my friend got filtered out of 6 residency programs and we figured out why

she has a 262, multiple publications, strong LORs. heard nothing from 6 programs she was genuinely competitive for.

looked at her application and the formatting was doing her dirty. her board scores were in a sidebar — most systems skip sidebars entirely so they just disappeared. publications were in citation format which the parser reads as gibberish. she wrote "internal medicine rotation" everywhere but the postings all said "inpatient medicine" — same thing, zero match.

changed three things and she heard back from two of those same programs the following week.

has anyone else noticed certain specialties or programs being worse for this? feels like surgical specialties are particularly brutal but could just be selection bias on my end