It indexes the whole document body, so skills in your bullets count. The catch: an em-dash in a heading can make it misread your tech stack.
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 Lever reads your file
Lever accepts both text-layer PDF and DOCX, with a slight preference for DOCX, and indexes the full document body rather than only the section fields, so skills mentioned inside your experience bullets still count toward recruiter search. It maps your section headers to internal fields, so a creative header can misroute content, and there is a documented case of a table-based skills section being missed entirely. Header/footer content is skipped, and phone or email icons are not read; use text labels.
How it ranks and filters
Base Lever has no automated ranking. The paid Talent Fit AI anonymizes the resume before analysis, then produces a ranked shortlist with score explanations, using IBM watsonx for bias detection and no training on past hiring outcomes. It documents compliance with NYC Local Law 144 and the EU AI Act.
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
Word stemming is supported, so "collaborating" matches "collaborate" and "collaboration".
Source: RESEARCH.md - Lever keyword matching, official docs
- High confidence
Abbreviations are not expanded, so "SQL" and "Structured Query Language" stay separate; include both.
Source: RESEARCH.md - Lever keyword matching, official docs
- High confidence
Talent Fit AI anonymizes the resume before analysis and explains its scores.
Source: RESEARCH.md - Lever ranking, official AI Brief
The winning checklist
- 1Include both the full term and the abbreviation
- 2Standard section headers; creative names silently misroute content
- 3No tables for the skills section
- 4Text labels, not icons, for phone/email
- 5No hyphenated skill names (Full-Stack -> Full Stack)
- 6No trailing slash on GitHub/LinkedIn URLs
- 7Replace em-dashes in headings with a pipe or comma
See how your résumé scores on Lever.
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