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A career-advice article by Mitul Gelani, dated September 28 (the year is not shown in the listing reviewed), identifies six resume sections that automated screening tends to read first: the contact block, job titles, employer names and dates, skills, education and certifications, and the summary and bullet points. Treat that order as editorial guidance. No public documentation reviewed establishes a single fixed sequence that every applicant tracking system (ATS) follows. What is documented is narrower: parsers pull specific details out of a resume into structured fields, and layout problems can stop that extraction from working properly. The sections below explain what each part of a resume contributes, what the vendor documentation actually supports, and how to check your own file.
The six sections, in the order the article gives them
The article lists its sections in a sequence that starts at the top of the page and moves toward the body. The table below pairs each section with the practical check it recommends.
| Position | Section | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Name and contact block | Put email, phone, and location where they are easy to find, near the top of the first page. |
| 2 | Job titles | Use recognizable, standard titles. An unusual internal title can be harder to match; a clarifying phrase can help. |
| 3 | Employer names and dates | Keep each employer, title, and date range clearly linked. Format dates the same way throughout. |
| 4 | Skills | List skills in a clearly labeled section and only where you can support them with experience. |
| 5 | Education and certifications | Give the institution, qualification, and date in a consistent pattern. |
| 6 | Summary and bullet points | Use bullets that describe what you did and the results you achieved. Reuse job-ad wording only where it accurately describes your experience. |
Why the order is guidance, not a specification
The sequence is a sensible way to organize a resume for a human reader, and it is the article’s own suggestion. It should not be read as a description of how every employer’s software works. Different products, configurations, and downstream workflows handle a file differently. Some systems extract every field at once; others rank candidates on criteria set by recruiters. A reader who builds a resume around this list is doing sound work, but the list does not prove what any particular system will read first.
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What vendor documentation supports
The most concrete official material comes from Greenhouse, an applicant tracking vendor, and it describes its own product rather than the whole market.
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Parsing fills fields and can fail partially
Greenhouse’s support documentation says that resume parsing scans an imported resume and fills fields with the information it detects. It also warns that formatting may be interpreted incorrectly. In its “Unsuccessful resume parse” support article, Greenhouse states: “These formatting issues may result in a partial resume parse that will need to be manually corrected and verified.” A partial parse is one where some fields are filled correctly and others are missing or wrong, so the output needs a human to check it.
What a matching feature extracts
Greenhouse’s Talent Matching FAQ describes a feature that extracts skills, job titles, years of experience, employment start and end dates, and company names from the employment history. It then compares that information with job criteria that recruiters set. This describes one named feature. It does not show that other systems extract the same fields, use the same matching method, or rank candidates in the same way.
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Layout patterns that cause partial parses
Greenhouse’s documentation lists formatting patterns that can produce incomplete parses. These are specific to its parser, so they are best treated as a checklist of risks rather than a universal ban:
- Letters spaced out to create a visual effect, which can break words apart
- Graphics or photos carrying text that the parser cannot read
- Image uploads in place of document files
- Complex tables used to lay out sections
- Information placed in headers or footers
- Text boxes and multi-column layouts that change the reading order
- Section divisions that are unclear or unlabeled
- Incomplete job titles
A plain-text check for reading order
The article also suggests pasting the resume into plain text to see what survives. This is a quick way to catch missing words and scrambled order. It does not reproduce any employer’s parser, so use it as a diagnostic and not as a pass or fail test.
- Open your resume in the word processor you used to create it.
- Select all text and copy it.
- Paste into a plain-text editor. On Windows, use Notepad. On a Mac, use TextEdit after switching to Format > Make Plain Text.
- Read the output from top to bottom. Check that the name and contact details appear first, that each job title sits next to its employer and dates, and that no sentence is cut in half.
- If words are missing or lines appear in the wrong order, the cause is usually a text box, column, table, or header. Rebuild that part with ordinary paragraphs and headings, then repeat the check.
Writing the content so it is accurate and readable
The article’s advice about job-ad wording deserves emphasis. Matching terms from a posting can help a resume reflect the role, but only when those terms truthfully describe what you did. Repeating a keyword to improve a match is not a reliable strategy, and it makes the document harder for a recruiter to trust. No formatting choice guarantees a particular score or selection outcome, so the goal is a resume that is clear to both software and people.
Consistency matters more than cleverness. Use the same date format in every entry, label each section with a plain heading, and keep each job’s title, employer, and dates together on the same line or in the same block. These habits reduce the chance that a parser will misassign a field and make manual correction faster if it does.
If a parse looks wrong
When an application system shows extracted details that do not match your resume, compare the output with your plain-text copy. If the problem is in the source file, simplify the layout and upload again. If the employer’s system allows you to correct or confirm parsed fields, do that before the recruiter reviews them, since Greenhouse notes that partial parses need manual correction and verification.
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