ATS has constrained resumes so much they may as well be XML.
For the past 25 years this site has generated resumes on the fly from a database and for the most part it worked. I used to use Microsoft Access to maintain it, it was easy and had a spell-checker.
At any rate I had a highly detailed resume format that seemed to work, it was designed to be printed which is what you did back then.
Now, we have ATS systems that read resumes and extract the data from them automatically. This basically nuked my original resume because it was not 'ATS Friendly', it was however Human friendly. I tried making it look more professional and instantly it was not 100% "parseable" by many sites, Claude and ChatGPT also pointed out parsing errors.
Nothing besides maybe a horizontal rule seems to be allowed.
Anyway, I finally decided to create code to emit a new XML (Word OpenXML) resume that is ATS friendly. It seems so bland. But hey, its what was necessary. On my resume download page, I thought I would offer, text, the original format and the new ATS format. That was not a good idea. People got confused. Sigh.
Text Resume: Gone. Detail Resume: Gone. All that is left is the ATS resume now so AI can read it.
Times change. I'm cool with it.
Is PDF permissible? LOL..