Lever & SmartRecruiters ATS Parsing Guide for High-Growth Tech & Enterprise Applications

Where you will meet Lever and SmartRecruiters

Lever is widely used by venture-backed software companies, from early-stage startups to late-stage growth companies. You will usually see it in the job link: postings on a jobs.lever.co address, or an embedded form on the company's careers page. SmartRecruiters is common at larger and multinational employers, including retail, hospitality, manufacturing, logistics and corporate functions of global brands, with postings often on a jobs.smartrecruiters.com address.

Both are modern systems. They handle well-built PDFs and Word files better than older enterprise portals, and both put your actual resume in front of recruiters. The rules here are less about surviving a legacy parser and more about making sure the extracted text is clean for search and the document itself convinces the person reading it.

How Lever reads and displays your application

A Lever application form is short: resume upload, name, email, phone, current company, links (LinkedIn, GitHub, portfolio, other website), an optional "additional information" box, and any custom questions the employer adds. Lever reads the resume to prefill some fields, and recruiters see your file displayed inline on the candidate profile.

Lever is built around the idea that every candidate, whether they applied, were referred or were sourced, sits in one searchable pool. Recruiters search resume text by keyword, add tags, and come back to past candidates when new roles open. At a startup that is hiring quickly, the recruiter who reads your resume for one role may be looking for three others at the same time, so a clear, searchable resume can be considered for more than the job you chose.

Hiring managers at smaller companies are often directly in the loop, sometimes reviewing applicants themselves. Expect a technical reader who knows exactly what the work involves and who reads for scope and judgment, not buzzwords.

How SmartRecruiters reads and displays your application

SmartRecruiters typically presents a one-page application. You can upload a resume, and many employers also let you import details from a professional profile. The resume is parsed to fill experience and education fields, which you can edit, followed by screening questions the employer has configured, such as work authorization, location, shift availability or required certifications.

SmartRecruiters offers AI matching that employers can switch on to suggest and rank applicants against a job's requirements. Whether it is enabled, and how an employer uses it, is not visible to you. Recruiters still make the decisions, and they generally review the parsed profile, the screening answers and the resume itself. What helps you with both the matching and the human reader is the same: accurate titles, the posting's terms used where true, and clear evidence for each requirement.

Enterprise employers on SmartRecruiters often hire for many locations at once. Make sure your city and state, or your relocation intent, is clear on the resume and consistent with your screening answers.

Format rules that hold on both platforms

• Single column. Both platforms extract text for search. Columns and text boxes can interleave that text even though the document looks fine in the viewer.
• Text-selectable PDF or .docx. A PDF exported from Word or Google Docs is a good default here because it keeps your layout exactly as designed in the recruiter's viewer.
• Contact details in the body. Prefill depends on finding them.
• Standard headings so the experience and education sections are found.
• Readable URLs. Write links as plain text, such as github.com/yourname, in addition to filling the form's link fields.
• Length. One page is common for early-career tech candidates; two pages are normal for experienced candidates. More than two rarely helps on either platform.

To check your file, run it through the ATS compatibility calculator, then paste its text into a plain text editor and read it top to bottom.

Writing for high-growth tech reviewers

Reviewers at fast-growing companies read for three things: what you owned, at what scale, and what changed because of you. They also want to know the stage and type of company you worked in, because the same title means different work at a 40-person startup and a public company.

• Give context in one line. Under the employer name: "Series C fintech, 300 employees, B2B payments". That tells a reviewer how to read every bullet below it without naming anything you should not.
• Show ownership. Before: "Worked on the billing service migration." After: "Led migration of billing from a monolith to three services; cut invoice generation time from 40 minutes to under 5 and removed the month-end freeze."
• Name the stack in context. For software engineers and DevOps and cloud architects, tools listed inside results ("moved CI from Jenkins to GitHub Actions") are both searchable and credible.
• Show judgment. A bullet about a trade-off you made, and why, often does more for a product manager than one more metric.

Writing for enterprise applications

Enterprise employers on SmartRecruiters often receive large applicant volumes for each posting, especially for roles open in many locations. Recruiters working that volume sort quickly, so the resume needs to make the basic fit obvious:

• A title that matches the posting's title or its common market equivalent.
• Required certifications and licenses written in full near the top, with the acronym.
• Scale stated plainly: number of stores, sites, direct reports, budget responsibility or volume handled.
• Location and availability matching your screening answers.

Keep the summary to two or three lines naming your function, level and strongest relevant evidence. Enterprise recruiters reading many similar profiles are looking for the requirement match first, and the detail second.

Global employers also hire across borders and languages. Use the standard US form of your title and degree when applying to US roles, and if a credential was earned abroad, name it and add its common US equivalent in plain words where one exists. Recruiters and matching tools both handle "Bachelor of Engineering, Mechanical" more reliably than a degree name they have not seen before.

Referrals, sourced candidates and the first screen

At high-growth companies, a large share of hires often come through referrals and direct sourcing rather than inbound applications. On Lever in particular, referred and sourced candidates sit in the same pool as applicants, and recruiters move quickly on people a colleague vouched for. That has two consequences for your resume.

First, if you know someone at the company, ask them to refer you rather than only applying. The referral usually attaches your resume to a note from an employee, which tends to get faster attention. Send your referrer the tailored version, not an old one, because it becomes the document on your profile.

Second, a sourced candidate's resume is often read after the first conversation, not before. A recruiter who reached out to you on a professional network will ask for a resume after a short call, then forward it to the hiring manager with a one-line summary. Make the top third of the page say what you told the recruiter: your function, level, the scale you work at, and two strongest results. Hiring managers forwarded a resume read that top third first and decide from there whether to take the next call.

In both cases, the resume is passed between people. Clean formatting, a clear file name and a page that makes sense without the recruiter's notes all help it survive that handoff.

Using the link fields and the additional information box

Both platforms give you more room than the resume. Use it with purpose.

Fill every relevant link field. Reviewers at tech companies do click GitHub and portfolio links, so make sure what they land on is current and shows work related to the role. A GitHub profile with only coursework from years ago does less than no link. Your LinkedIn profile should match the resume's titles and dates, since reviewers compare the two.

Lever's "additional information" box is optional, and most applicants leave it empty or paste a generic cover letter. A short, specific note works better: two or three sentences on why this role, one concrete example of related work, and anything the resume cannot explain, such as a relocation date or a gap. Keep it under 150 words.

Next steps

On modern platforms, the document has to convince a technical or experienced reader, and its text has to search cleanly. Our writers build every Professional resume in one column with context lines, ownership-led bullets and the posting's real terms. If you are coming from a different field into tech, our Career Change service handles the translation. For Greenhouse, the other common system at tech companies, see our Greenhouse guide.

Key takeaways

• Lever and SmartRecruiters both show recruiters your actual resume and search its extracted text, so layout affects search even when the file looks fine.
• A single-column, text-selectable PDF is a strong default on both platforms.
• For startups, add a one-line company context and write bullets about ownership, scale and decisions.
• For enterprise roles, make the title, credentials, scale and location match the posting and your screening answers.

Frequently asked questions