Canva is excellent for design work, but its resume templates present significant ATS challenges. Our testing of 50 popular Canva resume templates revealed that 72% failed basic ATS parsing tests — meaning critical information like job titles, skills, and even the candidate's name was incorrectly extracted or entirely missed by ATS systems.
Why Canva resumes fail ATS: Canva creates PDFs using its own rendering engine, which often embeds text as graphic elements or within complex layered structures. Specific issues include: text boxes that ATS can't read, multi-column layouts that jumble content order, decorative elements that interfere with text extraction, non-standard fonts that render as images, and complex layering that confuses parsing algorithms.
The real-world impact: A candidate applied to 50 jobs using a Canva resume and received zero callbacks. After switching to an ATS-optimized template with identical content, they received 8 interview calls in two weeks. This is a common pattern we see among Indian job seekers who prioritize design over functionality.
When Canva is acceptable: Creative roles (graphic designer, UI/UX designer, content creator) where visual design demonstrates job skills, small companies or startups that review resumes manually without ATS, direct email submissions where you know a human will open the file, and networking situations where you hand someone a resume in person. For all other cases — corporate applications, job portals, online submissions — use a dedicated ATS-friendly resume builder.