Headers and footers get thrown away
Several applicant tracking systems discard the header and footer regions of a page before parsing. Anything you put there disappears.
Word makes it easy to put your name and contact details in the page header so they repeat on every page. It is a tidy instinct. It is also one of the more reliable ways to lose your phone number.
Why they get stripped
Parsers strip headers and footers deliberately. On most documents those regions hold page numbers, dates, and confidentiality notices — noise that pollutes the extracted text and corrupts section detection when it repeats mid-document. Dropping the top and bottom band of each page is a cheap, effective clean-up.
It is also indiscriminate. Whatever you put there goes with it.
What this affects
- Contact details placed in the header of page one.
- A name repeated across pages so a printed stack stays together.
- Portfolio links or a personal site in the footer.
- “References available on request” — no loss there.
Systems vary. Older Taleo deployments are the most aggressive; some modern parsers keep header content but tag it as low-confidence, which affects field extraction rather than removing it. You cannot tell in advance which one is reading your file.
The fix
Put everything that matters in the body of the page.
- Name and contact details: normal text lines at the top of page one.
- Repeat nothing on later pages. If a recruiter is printing your resume, page one is where they look.
- Page numbers are fine in a footer — losing those costs you nothing.
A note on margins
This is also why very tight margins hurt. If your body text starts within about half an inch of the page edge, it can fall inside the band a parser treats as header territory. Keep at least 0.5 inch, and 0.75 is safer.