How Greenhouse reads your resume
Greenhouse is unusual among applicant tracking systems: it publishes a specific list of what makes a resume fail to parse. Most guidance on this subject is guesswork passed between blogs, so a page you can check your file against, in the vendor's own words, is worth more than any of it.
Greenhouse is a trademark of its owner. ATSPrep isn't affiliated with it.
Will Greenhouse read your file?
1.5 MB is well inside the published 2.5 MB limit.
- Made by
- Greenhouse Software
- Parser
- Not published
- Accepts
- PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, TXT
- ATSPrep exports
- PDF accepted, DOCX accepted
What Greenhouse pulls out, and what gets lost.
Your file goes in, Greenhouse fills the fields it recognises, and the line underneath types what its own documentation says goes missing on the way.
What Greenhouse accepts, with sources.
Every line below links to the page it came from. Where Greenhouse does not publish a detail, this guide leaves it out rather than guessing.
Accepted file types
Size limits
Uploads accepted up to 100 MB.
Parsing stops above 2.5 MB. That is the number that decides whether your resume is read. A larger file uploads without complaint and is not parsed.
Form autofill
Greenhouse scans an uploaded resume and auto-fills the fields it recognises when a candidate or prospect is added, confirming when it succeeds and showing an error when it does not.
When a parse fails, the documented fallback is for the recruiter to enter the details by hand. A failed parse is a worse first impression, not an automatic rejection.
What ATSPrep exports, and whether Greenhouse takes it
This is computed at build time by comparing our export formats to Greenhouse's published list. It is not written by hand, so it cannot drift out of date.
- PDFATSPrep exportAccepted by Greenhouse
- DOCXATSPrep exportAccepted by Greenhouse
Greenhouse takes both, so the choice is yours. PDF or DOCX: a simple rule for picking
What trips people up on Greenhouse
The upload limit and the parsing limit are different numbers
Greenhouse will accept a file far larger than it will read. The support documentation states plainly that it cannot parse resumes larger than 2.5 MB, while the upload itself allows much more. A heavy, image-rich export can therefore go through without a single warning and still arrive as an empty record.
Source: Greenhouse Support, unsuccessful resume parse · checked Jul 30, 2026Contact details in a header, footer or text box
Greenhouse lists name and contact information placed in the header, footer or a text box as a direct cause of an unsuccessful parse. This is the single most common way a resume that looks immaculate produces a record with no email address on it.
Source: Greenhouse Support, unsuccessful resume parse · checked Jul 30, 2026Columns and tables
A columned layout and complex layouts using tables both appear on the official list of parse failure causes. Two columns look organised to a person and interleave into nonsense for an extractor reading the page in a single pass.
Source: Greenhouse Support, unsuccessful resume parse · checked Jul 30, 2026Abbreviated job titles
Greenhouse specifically names shortened titles (“Sr. Account Exec” instead of “Senior Account Executive”) as something that trips the parser. Abbreviation costs you nothing to undo and is one of the few fixes the vendor asks for by name.
Source: Greenhouse Support, unsuccessful resume parse · checked Jul 30, 2026Company names without an identifier
The list calls out company names that lack an identifier such as Inc., Co., Ltd or LLC. The suffix is one of the signals used to recognise that a line is an employer rather than a project or a client.
Source: Greenhouse Support, unsuccessful resume parse · checked Jul 30, 2026Letter-spaced words
Spaces inserted between individual letters (a common way to stretch a section heading across a page) are listed as a parse failure cause. The extractor sees separate characters, not a word.
Source: Greenhouse Support, unsuccessful resume parse · checked Jul 30, 2026Graphics, photos and word art
Greenhouse names graphics, photos and word art, and separately calls out resumes uploaded as an image rather than a document. Anything where the text is painted rather than written has nothing for a parser to recover.
Source: Greenhouse Support, unsuccessful resume parse · checked Jul 30, 2026Parsing covers 28 languages
Greenhouse publishes the list of languages it can parse, which runs to 28 and includes Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. A resume outside that set may still be readable by a person but will not populate fields.
Source: Greenhouse Support, resume parsing languages · checked Jul 30, 2026
Formatting for Greenhouse
Go through your file before you apply and tick each one off. Your ticks stay in this browser, so the list is still here for the next Greenhouse job.
This is the number that decides whether you are parsed, and it is not the number on the upload button. Plain text-based exports land far below it; anything approaching the limit usually means embedded images.
Name, email and phone belong in the first lines of the page itself, not in a header, footer or text box. This is the correction Greenhouse asks for most explicitly.
Let the document read top to bottom in one pass. If you would need to explain the reading order to a person, an extractor has no chance of guessing it.
Write “Senior Account Executive”, not “Sr. Account Exec”. Greenhouse names this one directly, and full titles also match what a recruiter types into a search.
Include the Inc., Ltd, LLC or Co. that belongs to the legal name. It costs a few characters and it is on the vendor's own list.
Skip letter-spacing as a design device. If you want a heading to feel wider, change the size or the weight rather than putting spaces inside the word.
All six checked. Good luck with this one.
Once it's sent, add the job to your tracker. You'll know which version went where, and when a follow-up is fair.
Read your resume back before Greenhouse does.
Guidance is worth less than evidence. Export a PDF from the Studio and the X-Ray re-opens that exact file and shows you the text a parser recovers from it, in reading order, with anything it dropped marked.
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Greenhouse and your resume
- What is Greenhouse?
- Greenhouse is an applicant tracking system that employers use to post jobs, collect applications and run structured interviews. If a job application page sits on boards.greenhouse.io or job-boards.greenhouse.io, the employer uses Greenhouse, and your resume goes through the parsing described on this page.
- Does Greenhouse read PDF resumes?
- Yes. PDF is on its accepted list. As long as the PDF holds real text rather than a scanned image, and stays under the 2.5 MB parsing limit, Greenhouse can extract it.
- What file types does Greenhouse accept for a resume?
- PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF and TXT. Greenhouse publishes this list in its support documentation, and it covers both the candidate-facing application and resumes added by a recruiter.
- Why did my resume fail to parse in Greenhouse?
- Greenhouse names the causes directly: a file over 2.5 MB, graphics, photos or word art, a resume uploaded as an image, complex layouts using tables, headers or footers, contact details placed in a header, footer or text box, a columned layout, no clear sections, company names without an identifier such as Inc. or Ltd, abbreviated job titles, and spaces placed between individual letters.
- How large can a resume be in Greenhouse?
- The upload accepts files far larger than the parser reads. Greenhouse states it cannot parse resumes larger than 2.5 MB, so that is the limit that matters. A file above it can upload successfully and still produce no extracted data.
- Does a failed parse mean Greenhouse rejected my application?
- No. The documented response to a failed parse is that the details get entered manually instead. The parse determines how complete and searchable your record is, not whether your application survives.
- Does Greenhouse parse resumes in languages other than English?
- Yes, in 28 languages including Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Greenhouse publishes the full list.
How the rest of them read a resume
- Oracle TaleoOracle ships Taleo with a 1 MB default attachment limit and no resume parser of its own. Parsing only works if the employer has enabled a third-party partner integration, so behaviour differs from one Taleo site to the next.8 file types · Varies by employer
- SmartRecruitersSmartRecruiters accepts PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, JPG and PNG at 2 MB per file, and its CEO named Textkernel as the parsing engine, whose own documentation warns about PDFs more bluntly than any resume blog does.6 file types · Textkernel
- AshbyAshby accepts PDF, DOC and DOCX up to 50 MB but does not support Markdown. Its docs name the two reasons a resume fails to parse, and its better parser is an opt-in feature some employers never switch on.3 file types
- WorkableWorkable accepts PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, HTML and ODT for a resume, with a 5 MB ceiling, while other attachments on the same form are allowed four times that size.6 file types
Start from an example that Greenhouse can read.
Each one is a single-column document, scored by the same checks the Studio runs.