Hiring systems differ
ATS Readback is not the parser inside Greenhouse, Workday, iCIMS, Lever, Taleo, Bullhorn, or any employer-specific system. Products differ in OCR, supported file types, field mapping, document libraries, and customer settings.
A coherent readback is useful evidence, not certification.
PDF limits
- Encrypted PDFs cannot be inspected reliably.
- Unsupported stream filters are reported as incomplete coverage.
- Custom font encodings without usable character maps can produce damaged text.
- Geometry-based column detection can mistake legitimate aligned text for columns.
- Complex forms, embedded objects, scripts, and application-specific extensions are not fully reproduced.
- OCR is deliberately not bundled in the first release. Image-only resumes are flagged rather than sent to a remote OCR service.
DOCX limits
- WordprocessingML is read in package order; Microsoft Word's full layout engine is not reproduced.
- Nested tables, floating shapes, SmartArt, equations, and vendor extensions can behave differently in other parsers.
- Text inside drawings can be identified but may not be reconstructed exactly.
- Password-protected or malformed packages may stop extraction.
Job comparison limits
The comparison is lexical. It does not understand whether a claim is true, whether experience is recent, how senior it was, or whether a synonym is appropriate in context. A matched word is not proof of qualification. A missing word is not proof of a weak application.
Safe operating practice
- Run the exact final file.
- Read the entire extracted text in sequence.
- Confirm name, email, phone, dates, employers, titles, education, and skills.
- Upload the file to the real application.
- Review every field the application populated.
- Correct the source file—not only the web form—when extraction is wrong.