ATS Platform Guide
How Greenhouse ATS Reads Your Resume — and How to Pass It
Greenhouse is the dominant ATS for tech companies and startups. Less strict than Workday but with its own parsing quirks.
What is Greenhouse?
Greenhouse parses resumes into a structured candidate profile. Its parser is more forgiving than Workday with formatting variations, but still has critical failure modes around layout and contact extraction.
Companies using Greenhouse
- Most US tech startups (Stripe, Notion, Linear, Vercel, Anthropic)
- Mid-stage SaaS companies
- Tech-forward enterprises (Airbnb, Pinterest, DoorDash, etc.)
How Greenhouse parses your resume
Field-based extraction
Greenhouse maps your resume to specific fields: Name, Email, Phone, LinkedIn, Current Title, Current Company, Education. If any of these fields can't be confidently extracted, the application reaches the recruiter incomplete.
Strong on linked URLs
Greenhouse correctly extracts hyperlinks (LinkedIn, portfolio, GitHub) from PDFs — better than Workday in this respect. Your URLs DO need to be actual hyperlinks, not just visible text.
Tolerant of design variation
Greenhouse handles slight formatting variations better than Workday. But it still struggles with multi-column layouts and image-only contact info.
Common Greenhouse parsing failures
Missing email field
If your email is rendered as an image (sometimes happens with stylized contact bars), Greenhouse's parser leaves the email field blank. The recruiter sees an application with no way to contact you.
Two-column scrambling
Same as Workday — sidebars produce scrambled output, just slightly less catastrophically.
Custom section names fail
If your section is called 'Career Highlights' instead of 'Experience', Greenhouse may not populate the experience field.
Resume tips for Greenhouse
- Single-column layout (always)
- Standard fonts (Calibri, Arial, Helvetica)
- Real hyperlinks for LinkedIn/portfolio (not just visible text)
- Email and phone in plain text body, not in image-styled headers
- Standard section headers
Test your resume against Greenhouse-style parsing
Free 30-second scan simulates extraction patterns common across Greenhouse and other major ATS engines.
Free ATS scan →