ATS Platform Guide
How Ashby ATS Reads Your Resume — and How to Pass It
Ashby is the modern all-in-one recruiting platform behind a wave of high-growth tech and AI companies. Its parser is one of the most capable in the market — which paradoxically punishes the over-designed templates its own startup-savvy applicants tend to use.
What is Ashby?
Ashby (sometimes searched as AshbyHQ) bundles ATS, CRM, scheduling, and analytics into one platform built for fast-scaling tech companies. Its resume parser is modern and ML-assisted — strong on structured work history and hyperlinks — but applicants to these companies often submit Notion-, Canva-, or designer-built PDFs, and that's exactly where even a good parser struggles.
Companies using Ashby
- Y Combinator startups and venture-backed tech
- AI / ML companies and developer-tools startups
- Fast-scaling product companies (fintech, infra, SaaS)
- Modern high-growth teams that rejected legacy enterprise ATS
How Ashby parses your resume
ML-assisted structured extraction
Ashby leans on machine-learning parsing rather than rigid templates, so it tolerates more layout variation than Workday or Taleo and is good at reconstructing work history (title, company, dates) even when labels are non-standard.
Excellent hyperlink and profile extraction
Ashby reliably pulls real hyperlinks (GitHub, LinkedIn, portfolio) from PDF anchors and is strong at matching candidates to enriched profile data. URLs must be actual links, not visible text.
Still reads a single text stream
However capable the model, Ashby still extracts a linear text stream from your file. A two-column layout is read left-column-then-right, so chronology still scrambles — modern parser, same physics.
Common Ashby parsing failures
Over-designed PDFs from design tools
The #1 Ashby failure is ironic: applicants to startups submit visually polished Notion/Canva/Figma-exported PDFs where text lives in shapes or image layers. Ashby extracts little or nothing from those regions.
Multi-column scrambling
Sidebars still produce out-of-order extraction. Ashby recovers better than legacy engines, but single-column is still the only safe choice.
Skills buried in prose go unweighted
Ashby's search and ranking lean on extracted skills. Skills mentioned only inside paragraph bullets are weaker signals than a clean, explicit Skills section.
Resume tips for Ashby
- Export a true text-based PDF (not an image/flattened export from a design tool)
- Single-column layout always
- Real hyperlinks for GitHub / LinkedIn / portfolio
- Explicit Skills section with standard terms
- Standard section headers — the ML parser is forgiving, but don't make it guess
Test your resume against Ashby-style parsing
Free 30-second scan simulates extraction patterns common across Ashby and other major ATS engines.
Free ATS scan →