Software reads your résumé before a person does.

No. It's a searchable filing cabinet, not a bouncer. Nothing in there is deciding you're out. What actually happens when a résumé parses badly is quieter, you don't come up when the recruiter searches. Some systems auto-filter on screening questions, but those are answers you typed, not opinions about your layout.

Not for anything going through a portal. The parser guesses your reading order from the layout and two columns can shuffle your job titles into your skills list, or skip a sidebar entirely. You'd never know it happened. Keep a one-column version for applications, and use the nice one when you email a human.

Leave them out. Tables, text boxes and rating bars are the worst things you can hand a parser, and four-out-of-five stars in Python tells nobody anything. A comma-separated list under the heading Skills works every time.

Use their word, not their sentence. Recruiters search by term, so if the ad says Kubernetes, write Kubernetes rather than K8s. But lifting whole phrases is obvious to the person reading it next, and listing a skill you can't discuss for two minutes will cost you more than it wins.

Whatever they asked for. If they didn't say, PDF, your layout survives and the systems read it fine. The only PDF that fails is one with no text in it, like a scan. Try selecting the words in your own file; if you can't, nothing else can either.

One starting out, two when you've genuinely got two pages of relevant work. Nothing penalises the second page. Just remember the first read is about ten seconds, so page two should earn its place rather than fill space.