The six resume sections that screening software reads first, according to a career-advice article by Mitul Gelani dated September 28, are: your name and contact block, job titles, employer names and dates, skills, education and certifications, and the summary and bullet points. That order is the article’s suggested sequence. It is not a fixed reading order that every applicant tracking system follows. Resume parsers pull information into structured fields, and how well they do that depends on the product, its configuration, and how cleanly the file is laid out. The year of the article is not visible in the version we could verify, so treat the date as undated.
The six sections, in the order the article suggests
The article presents these six sections as the parts of a resume that screening tools are most likely to pick up. Each one below includes the article’s advice and the parsing behavior that official Greenhouse documentation describes, where it applies.
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1. Name and contact block
Put your name at the top of the first page, followed by a phone number, an email address, and your city or region. The article’s main advice here is to make contact details easy to find. Keep them in the main body of the document rather than in a header or footer. Greenhouse lists headers and footers among layouts that can cause parsing trouble, so this is the one place where a layout choice can hide the information a recruiter needs first.
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2. Job titles
Use the job title you actually held, written in a form that another person would recognize. The article recommends recognizable titles. If your internal title was unusual, a short plain-language clarification is a reasonable way to keep the title accurate and understandable. Greenhouse’s Talent Matching feature extracts job titles from employment history, so the title line is a field that gets read directly.
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3. Employer names and dates
Keep each employer, job title, and date range together so the associations are unambiguous. The article advises keeping employer, title, and date clearly linked and formatting dates the same way throughout. A format such as “Jan 2021 – Mar 2024” applied to every role is easier to read than a mix of numeric and spelled-out dates. Greenhouse’s Talent Matching documentation says the feature extracts employment start and end dates and company names from the work history section.
4. Skills
Give skills their own labeled section rather than scattering them through prose. Include skills you can discuss in an interview. The article’s guidance on job-ad wording applies here: use terms from the posting only when they accurately describe your experience. Greenhouse’s Talent Matching feature extracts skills from employment history and compares them with job criteria that recruiters set, so a skill that appears only in a list with no supporting role gives the reader less to work with.
5. Education and certifications
List each degree with the institution and the year awarded, and list each certification with its issuing body and the date earned or the expiry date if it applies. The article places this section fifth in its sequence. Keeping certifications in their own clearly titled block avoids confusion with employment history, which the parser also reads.
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6. Summary and bullet points
A short summary near the top gives the reader context, and the bullet points under each role describe what you did there. Place each bullet block directly beneath the matching title and dates so that the duties belong to the right job. The article treats the summary and bullets as the last of the six sections in its sequence, but the bullets are often the content that a human reviewer reads after the structured fields.
What the order means, and what it does not
The sequence is editorial guidance. The article uses it to explain which parts of a resume matter most, not to describe a universal ATS specification. Greenhouse’s documentation describes parsing specific data fields and warns that formatting can produce a partial parse. It does not describe a six-section reading order. Two systems can read the same resume differently, and a single employer may use workflows that change what happens after the parse.
The article also suggests a simple check you can run yourself. It shows whether the text comes out in a sensible order and whether anything is missing. It does not reproduce any employer’s parser.
- Open your resume in its original file format.
- Select all text with Ctrl+A on Windows or Linux, or Cmd+A on a Mac, then copy it with Ctrl+C or Cmd+C.
- Paste into a plain-text editor such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. In TextEdit, choose Format > Make Plain Text before pasting so that formatting does not carry over.
- Read the pasted text from top to bottom. Check that your name and contact details come first, that each job title sits next to its employer and dates, and that no sentence, date, or job title has disappeared or been merged into another line.
- If the order is wrong or text is missing, look for the layout element causing it. The next section lists the common ones.
What Greenhouse documents about parsing
Greenhouse describes resume parsing as scanning an imported resume and filling fields with the information it detects. Its support documentation, under the title “Unsuccessful resume parse,” warns that formatting may be interpreted incorrectly. It states: “These formatting issues may result in a partial resume parse that will need to be manually corrected and verified.” In other words, the parse can be incomplete, and someone may need to fix it by hand.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsGreenhouse’s Talent Matching FAQ describes a separate feature. It extracts skills, job titles, years of experience, employment start and end dates, and company names from employment history. It then compares that information with job criteria that recruiters set. This describes one named feature. It does not show that every applicant tracking system extracts the same fields, uses the same matching method, or ranks candidates in the same way.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Layout patterns that can cause partial parses
Greenhouse’s documentation gives these examples of formatting that can cause trouble. The list is specific to Greenhouse. Other products may handle them differently, and not every item will cause a problem in every file.
- Letters spaced apart, such as a name typed with a space between every character
- Graphics or photos, including a photo placed in the resume
- Image uploads in place of a document file
- Complex tables used to lay out sections
- Headers and footers that hold contact details or dates
- Text boxes
- Multi-column layouts
- Unclear section divisions where headings do not separate the content
- Incomplete job titles
If the plain-text check in the previous section shows a problem, check these items first. Replacing a column layout or a text box with a single-column flow, and moving contact details out of the header, often resolves the problem without changing the content.
Wording that matches the role without stuffing keywords
The article advises using job-ad wording only when it accurately describes your experience. This matters because Greenhouse’s Talent Matching feature compares extracted information with the criteria a recruiter has set. A resume that says you did something you did not do will not hold up in an interview, and a list of repeated terms adds little for a human reviewer.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchChoose the job-ad terms that describe work you have done, put them in the role where you did the work, and leave out the rest. Do not expect a specific formatting change to guarantee a selection or a particular score. The evidence reviewed here does not establish any such guarantee for any product.
What the evidence does not establish
No pass rate, prevalence figure for applicant tracking software, or hiring outcome percentage is established by the sources behind this article, so none is given here. The six-section list is the article’s editorial view. Greenhouse’s documentation supports the narrower points about parsing, partial parses, and the fields its Talent Matching feature extracts. Use the sequence as a guide to clarity, and use the plain-text check to find the problems most likely to cause a partial parse.
A clear layout with consistent headings and complete role-and-date associations helps any reader, human or software, find what they need. That is the practical reason to follow the six sections: they are the parts of a resume where a reader most needs clarity, and where the parse is most likely to go wrong if the layout is unclear.
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