Is a Canva resume ATS-friendly? How to check yours

Canva makes it easy to put together a resume that looks good, so plenty of people apply with one. Then they read that “an ATS can’t read Canva resumes” and wonder whether they have to start over.

Usually you don’t. Whether a Canva resume parses depends on the design you chose and how you downloaded it. A Canva PDF normally contains real, selectable text, and an applicant tracking system can read that. Some design choices make the text come out in the wrong order, in pieces or not at all, and a five-minute test tells you whether your file has that problem.

What an ATS does with your resume

When you upload a resume to a company’s career portal, the applicant tracking system (ATS) first extracts the text, in the order the file stores it. Then it tries to split that text into fields: name, email, phone, job titles, employers, dates, education, skills. Recruiters later search and filter on those fields.

The parser doesn’t know that the grey strip on the left is a sidebar, or that a small phone icon means “phone number”. It works with characters and their order. If the order is clean, the fields come out right. If lines from two columns get merged, or your dates end up three paragraphs away from the job they belong to, the profile a recruiter opens may have missing jobs, broken dates or skills mixed into a job description, even though your PDF looks fine. Our ATS resume guide covers the whole process in more detail.

What Canva gets right

A standard Canva PDF stores text as text. You can usually open it, select a sentence and copy it, which is the first thing an ATS needs. Fonts are embedded, so the file looks the same on the recruiter’s screen as on yours. A simple, single-column Canva resume with plain headings can parse just as well as one made in Word or a resume builder.

The difficulty is that Canva is a free-form design tool. Every heading, paragraph, icon and line is a separate element you can drag anywhere on the page, and many resume templates are built to look striking: sidebars, timelines, rating bars, round photos. A person reading the page has no trouble with any of that. The file also has a reading order, though, and the Canva editor never shows it to you.

Design choices that confuse a parser

Design element	What an ATS may get	Fix in Canva
Two columns or a sidebar	Lines from both columns merged, so skills land inside a job description	Choose a single-column template, or move sidebar content below the main column
Several small text boxes per job	Title, company and dates in a jumbled order, dates separated from their job	Put each job in one text box: title, employer, dates, then bullets
Icons instead of words for contact details	A stray symbol or nothing at all	Write the email, phone and city as text; keep the icon beside it if you like
Skill bars, stars, dots or circles	The skill name with no level, or nothing	Write the level in words: “Excel, advanced”, “Spanish (B2)”
Headings with wide letter spacing or unusual wording	“S K I L L S” as single letters, or a section the parser doesn’t recognise	Normal spacing and standard words: Experience, Education, Skills
Curved text, text effects, text inside an image	Missing text or odd characters	Use a plain text element; keep effects for decoration
Contact details at the bottom of a sidebar or in a footer strip	Contact details found late or not at all	Name and contact details at the top of the page as plain text
Photo, shapes, background graphics	Skipped	Harmless, as long as no information lives only inside them

Columns and sidebars

Check this first if your template has a sidebar. Some parsers rebuild the page line by line from left to right. In a two-column layout, the first line of your sidebar and the first line of your experience then become one line, and so on down the page. Other parsers read each column as a block, which works fine. You can’t tell which kind you’ll meet, and the copy-paste test below shows how your file holds up.

Separate text boxes

In Canva it feels natural to use separate text boxes for the job title, the company, the dates and the bullets, then line them up by eye. The PDF may store these in the order you added or layered them, which isn’t necessarily the order you read them. Templates edited over several rounds are prone to this: the job you added last can appear first in the extracted text.

Icons and rating graphics

An envelope icon next to your email address is fine; an envelope icon instead of the address is invisible to software. Skill bars, stars and pie charts carry no text, so a parser sees “Photoshop” with nothing after it. Our guide to the resume skills section shows how to describe levels in words.

Headings

Parsers find sections by their titles. “Experience” and “Education” are recognised; “Where I’ve worked” and “My toolkit” make the parser guess. Canva templates also like headings with wide letter spacing. On screen that looks elegant. In the extracted text it can come out as “E X P E R I E N C E”, which no longer matches the word.

Text that turns into a picture

A few things remove the text layer from part or all of the page:

• downloading as PNG or JPG instead of PDF
• ticking Flatten PDF in the download options, which turns each page into a static image
• curved text and some text effects, which can come out as shapes
• text that is part of an uploaded image, such as a name inside a graphic you made elsewhere

The copy-paste test catches all of these: text that has become an image can’t be selected.

Photo and graphics

An ATS skips photos, shapes and background colours without breaking the rest of the file. Whether to include a photo depends on where you apply, which our guide to resume photos by country covers.

How to test your Canva resume

1. Download it the way you’ll send it. In Canva, choose Share, then Download, pick PDF Standard and leave Flatten PDF unticked.
2. Copy all the text. Open the PDF, press Ctrl + A (Cmd + A on a Mac), copy, and paste into a plain text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit.
3. Read the result from top to bottom. Does it start with your name? Are your email and phone there as text? Does each job appear with its own employer and dates, in order? Do the sidebar items stay together, or are they cut into the middle of a job description? Did any letters turn into boxes or question marks? The table after these steps tells you what each problem means.
4. Run it through the ATS checker. AlderCV’s ATS resume checker is free and needs no sign-up, and your file is read in your browser without being uploaded. It shows the text in the order a parser extracts it, gives a score and lists what to fix, such as columns mixed line by line, spaced-out headings or missing contact details.
5. Compare it with a job ad, if you like. Paste an ad into the resume keyword scanner to see which of its key terms your resume already uses and which are missing.

If the text comes out complete and in order, your Canva resume is readable and you don’t need to rebuild it.

Reading the copy-paste result

Here is the top of a two-column Canva resume after the copy-paste test, where the parser read across both columns:

Before: Maya Ortiz CONTACT

Marketing Coordinator maya.ortiz@example.com

Bright Lane Studio, Austin, TX 2022 – Present SKILLS Canva, Photoshop

And the same content after moving the sidebar below the main column:

After: Maya Ortiz

maya.ortiz@example.com · Austin, TX

Marketing Coordinator, Bright Lane Studio, Austin, TX, 2022 – Present

What you see in the pasted text	What it means	What to change
Sidebar words in the middle of job lines, as above	The parser reads straight across both columns	One column, or the sidebar moved below the main content
Your skills or languages appear before your name	The sidebar is stored first	Move the name and contact block so it is the first thing on the page; if that does not help, use one column
One job’s dates appear under a different job	Title, employer and dates are separate text boxes	Rebuild that job as a single text box
A whole section is missing	It is curved text, an effect, or part of an image	Retype it as a plain text element
“E X P E R I E N C E” or letters as boxes	Letter spacing or a font that does not extract cleanly	Normal spacing; try another font for that heading
No text at all	The file was flattened or downloaded as an image	Download again as PDF Standard, Flatten PDF unticked

When a Canva resume is fine

• Design and portfolio roles. For graphic design, illustration, branding or social media jobs, a visual resume is often expected and doubles as a work sample. These applications often go by email or alongside a portfolio link. Keep the text real all the same.
• Printed copies. At a career fair or an interview you hand a person a sheet of paper, and no parser is involved.
• Emailing a person directly. When the owner of a small business or a hiring manager asks you to email your resume, a person opens it and reads it.
• Any file that passed the test. If the copy-paste result is clean, upload it.

When to use a plain version

• Online application forms and large companies’ career portals. These run your file through an ATS and often prefill the form from it.
• Job boards that build a profile from your upload. The parsed profile is what recruiters search.
• When the ad asks for Word. A plain, single-column Word document is the safe choice there. Our guide on sending Word or PDF explains when each one fits and how to fill in application forms.

Many people keep two versions: the designed one for people and a plain single-column one for portals. Make the plain one from a copy of your design so the wording stays identical, and when you change a bullet, change it in both files the same day. Two versions that drift apart are how a recruiter ends up with different dates on your PDF and your application form.

Fixing it inside Canva

You don’t have to leave Canva to make your resume easier to parse:

1. Start from a single-column template, or rearrange yours so the main content runs from top to bottom. If you keep a sidebar, put only short items there, such as languages and a few skills, and check the order afterwards.
2. Use one text box per job: title, employer, location and dates on the first lines, bullets below. If one job keeps landing in the wrong place in the pasted text, delete its boxes and type it again as one box; that is usually quicker than hunting for the cause.
3. Write headings as plain words with normal letter spacing: Profile, Experience, Education, Skills, Languages.
4. Write your contact details as text at the top: email, phone, city and your LinkedIn address spelled out (linkedin.com/in/your-name).
5. Replace bars and stars with words (“Figma, advanced”), or leave the level out.
6. Remove effects from any text that carries information. Curved text and styled graphics can stay as decoration.
7. Download as PDF Standard, without flattening, and run the copy-paste test again.

A resume builder made for parsing

If fixing the layout by hand takes longer than writing the content, a resume builder can handle that part. In AlderCV, every template uses real text, standard headings and a logical reading order, and the text order of generated PDFs is tested automatically, so a two-column design still comes out in a sensible order. The free plan includes every template and unlimited PDF downloads with no watermark, for one resume and one cover letter. You can start without an account; downloading needs a free one. A Word (.docx) and a plain-text version of the same resume come with every plan, which helps with application forms. Have a look at the templates if you want to compare.

Common questions

Are Canva resumes bad?

No. A simple Canva resume can parse without trouble. Problems come from specific design choices, and you can test for them in a few minutes.

Should I download PDF Standard or PDF Print?

PDF Print is meant for printers: higher resolution, plus options for bleed and crop marks. For an online application, use PDF Standard. If you also want a printed copy, download a second file for that.

A template says “ATS-friendly”. Can I skip the test?

Test it anyway. Once you have edited a template, the order of its text depends on what you moved, added and deleted.

Before you send a Canva resume

• Downloaded as PDF Standard, with Flatten PDF unticked
• Copy-paste test: complete text, your name first, each job next to its own dates
• One column, or a sidebar whose text stays together
• Standard headings with normal letter spacing
• Email, phone, city and LinkedIn address written out as text at the top
• Skill levels in words; no bars or stars carrying information
• No information only inside images, icons or text effects
• A clear file name: First-Last-Resume.pdf
• A plain version ready for career portals and application forms