What the system does with your file
It pulls the text out of your file and sorts it into fields: name, email, phone, each job with its dates, schools and skills. It keeps the file too. Recruiters search those fields, and on many systems the fields also fill in the application form for you.
About two in three jobs on our board sit on systems that read your resume into fields this way, including Workday, Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Lever and iCIMS. When the reading goes wrong, you retype everything by hand, or a recruiter searching for your skills never sees you.
Save it as a PDF or Word file, under 2.5 MB
Every system we checked takes both .pdf and .docx. Plain .txt is turned away by Lever, Workable, Pinpoint, Paylocity and Rippling, and Pinpoint won’t take the older .doc format.
Export the PDF from Word or Google Docs. A scanned page or a PDF made from a photo has no text in it, so there is nothing to read. BambooHR will accept an image file, but nothing in it can be searched.
Size limits run from 5 MB on Workable to 10 MB on Lever and Paylocity. The tighter number is Greenhouse’s: it attaches files up to 100 MB but doesn’t read resumes over 2.5 MB. A text-only resume is usually well under 1 MB. If yours is bigger, a photo or logo is the likely cause.
Use one column and keep text out of tables, headers and text boxes
Greenhouse lists what makes it fail to read a resume: multi-column layouts, tables, headers and footers, text boxes, graphics and photos, and contact details placed in a header or footer. Its help page is the clearest any vendor publishes, and the same layouts trip up most systems.
Here is why columns cause trouble. A simple reader goes straight across the page, so a left column of contact details and a right column of jobs come out as one jumbled line: “Contact Experience”, then “Email Senior Data Engineer”. On a system that fills in its form for you, those lines land in the wrong fields.
Type out your email, phone and LinkedIn
Write your email address, phone number and LinkedIn URL as plain text near the top of the page. An envelope icon that links to your email shows nothing to a system reading the text, and icon fonts often come out as boxes or blank characters.
Use the usual headings, written as normal words
Experience, Education and Skills are the headings these systems look for. “Where I’ve been” reads well to a person, but a system splitting your resume into sections may not find your jobs under it.
Don’t space out letters for style. Greenhouse names “E X P E R I E N C E” as something it can’t read, because each letter comes out as its own word.
Write job titles in full. Greenhouse gives “Sr. Account Exec” as an example of a title it can miss, and it finds employers more easily when the name includes Inc., LLC or Ltd.
Name the skills the posting names, if you have them
Recruiters search for specific tools and skills, so use the posting’s own words for the ones you have really used: “Power BI” if it says Power BI. Leave off anything you haven’t done. It will come up in the interview, and it costs more there than it gains in the search.
Check your resume before you apply
Add your resume to a free Wait, What Do You Do? profile and we show you what an applicant system reads from it: whether there is text at all, whether your contact details are written out, whether symbols come out as junk, and whether columns get merged. No AI reads the file for this check.
Every job page also names the hiring system the employer uses and what it does with a resume. Signed in, you can check your resume against that system and the skills the posting names. See what each hiring system does with your resume.