Contact details a parser cannot find
If the email and phone fields come back empty, nobody can act on your application. Here is where to put them and how to format them.
An applicant tracking system stores your application as a record with named fields. Two of them matter more than the rest: email and phone. If those come back empty, a recruiter who likes your resume has no way to contact you, and many systems will not let them advance an incomplete record at all.
The four ways contact details go missing
They are in a page header or footer. Several major systems strip header and footer regions before parsing, on the reasonable assumption that they hold page numbers. Your email goes with them.
They are inside an image. A designed contact block, or an icon set with the text baked in, extracts as nothing.
They are obfuscated. Writing dana (at) example dot com defeats spam scrapers and every resume parser equally.
They are in a sidebar. See two-column layouts — the address survives, but glued to an unrelated line.
The format that always works
Plain text, in the body of the first page, in the first few lines:
Dana Whitfield
Senior Operations Manager
dana.whitfield@example.com · (415) 555-0148 · San Francisco, CA
linkedin.com/in/danawhitfieldDetails worth getting right:
- Write the address in full, with the
@. No tricks. - Use a standard phone format.
(415) 555-0148and+1 415 555 0148both parse;415.555.0148usually does; ASCII only. - City and state is enough for location. A full street address is unnecessary and increasingly a liability.
- Write your LinkedIn as visible text, not as a hyperlinked word like “LinkedIn”. Parsers read the text, not the link target.
What about my name?
Put it on its own line at the top, and nowhere else. Parsers infer the name field from the first prominent line. A name repeated in a footer on every page sometimes ends up as part of the employer field.