How Workable Reads Your Resume
Workable publishes exactly what its application form takes, which is more than most applicant tracking systems will tell you. The list is unusually broad at one end — OpenOffice and HTML both appear — and unusually strict at the other, with a resume ceiling well below what the same form allows for other files.
What Workable accepts
Every line below links to the page it came from. Where Workable does not publish a detail, this guide leaves it out rather than guessing.
Uploads accepted up to 5 MB.
What ATSPrep exports, and whether Workable takes it
This is computed at build time by comparing our export formats to Workable's published list — not written by hand, so it cannot drift out of date.
| ATSPrep export | Accepted by Workable |
|---|---|
| Yes | |
| DOCX | Yes |
What trips people up here
The resume limit is stricter than the form's other limits
A resume is capped at 5 MB, while file uploads attached to custom questions on the same application are allowed up to 20 MB. If a portfolio attachment goes through and your resume does not, this asymmetry is why — the constraint is specific to the resume field.
Source: Workable Help — file types accepted on the application formPlain text is not on the list
PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, HTML and ODT are accepted. A .txt file — often the safest possible format elsewhere — is not among them, so the plain-text fallback that works on other systems will be rejected here.
Source: Workable Help — file types accepted on the application formOpenOffice and HTML are genuinely supported
ODT and HTML both appear on the official list, which is broader than most systems allow. Breadth is not a recommendation, though: the further you get from a plain linear document, the more ways there are for the extracted text to arrive in an order you did not intend.
Source: Workable Help — file types accepted on the application formThe parsing engine is not disclosed
Workable does not publish which parser it uses, and no credible source names one. This guide leaves that blank rather than repeating the guesses that circulate — but it does mean you cannot reason about behaviour from a vendor's documentation the way you can with systems that have named theirs.
Formatting for Workable
Keep the resume under 5 MB
Lower than it sounds once a photograph or a design-tool export is involved. A text-based PDF will normally be a small fraction of it.
Do not fall back to .txt
Plain text is missing from Workable's accepted list even though it is the safest option on several other systems. Use PDF or DOCX instead.
Put the portfolio in the portfolio field
Custom question uploads allow up to 20 MB. Heavy visual work belongs there, not bolted onto the end of the resume where it eats the tighter limit.
Format for an unknown parser
With no published engine, the only safe assumption is the conservative one: single column, ordinary headings, real text, contact details in the body of the page.
Read your resume back the way Workable 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 →Workable and your resume
What file types does Workable accept for a resume?
PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, HTML and ODT. Workable publishes this list in its help centre. Plain text files are not included.
What is the file size limit for a Workable resume?
5 MB. Separately, file uploads attached to custom questions on the same application form are allowed up to 20 MB, so the resume field is the stricter of the two.
Which parser does Workable use?
Workable does not publish this, and no reliable source names it. Claims you may find asserting a specific vendor are not supported by any Workable documentation, so this guide does not repeat them.
Can I upload a .txt resume to Workable?
No. Plain text is absent from Workable's published list of accepted formats, which is worth knowing because .txt is the standard fallback on several other systems.
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 publishes Taleo's accepted attachment formats but ships 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.