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Greenhouse and Lever Resume Tips: What Their Own Help Docs Say About Parsing

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Greenhouse and Lever are common at startups and tech companies. If you apply through a page on boards.greenhouse.io or jobs.lever.co, that's what you're using. The main job of both systems is to parse your resume into a profile that recruiters then search and filter.

So the question is whether your resume parses cleanly. Greenhouse's own help center answers that in unusual detail.

What Greenhouse says breaks resume parsing

Greenhouse has a support article called "Unsuccessful resume parse" (updated March 2026). It lists these formatting problems:

  • "Resumes that include graphics, photos, or word art"
  • "Resumes that are uploaded as an image, rather than a document (such as a .docx or .pdf)"
  • "Complex resumes with tables, headers, and footers"
  • "Resumes with the name and contact information in the header, footer, or text box"
  • "Resumes that have a columned layout"
  • "A resume with spaces between the letters."

The same article mentions resumes without clear sections, inconsistent formatting between sections, and abbreviated job titles such as "Sr. Account Exec". It also says Greenhouse "can't parse resumes larger than 2.5MB".

Most of that list matches what we found when we tested one resume in 7 layouts: two-column designs built from tables and resumes made of floating text boxes came out in the wrong order. Two items deserve extra attention.

Contact details in the header

Many templates put your name, email and phone in the page header. Greenhouse names this as a parsing problem. If the parser misses it, your profile can end up without an email, and the recruiter has to dig through the attached file to contact you. Move contact details into the body of the page, right under your name.

Spaces between letters

"A resume with spaces between the letters" sounds odd until you look at design templates. Wide letter spacing on headings and names is a common style in tools like Canva, and in some exports the letters can come out separated: "A L E X M O R G A N". A parser can't match that to a name or a section heading. More in Is a Canva resume ATS friendly?

File formats and size

Greenhouse's article on supported formats lists .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf and .txt, with uploads up to 100 MB. But parsing has a much lower limit: the 2.5 MB mentioned above. A resume with a large embedded photo or high-resolution graphics can upload fine and still not parse.

Keep the file small and text-based. A one or two page resume without images is usually well under 1 MB.

How Lever recruiters find you

Lever's help center describes search in a way that explains why the wording on your resume matters:

  • The search bar looks at candidate names and the parsed text attached to profiles, including resumes, notes and feedback.
  • A "Resume" filter limits matches to text parsed from the resume itself.
  • Recruiters can search work history titles parsed from resumes, and combine terms with AND, OR and NOT.
  • Advanced search can filter by companies parsed from resumes, and by years of experience calculated from the dates on your resume.

Three practical consequences:

  1. Titles are searchable fields. If a recruiter searches for "product manager" in titles and yours says "PM, Growth", you may not appear. Write titles in full.
  2. Dates feed a years-of-experience filter. Use a consistent date format for every role ("Mar 2021 to Present"), so the dates parse and your experience is counted.
  3. Keywords need to be in the resume text. A skill that appears only in a design element, an icon or an image isn't searchable.

What this means for your resume

For both systems, the safe format is the same:

  • One column, sections in reading order
  • Name and contact details in the body, not the header
  • Standard headings: Experience, Education, Skills
  • Full job titles, written out: "Senior Account Executive", not "Sr. AE"
  • One date format for every job, with month and year
  • No text boxes, tables for layout, icons instead of labels, or letter-spaced headings
  • A text-based PDF or DOCX, under 2.5 MB

Check before you apply

Upload your resume to our free ATS resume checker and open What the ATS sees. It shows the text extracted from your file in order. If your name, email or job titles are missing or out of place there, a Greenhouse or Lever parser is likely to have the same trouble.

Then paste the job description. Keywords from the job shows which terms from the posting your resume is missing, the terms a recruiter is likely to search for. No account needed.

Quick answers

Does Greenhouse read PDF resumes?
Yes. Greenhouse accepts .pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf and .txt. Its help center says files over 2.5 MB can't be parsed, and layouts with columns, tables or text boxes cause problems.

Does Greenhouse reject resumes automatically?
Greenhouse parses and stores applications. Automatic rejections usually come from screening questions the employer sets up, not from the parser. See Why is my resume getting rejected?

How do recruiters search in Lever?
By keywords across parsed resume text and notes, and by fields such as job titles, companies and years of experience, all parsed from your resume.

Should I put my contact details in the header?
No. Greenhouse lists contact details in the header, footer or a text box as a cause of failed parsing. Put them in the main body.

Is a two-column resume OK for Greenhouse?
Greenhouse lists columned layouts as a parsing problem. A one-column resume is the safer choice.

Before your next application, see what an ATS reads in your resume. It's free and takes a few seconds.

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