Knockout questions are the only auto-reject here. Everything else is read by a person, so format for both the parsed profile and the PDF a recruiter actually opens.
Independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by the named vendors. This reflects publicly documented behavior and may not match any specific employer's configuration. Trademarks belong to their owners.
How Greenhouse reads your file
Textkernel pulls text out of the PDF's text layer, so a scanned or image-only PDF returns nothing. Two-column layouts parse correctly most of the time now, but tables still break the link between a title, its company, and its dates, and anything in a text box gets dumped to the start or end of the extracted text. Contact details placed in the document header or footer are skipped silently.
How it ranks and filters
There is no automated ranking in base Greenhouse; every advance is a person's decision, confirmed by the co-founder. The paid Talent Matching AI sorts candidates into five tiers (Strong, Good, Partial, Limited, Needs Review) but does not auto-advance or auto-reject. The one thing that rejects you without a human is a configured knockout question: fail it and you are archived before anyone reads you.
What we're sure of, and how sure
We tag every load-bearing claim with a confidence tier and a source, so you can see which facts rest on official vendor documentation and which are weaker. Sources are compiled in our public research corpus.
- High confidence
Base recruiter search is exact string match, so "SQL" and "Structured Query Language" are different tokens.
Source: RESEARCH.md - Greenhouse keyword matching, confirmed by co-founder Jon Stross
- High confidence
There is no automated ranking in base Greenhouse; advancement is always a human decision.
Source: RESEARCH.md - Greenhouse ranking, co-founder confirmed
- High confidence
Knockout questions are the only auto-reject mechanism; failure archives you before human review.
Source: RESEARCH.md - Greenhouse ranking / scoring
- High confidence
There is a 2.5 MB file-size cap, and files above it fail silently.
Source: RESEARCH.md - Greenhouse file size limit
The winning checklist
- 1Keep the file lean so a heavy export never fails to upload
- 2Single column, no tables, no text boxes
- 3Keep contact details in the body, not the header or footer
- 4Use conventional, full-length section headers, not shortened ones
- 5Spell out each key skill and pair it with its abbreviation
- 6Use a standard term for an ongoing role
That is the direction. The exact formats, thresholds, and per-field rules our engine checks for Greenhouse, and the rewrite that applies them, are in your report.
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