ATS guides · Sources checked 12 October 2026
ATS guides: Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS and Taleo
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software an employer uses to post jobs, collect applications and review candidates. When you apply online, the form you fill in and the way your resume is read usually belong to one of a handful of vendors. These guides cover five of them, built from each vendor's public documentation and, where a vendor publishes no help for applicants, from guides employers publish for their own applicants.
The five guides
| System | What its documentation says about your resume |
|---|---|
| Workday | Employers' applicant guides describe an option to autofill the experience section from your resume, which you review before submitting. |
| Greenhouse | Greenhouse cannot parse resumes over 2.5MB, image files, or complex layouts with tables, headers and footers; parsing "can make mistakes". |
| Lever | A parsed resume can autofill name, emails, phones, location, company and links, but "no information is guaranteed to be extracted"; image files are not parsed. |
| iCIMS | Uploading a resume "may populate some profile fields", so iCIMS suggests uploading it before filling in the rest; status questions go to the employer. |
| Taleo | If parsing is on, an uploaded resume fills part of the application for you to review; Taleo Business Edition does not parse resumes in image formats. |
What holds across all five
- Upload text, not a picture of text. Greenhouse, Lever and Taleo Business Edition all say resumes uploaded as images are not parsed.
- Autofill is a draft. Greenhouse says parsing "can make mistakes", Lever says "no information is guaranteed to be extracted", and Taleo's and employers' Workday guides build in a review step. Read what was filled in before you submit.
- Simple layouts are safer. Greenhouse names tables, headers, footers, text boxes, graphics and photos among the causes of failed parses. Oracle says Taleo's parser can read header and footer text; Greenhouse warns against contact details there. The safe choice for both is your contact details in the body.
- The employer sets the rules. File limits, questions and upload instructions differ: one employer's Workday setup allows 5MB per document, another employer's iCIMS portal wants the resume and cover letter as one file.
- Status questions go to the employer. Greenhouse and iCIMS both say so.
What our own test shows, and what it doesn't
In a study dated 9 October 2026, we exported 21 PDFs from Resumity's 7 templates and read them back with three open-source text extractors, pdf.js, pdftotext and pypdf (63 extractions). Every name, email, phone number, section heading and bullet came back intact and in order. That tells you the text layer of those PDFs is complete.
It does not tell you how any of these systems reads the same file. We have not tested Resumity's templates in any of these systems, and each employer configures its own setup. The method, limits and raw data are on how we test our templates.
Check what software can read in your PDF
The free check reads your PDF in your browser (the file is not uploaded) and shows whether your name, email, phone, section headings and dates can be extracted. It is not any of these systems, but text that doesn't come out cleanly there is worth fixing before you apply anywhere.