How SmartRecruiters reads your resume
SmartRecruiters is one of the few applicant tracking systems whose parsing engine is a matter of public record: its chief executive named Textkernel in an interview. That is unusually useful, because Textkernel publishes detailed developer documentation about what its parser does and does not handle, far more than SmartRecruiters says itself.
SmartRecruiters is a trademark of its owner. ATSPrep isn't affiliated with it.
Will SmartRecruiters read your file?
1.5 MB is well inside the published 2 MB limit.
- Made by
- SmartRecruiters
- Parser
- Textkernel
- Accepts
- PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, JPG, PNG
- ATSPrep exports
- PDF accepted, DOCX accepted
What SmartRecruiters pulls out, and what gets lost.
Your file goes in, SmartRecruiters fills the fields it recognises, and the line underneath types what its own documentation says goes missing on the way.
What SmartRecruiters accepts, with sources.
Every line below links to the page it came from. Where SmartRecruiters does not publish a detail, this guide leaves it out rather than guessing.
Accepted file types
Size limits
Uploads accepted up to 2 MB.
Parsing engine
Textkernel. Named publicly by SmartRecruiters' chief executive, who described roughly 98% parsing accuracy across application types after adopting it.
What ATSPrep exports, and whether SmartRecruiters takes it
This is computed at build time by comparing our export formats to SmartRecruiters's published list. It is not written by hand, so it cannot drift out of date.
- PDFATSPrep exportAccepted by SmartRecruiters
- DOCXATSPrep exportAccepted by SmartRecruiters
SmartRecruiters takes both, so the choice is yours. PDF or DOCX: a simple rule for picking
What trips people up on SmartRecruiters
2 MB is a tight ceiling
SmartRecruiters' application endpoint documents a limit of 2 MB per file, among the lowest of any major system. A resume with an embedded photograph or a design-tool export will clear that limit easily, and a plain text-based export will not come close to it.
Source: SmartRecruiters Developers, posting an application · checked Oct 25, 2026The parser's own authors are wary of PDF
Textkernel's documentation says that to minimise conversion problems you should not use PDF documents, on the grounds that most of their bad-parse reports come from corrupt PDFs, and that PDF often hides issues with the underlying text. That is a warning about how the file was produced rather than about the format itself: a PDF generated as clean linear text is fine, and the only way to know which one you have is to extract the text back out and look.
Source: Textkernel Developers, resume parser, getting started · checked Jul 30, 2026Design-led resumes are a named failure mode
Textkernel calls out artists and graphic designers specifically (resumes using images instead of text, and diagonal or vertical text), along with the very long CVs common in academia and medicine. If your field encourages a visually distinctive resume, this is the engine most likely to punish it.
Source: Textkernel Developers, resume parser, getting started · checked Jul 30, 2026The parser's language list runs to 29
Textkernel publishes the languages its CV parser supports: 29 of them, including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. It adds that support varies by data centre region: all languages in its NL, DE and US regions, English and Japanese in Japan, English and Chinese in Australia. This is the parsing vendor's list; SmartRecruiters itself publishes none.
Source: Textkernel Developers, supported languages · checked Oct 25, 2026Images are accepted, which is not the same as read
JPG and PNG appear on the accepted list. Textkernel supports image formats only with an optional OCR add-on, so an image resume may be stored without its text ever being recovered. Accepting a file and understanding it are different things.
Source: Textkernel Developers, supported file formats · checked Oct 25, 2026
Formatting for SmartRecruiters
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 SmartRecruiters job.
This is the tightest limit among the major systems. Strip embedded images and avoid design-tool exports, which carry large font and graphic payloads for no benefit to a reader.
The upload will take a JPG or PNG. The parser needs an OCR add-on to make anything of it, and you have no way of knowing whether the employer pays for one.
Textkernel's objection is to PDFs that hide broken text, not to the format. Export the file, extract the text back out, and confirm it reads in order before you send it.
Diagonal text, vertical text and image-based headings are named directly. Whatever the visual convention in your field, the parsed record is what gets searched.
All four 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 SmartRecruiters 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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SmartRecruiters and your resume
- What is SmartRecruiters?
- SmartRecruiters is an applicant tracking system that employers use to post jobs and collect applications. Job pages on jobs.smartrecruiters.com belong to employers that use it, and the resumes sent through them are parsed by Textkernel.
- What file types does SmartRecruiters accept?
- PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, JPG and PNG, with a documented limit of 2 MB per file on its application endpoint. Note that accepting an image format is not the same as reading it. Extracting text from an image requires OCR, which is an optional add-on to the underlying parser.
- What are SmartRecruiters' resume upload requirements?
- Its developer documentation for posting an application gives the rules: PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, JPG or PNG, at most 2 MB per file. Plain text (.txt) is not on that list, even though Textkernel's parser reads plain text, so export a PDF or DOCX instead.
- Which languages does SmartRecruiters' resume parsing support?
- SmartRecruiters publishes no list of its own. Its parser, Textkernel, documents 29 languages for CV parsing: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. Textkernel notes that support varies by data centre region.
- What parser does SmartRecruiters use?
- Textkernel. SmartRecruiters' chief executive named it publicly, describing about 98% parsing accuracy across application types and citing the need for a partner that could scale with rapid traffic growth and support multiple languages.
- Should I avoid PDF for SmartRecruiters?
- Textkernel's own documentation advises against PDF to minimise conversion problems, saying most of its bad-parse reports come from corrupt PDFs and that the format often hides problems with the underlying text. The practical reading is narrower than the headline: a PDF built as clean linear text parses fine. What matters is checking the text can be extracted rather than trusting how the page looks.
- How large can a resume be in SmartRecruiters?
- 2 MB per file according to its developer documentation, which is one of the lowest ceilings among the major applicant tracking systems. A plain text-based resume sits comfortably below it.
How the rest of them read a resume
- 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
- ManatalManatal takes PDF, DOC, DOCX and RTF, parses every resume the moment it lands with a parser it built rather than licensed, and keeps the original file where recruiters can open it.4 file types · Manatal (in-house)
- SAP SuccessFactorsSAP SuccessFactors Recruiting parses resumes with Textkernel in 15 languages, takes resumes up to 5 MB, and says plainly that parsing is not always accurate. What SAP's own documentation says, with links.7 file types · Textkernel
Start from an example that SmartRecruiters can read.
Each one is a single-column document, scored by the same checks the Studio runs.