How Manatal Reads Your Resume
Manatal is unusual in this registry for two reasons: it publishes its documentation as plain pages anyone can read without an account, and it wrote its own parser instead of licensing one of the three engines most of its competitors share. That second point matters more than it sounds, because it means nothing you learn about how other systems read a resume transfers here.
What Manatal accepts
Every line below links to the page it came from. Where Manatal does not publish a detail, this guide leaves it out rather than guessing.
Manatal does not publish a size limit for resume uploads.
Manatal (in-house) — Manatal describes the engine as its own parsing AI agent rather than naming a third-party vendor. Nothing you know about how a licensed engine behaves carries over, and Manatal is the only system here that shares its parser with nothing else.
Manatal documents that a resume is read the moment it is added to a profile, and that the extracted data builds the candidate record — name, contact details, location, languages, nationalities, full work history with dates, skills and education.
Manatal does not document a step where the applicant reviews what the parser understood. The correction happens on the recruiter's side, against the original file.
What ATSPrep exports, and whether Manatal takes it
This is computed at build time by comparing our export formats to Manatal's published list — not written by hand, so it cannot drift out of date.
| ATSPrep export | Accepted by Manatal |
|---|---|
| Yes | |
| DOCX | Yes |
What trips people up here
Four formats, and the list is genuinely short
PDF, DOC, DOCX and RTF. There is no plain text, no ODT and no HTML, so several of the fallbacks that work elsewhere in this registry have nowhere to go here. A resume that is already a PDF or a DOCX has nothing to worry about; anything else needs converting before it will be taken at all.
Source: Manatal Documentation — resumes data importThe parser is Manatal's own, and shared with nothing
Most applicant tracking systems license their parsing, which is why behaviour clusters — fix a resume for one product on a given engine and you have fixed it for every other product on that engine. Manatal built its own, so it sits outside every one of those clusters. It is the one system here where a fix cannot be reasoned about from a neighbour.
Source: Manatal Documentation — AI resume parsingRecruiters can open the file you actually sent
Manatal keeps what it calls the original resume — the unaltered file exactly as uploaded — and gives recruiters a button to open it alongside the parsed profile. Layout is therefore not purely a parsing concern here: a design that reads badly as extracted text can still be judged as a document, and a design that looks impressive can still fail to populate the fields the recruiter searches on.
Source: Manatal Documentation — view original resumesNo published size limit
Manatal's documentation does not state a maximum file size for a resume anywhere we could find. That is recorded here as an absence rather than as permission — an undocumented limit is not the same as no limit, and the sensible assumption is still the conservative one.
The resume field is on the form by default
Manatal's career page application forms ship with full name, resume, cover letter, phone and email already present. The resume is not an optional extra an employer has to add, which means the parsed profile is the default route into the database rather than a supplement to a form you filled in by hand.
Source: Manatal Documentation — advanced career page application formsFormatting for Manatal
Send a PDF or a DOCX
Both are on the accepted list and both are formats you can check the text layer of before sending. RTF is accepted too, but it buys nothing a DOCX does not already give you.
Do not plan a plain-text fallback
TXT is absent from every accepted list Manatal publishes. If a submission is failing, converting down to plain text is the one move that cannot help.
Write for extraction, then look at it as a document
Because recruiters can open the original file, both readings happen. The text has to survive the parser and the page has to hold up to a human — neither one on its own is enough here.
Put dates and employers where a parser expects them
Manatal lists job title, employer, start and end dates among the fields it extracts into structured history. A layout that hides any of those in a sidebar or a header is removing a field the recruiter later filters on.
Read your resume back the way Manatal will.
Guidance is worth less than evidence. Open the studio, export a PDF, 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. Free, no account, and your file is never uploaded.
Open the Studio →Manatal and your resume
What file formats does Manatal accept for a resume?
PDF, DOC, DOCX and RTF. Manatal states this in its documentation for resume imports. Plain text, ODT and HTML are not on the list.
Does Manatal parse resumes automatically?
Yes. Manatal documents that its parsing agent reads a resume the moment it is added to a profile and builds a structured candidate record from it, including contact details, work history with dates, skills and education.
Which parser does Manatal use?
Its own. Manatal describes the engine as its own parsing AI agent and does not name a third-party vendor, which makes it the only system in this guide whose behaviour cannot be inferred from another product sharing the same engine.
What is the file size limit for a Manatal resume?
Manatal does not publish one. This guide records that as an unknown rather than filling it with a number from somewhere else — but an undocumented limit is not the same as no limit, so a lean text-based file is still the safer choice.
Do recruiters see my original resume or just the parsed text?
Both. Manatal keeps the unaltered file as uploaded and gives recruiters an action to open it next to the parsed profile, so your layout is seen as well as your extracted text.
How the rest of them read a resume
Greenhouse
Greenhouse takes PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF and TXT, and will not parse a resume larger than 2.5 MB. Its own support docs name what makes a parse fail — columns, contact details in a header, abbreviated job titles and more.
Oracle Taleo
Oracle 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.
SmartRecruiters
SmartRecruiters 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.
Ashby
Ashby 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.
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