Most resume import issues trace back to the source file's layout, not to your content — and each failure pattern has a recognizable signature and a specific fix. This guide covers the five problems we see most, in rough order of frequency, then walks the repair workflow inside the editor and the source-file tweaks that make a clean re-import possible. If you haven't run an import yet, start with the import guide; this page is for when the review screen shows you something wrong.
The five most common problems, ranked
- Garbled or missing text — the parse came back with strange characters, fragments, or nearly nothing.
- Sections in the wrong place — your skills ended up in a summary, your projects vanished, or content landed under the wrong heading.
- Merged or split jobs — two roles fused into one entry, or one role split into two.
- Wrong or missing dates — roles imported without dates, or with dates attached to the wrong job.
- Contact field mix-ups — name, headline, and location shuffled or concatenated.
Workplacea helps you catch all five before anything is saved: the review screen ("Check what we found") shows the raw extracted text under "From your file" beside the structured result under "What we extracted", and flags anything suspicious under "Double-check these before you continue". The diagnosis below tells you which repair route to take from there.
Garbled or missing text: image PDFs and exotic fonts
The signature. The "From your file" panel is empty, near-empty, or full of nonsense characters — which means the failure happened at text extraction, before any interpretation began.
The usual cause. An image-based PDF: a scan, a photo, or a screenshot saved as PDF. These contain a picture of your resume and no text layer at all. Run the definitive test on the original file — open it and try to select text with your cursor. Can't select? There's nothing to extract, for us or for any applicant tracking system. The runner-up cause is a decorative font with broken character encoding, which extracts as symbol soup even though the text technically exists.
The fix. Recreate a text-based file. If you have the original document (Word, Google Docs), export a fresh PDF from it. If the scan is all you have, it's faster to choose "Start from scratch" and retype than to fight OCR — and the retyped version will serve you better everywhere, since image PDFs fail at real employers too, as PDF or Word resume explains.
Sections in the wrong place: creative headings and columns
The signature. Content exists but landed oddly — skills parsed as prose, a "Projects" section absorbed into a job, or a sidebar's contents interleaved randomly through everything else.
The usual cause. Two design choices. Creative section headings ("Where I've Made an Impact" instead of "Experience") deprive the parser of its landmarks. And multi-column layouts store text in an order that doesn't match reading order — extraction walks the file's internal sequence, so sidebar content splices into the main flow at arbitrary points. The mechanics are laid out in how resume parsing works.
The fix. For mild cases, repair in the editor: move bullets to the right sections, rebuild the skills list, delete the noise. For a spliced multi-column parse, prevention beats surgery — flatten the source to one column with standard headings (Experience, Education, Skills), re-export, and re-import. Once your content lives in Workplacea, this problem is permanently behind you: all four templates are single-column with standard headings by design.
Merged or split jobs: how date detection goes wrong
The signature. On the review screen, one experience entry carries two companies' worth of bullets — or a single role appears twice with the bullets divided between them.
The usual cause. Role boundaries are inferred largely from the title-company-dates pattern repeating. Unconventional date placement (dates in a side margin, on their own distant line, or omitted for older roles) breaks the rhythm: a missing boundary merges two jobs, a phantom boundary splits one.
The fix. This one is usually quickest to repair in the editor rather than re-import: create the missing role entry, move each bullet to its correct home, and fill in the date fields. Bullets are the valuable cargo — they almost always extract correctly as text even when the entry structure around them is wrong, so repair means re-sorting, not re-typing.
Wrong dates and shuffled contact fields
Dates. Check every role's start and end on the review screen, and confirm your current role shows "Present". Ambiguous source formats ("Summer 2021", "2019–present" written in prose) may arrive empty rather than wrong — the parser prefers leaving a field blank over guessing. Blank dates also cost you score points later, so the score drawer's Format checks will remind you if you miss one.
Contact. Name, headline, email, phone, and location are all editable directly on the review screen — fix them right there before accepting. Decorative headers that mix contact details with taglines are the usual culprit.
The manual-fix workflow inside the editor
When you accept an imperfect import ("Looks right — open in editor" — accept-then-repair is often the right call even when it's not entirely right), work in this order:
- Structure first. Create or delete experience entries until the role list matches reality; move bullets to their correct roles.
- Dates second. Fill every start and end; mark your current role.
- Fields third. Verify contact details, then rebuild the skills groups if they came through flat.
- Let the score audit you. Open the score drawer — Completeness and Format checks will name anything you missed, like "Dates missing on 1 role", with links to the spot.
- Content last. Only now use Rewrite to improve bullets — polishing text that's sitting under the wrong job wastes the effort.
Prevention: source-file tweaks for a clean re-import
If you'd rather fix the source and re-import, the high-yield changes are: one column, standard section headings, dates on the same line as (or directly beside) each role, no text boxes or tables, no header/footer content that matters, and export to PDF from the original editor rather than scanning anything. Then "Discard" the bad parse and run the import again — since files are parsed once and never stored, re-importing is always a fresh start.
When to skip import and rebuild
The ten-minute decision rule: on the review screen, count what's broken. One merged job and a few dates — accept and repair, you'll be done in ten minutes. Whole sections missing, text garbled, or three-plus structural problems — "Discard", choose "Start from scratch", and retype with the old resume open in another window. Retyping is dull but bounded (20–30 minutes); untangling a truly bad parse is neither. And you only pay this cost once — from then on, Workplacea is the source of truth and exports are clean by construction.
Frequently asked questions
The import failed with an error before the review screen. What now?
Check the two hard limits first: PDF or .docx only, 5 MB max. Oversized files usually mean embedded photos or scans — re-export without them. If the file passes both and it still fails, it may be malformed; re-exporting a fresh PDF from the original document fixes most cases.
Will re-importing the same file give the same result?
Substantially, yes — the same layout produces the same extraction problems. Re-import after you've changed the source file, not as a retry button.
My bullets imported fine but every one sits under the wrong job. Fastest fix?
Repair in the editor. Moving bullets between roles is quick, and it preserves the text extraction that already worked. Re-importing risks re-rolling structure problems without touching the cause.
Can I import from LinkedIn?
Use LinkedIn's "Save to PDF" on your profile, then upload that PDF normally. Expect moderate cleanup — LinkedIn's export has its own formatting quirks — and treat the result as a draft to repair with the workflow above.
Still stuck on a stubborn file
Run the repair workflow in the editor first — structure, dates, fields, score — and most imports come right in one sitting. For a file that defeats both import and repair, email contact@workplacea.com describing what the review screen showed, and we'll figure out what the parser choked on.