrying it says ensure and passes, stronger than the may and might these sites use elsewhere, though ensures turns up on MyPerfectResume's ATS page too, so it may be house style.
Read the hedges, and notice where they stop. Can confuse, might not pass, designed to be easily read — all quoted above, and none of them is will; LiveCareer's ensuring and Zety's ATS compliant are, and both are caveated above.
What this piece got wrong
Twenty-nine versions, each read by two AI reviewers: one checking against the sources, one forbidden from opening any. They are not two runs of the same check, so where a finding turned on one reviewer alone I re-ran that reviewer to see whether it reproduced.
- I quoted Monster accurately and never read the rest of the bullet. "Simple two-column layouts sometimes work with ATS" opens the second sentence of a bullet beginning "Two columns: A good option if you want to organize sections like skills, certifications, or contact details alongside your main experience." Draft after draft called Monster a site that warns you off two columns. Then, in the draft printing that correction, I misread the trailing clause of that same sentence and said the page gives no decision. It gives one: single-column resumes are the safest option. Same bullet, both ends, two different drafts — which is why no finding above rests on Monster's advice pages, though its counter and its About page appear as comparators in Findings 1 and 3.
- I called Zety's paragraph a flat self-contradiction, then over-corrected and threw the whole thing out. The first sentence is scoped to a curated roundup. The second isn't scoped at all, and I discarded it along with the first. It is Finding 6.
- I wrote that neither definition of ATS-friendly names a property. Three of the five tie it to one.
- I said LiveCareer's Don't-use item might mean newspaper columns, so the finding might dissolve. Its own gallery filter settles it.
- I described MyPerfectResume's two-column guide as sold on tips for making a two-column résumé ATS-friendly. That phrase is in the page's meta description; in the visible text it appears zero times.
- I said MyPerfectResume disclaims its ATS checker by name. The clause is category-level. Then I quoted that clause's scope sentence as though it were the disclaimer; the disclaiming words are three sentences further on.
- Smaller: I read "Avoiding… ensures" as saying columns are disqualifying — it's sufficiency, not necessity. I said the company owned six brands; it lists ten. I called an expired patent current. I said no footnotes appear on two pages that carry them. I counted six named qualifications where there are five, in a sentence listing them.
Three of those are one failure: the quoted words were right and the enclosing bullet or paragraph went unread — Monster's bullet, the definitions, and the Privacy Policy clause. One is its mirror image: words verbatim but nowhere in the rendered page. And two run the other way — having been burned on Zety and on the columns question, I discarded a sound sentence along with an unsound one, and declared a question unsettleable that my own source settled. The reflex that fixes over-claiming produces under-claiming, and it buries real findings just as effectively.
Two things about that record matter more than the items.
The over-claims all arrived at the confidence of the passages that were right.
The reviewers aren't reliable either. I ran one identical draft past two fresh source-checkers with identical instructions: they agreed on about half the findings, flatly contradicted each other on one, and disagreed on which problems were serious. So a finding has to appear in two independent runs before it gets acted on — one run is a hypothesis, not a defect.
The five sites were picked from BOLD's own brand disclosures — four from the logo grid on bold.com/about, ResumeBuilder.com from the acquisition timeline on the same page.
All live pages were read logged-out, in a US locale, from the hydrated page, on 26–27 August 2026 and re-read on 29 and 30 August. No prose changed across those readings. Two Trustpilot review counters moved, one by a single review and one by four; the rest of the drift was typographic. Every live reading is archived, and the source-checking reviewer works from that archive rather than the live web, so those checks are reproducible — except the two 1998 captures, which neither reviewer can currently check, and with the caveat that a capture catching a quoted sentence but not the paragraph around it would reproduce that gap forever. That happened repeatedly, which is why the current captures store whole sections.
Counts are the sites' own filter counters, operated by hand, and they are per-gallery listings. I have not added them: two galleries hold exactly 773 templates each and return different two-column counts, 355 and 386, so either the stock differs or the tagging does, and I can't tell which from outside.
Who did what: a language model ran the searches, read the page markup and drafted the text; I set the questions, operated the filters myself, and read every live source quoted here. As the error list shows, reading the sentence a quotation came from is not the same as reading the paragraph around it.
…/how-to/two-column-resume · myperfectresume.com/resume/templates · myperfectresume.com/about-us · myperfectresume.com/terms-conditions · myperfectresume.com/privacy-policy