I would suggest you don't. Bear with me for a minute.
Likely you have your CV in something like Word, what you want to do is:
- Open the CV in Word
- Export it from there into text
- Look at what happens to the formatting
Now, tweak and tidy the formatting in Word to get you a clean export that looks good.
The reason? Well there are 3:
- Many recruitment systems will rip out the info like this, both to parse and to present to hiring managers, you want to ensure that's right to pass auto screening
- You don't want the text version too different from the Word one, if the ATS gives a hiring manager both and they don't look to match, you may get dumped as the hiring manager doesn't have time to cross check.
- You don't want to have to update 2 docs when you put in new data/customise for an application etc.
So have one source to work on, just ensure it's clean when you export.
I used to have a CV I would use based on the one a consultancy company did when I worked for them, it looked nice but had tables within tables within tables, and most ATS parsers would reject without a human eye ever scanning my perfect match skills.
I extracted the text, cleaned up, pasted into a new Doc and applied some simple but clean formatting. Hey presto ATS systems passed.