Plain Text Resume Format: When and How to Use It

Use a plain text resume when a job board or employer portal asks you to paste your resume into a text box, or when a company explicitly requests a .txt file (USAJOBS still does). Strip out every font, bullet symbol, bold, and table, then paste the raw text into the box or save it as a .txt file, and you're done.

A plain text resume is the ugly cousin nobody designs on purpose. It has no bullets, no bold, no columns, no tabs that hold their position. It's the version your resume becomes the moment someone copies it into a web form, and it's worth having one ready instead of letting the form mangle your real resume on the spot.

When do you actually need one?

Three situations, roughly in order of how often they come up:

• Paste-into-a-box applications. Older or simpler application portals (some government sites, some smaller company career pages) show you a big empty text field and say "paste your resume here." Whatever formatting you paste in gets flattened, so you may as well control how it flattens.
• Explicit .txt upload requests. USAJOBS and a handful of federal and municipal systems in the US still list .txt as an accepted upload format alongside PDF and Word, mostly because their parsers were built a long time ago and never got rebuilt.
• Emailing a resume in the body of a message. A recruiter who asks you to "just paste it in the email, no attachment" wants plain text they can read on a phone without downloading anything.

Outside those three cases, don't bother. If a portal lets you upload a .docx or a PDF, upload that. A well-built, single-column resume already passes through almost every modern applicant tracking system without needing a separate plain text copy; see our guide to how ATS software actually reads resumes for what the parser is doing behind the scenes.

How do you convert a formatted resume into plain text?

Open your resume, select all the text, copy it, and paste it into Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit switched to plain text mode (Mac, under Format > Make Plain Text). Everything decorative disappears: bold, italics, bullet glyphs, tables, tab alignment, your two-column layout if you had one. What's left is raw characters and line breaks. Now you repair it by hand, because the paste alone usually leaves gaps, runs words together, or drops your section breaks.

Three fixes to make every time:

• Replace bullet symbols with a hyphen or asterisk. A • or ✓ character sometimes survives the paste and sometimes turns into a box or question mark depending on the system's character encoding. A plain hyphen never breaks.
• Turn section headings into ALL CAPS. Without bold or font size to signal "this is a heading," capitalization is the only visual cue left. WORK EXPERIENCE reads as a heading; Work Experience in regular case can get lost in a wall of text.
• Re-add blank lines between sections. Pasting often collapses double line breaks into single ones. Go through and add a blank line before each new section so the whole thing isn't one dense block.

What should a plain text resume look like?

Here's a short example of how a work experience entry converts:

❌ Pasted straight from Word with no cleanup: "Marketing CoordinatorNovaGoods Inc.Managed social campaigns→grew engagement 30%Led email program"

✅ Cleaned up plain text version:

MARKETING COORDINATOR, NovaGoods Inc.
June 2022 - Present

- Managed paid and organic social campaigns across Instagram and LinkedIn, growing engagement 30% over 12 months
- Led the monthly email program, lifting open rates from 18% to 26%

Same information, but a parser (or a recruiter's eyes, in a plain text field) can tell where one job ends and the credential starts. Keep line length to around 65 characters so nothing wraps awkwardly in a narrow text box, and don't use tabs to align anything; tabs render inconsistently across systems, so a space or a pipe character (|) is safer for separating things like city and dates on one line.

Does a plain text resume need a different structure?

No. Same sections, same order, same content: contact info, summary, work experience, education, skills. What changes is only the visual presentation, not the substance. If you've already written strong, quantified bullet points for your formatted resume, you're just reformatting them here, not rewriting them.

One thing to drop: your phone number and email shouldn't sit in a header or footer, because those elements frequently get stripped or scrambled during the plain text conversion. Put contact details as the first lines of the body instead.

Should you keep a plain text version on hand permanently?

Yes, as a backup file, not your main resume. Save it once, next to your .docx and PDF versions, and update it whenever you update the others. It takes ten minutes and means you're never caught scrambling to reformat on the fly when a portal surprises you with a paste-only field at 11pm the night before a deadline.

Pro tip: before submitting any resume anywhere, run the copy-paste test. Select all the text in your PDF or Word file, paste it into a blank Notepad window, and read it top to bottom. If names, dates, and bullets come out in a sensible order, your main resume is ATS-safe and you likely won't need the plain text version at all for that application.

What's the difference between plain text and a basic ATS-friendly resume?

An ATS-friendly resume (single column, standard fonts, no tables) is still a designed document meant to be read as a PDF or .docx by both software and a human. A plain text resume has no design at all; it exists purely as raw characters for a text field or a .txt upload. You want the first one for 95% of applications and the second one only when the system gives you no other choice. Our guide to ATS-safe resume formatting covers how to build that everyday version so you rarely need to think about plain text at all.

ResumeHero builds your resume as a clean, single-column document by default, so copying it into a text box or converting it to .txt takes minutes instead of a rewrite. Build your resume free with ResumeHero and keep a backup plain text copy ready for the portals that still ask for one.