There is a small CV mistake that hurts a lot of candidates and almost nobody knows they are making it: putting important information inside a Word header or footer.

In Word and Google Docs, headers and footers are a separate document zone. They render perfectly when a human opens the file. They also get treated very differently by the parsing engines inside applicant tracking systems — some ATS read them, some skip them, and many extract them as a separate string that never makes it to the recruiter's screen.

If your name, email, or phone number is up there, you may be sending a CV that arrives looking like it has no contact information at all.

What ATS parsers actually do with headers and footers

When an ATS receives your CV file, it does not show the PDF to a human. It runs a parser that converts the file into structured fields — Name, Email, Phone, Work History, Skills. The structured fields are what the recruiter sees in their dashboard. The PDF or Word file is just an attachment hanging off the structured record.

The parser's job is to find the right text and drop it into the right field. The way it identifies text often depends on its position in the document's reading order. Headers and footers in Word and PDF are stored in a different layer from the body, and parsers have to be specifically built to read them.

In practice, the major ATS handle this inconsistently:

• Workday generally parses Word headers but loses some PDF header content.
• Greenhouse and Lever are decent with PDF headers but struggle with multi-column headers.
• Taleo (older versions still widely used in large enterprises) frequently drops header content entirely.
• Smaller niche ATS often skip them altogether.

You do not get to know which one the employer uses. So the safe move is to assume the worst and stop putting critical information in headers.

What "critical information" means here

The items that absolutely must not live in a header or footer:

• Name
• Email address
• Phone number
• LinkedIn URL
• Job title or summary line
• Anything the recruiter needs to call you back

If the parser drops the header, the recruiter sees a CV with no name and no way to contact you. The CV gets filed as incomplete or duplicate, which means it never reaches a human review.

What you can keep in a header or footer

Not everything is risky. The items that are fine to leave up there:

• Page number on page 2 or 3 ("Page 2 of 3")
• Your name in a small footer on page 2+ (as a backup if pages get separated when printed)
• A repeated date for archival reasons (not commonly needed)

The principle: if losing the header would not change what a recruiter can do with the CV, you can leave it. If losing it means losing your phone number, move it into the body.

The correct way to write the top of a CV

Put everything important in the body of the document, on the first one or two lines. Like this (rendered as plain text):

```

JANE DOE

Senior Product Manager · jane@example.com · +33 6 12 34 56 78 · linkedin.com/in/janedoe

Paris, France

```

This is body content, not a header. The parser reads it as the first text in the document, which is exactly where ATS expect to find a candidate's name and contact details. Recruiters see it fine in the structured fields and fine in the PDF. The visual result is almost identical to using a header — slightly different vertical positioning, that is all.

How to check if your current CV has this problem

The two-minute test:

1. Open your CV in Word or Google Docs. Click on your name and contact line at the top.
2. If a header pane opens up (Word) or the cursor jumps to a separate region (Google Docs), you are in a header. That is the failure case.
3. Move the content out: select everything in the header, cut it, click into the body of the document, paste at the top. Then delete the empty header.
4. Save and re-export the PDF.

If you used a CV template downloaded from the internet, this is the single most common silent failure mode. Many "modern" templates have the contact info in a sidebar or top header by default because it looks good visually. The look comes at the cost of ATS parseability.

The related two-column problem

While we are here: ATS also struggles with multi-column layouts. The parser reads left-to-right, top-to-bottom by default, so a two-column CV gets read as a jumbled mix of the two columns interleaved. If your CV has a sidebar with skills on the left and the body on the right, the parser may produce something like:

Python | Senior Engineer | SQL | Built scalable | Docker | services in...

A recruiter scrolling structured fields in the ATS does not see the visual layout — they see the parsed text. If it is garbled, the CV gets filed as low quality without anyone realizing the candidate is strong.

A single-column layout, with everything in the body and nothing in headers or sidebars, parses cleanly across every ATS. Visually less interesting, structurally bulletproof. We covered the broader topic in ATS keyword optimization: how to get past the filter without keyword stuffing and in CV format and structure: what actually works in 2026.

When the header is fine — design CVs and creative roles

There are two narrow cases where the rules bend:

1. You are applying to a role that does not use an ATS. Senior executive search, top-tier creative agencies, certain VC-backed startups under 10 employees. The recruiter opens the PDF directly. Headers parse perfectly here.
2. You are applying for a design role, and your CV is also a portfolio sample. The recruiter is judging the visual craft. A clean header is part of the work.

Even in these cases, the safe pattern is to have two versions of the CV: a visually crafted one for the direct-recruiter path, and a single-column, plain version for any role that runs through an ATS. It takes 20 minutes to make the second version once.

File format choice ties into this

PDFs render the header consistently across viewers, but as noted above, parsers handle PDF headers worse than body text. Word files are slightly better-parsed at the header level because the header zone is more standardized in .docx, but Word files break in other ways (font substitution, layout shifts).

The best of both: a PDF with everything in the body, no header zone used at all. This is what we recommended in PDF vs Word for ATS and it sidesteps the entire header problem.

A 30-second checklist

• Open your CV in Word or Google Docs.
• Click your name and contact line. Are you in a header? If yes, move it to the body.
• Are there sidebars or columns? If yes, consider a single-column version for ATS submissions.
• Footer: is your name or contact info in it? Move it. Page numbers are fine.
• Save, re-export PDF, send.

This is one of the cheapest CV upgrades — five minutes of editing that prevents an entire silent failure mode where your application is filtered out before a human ever reads it.

If you generate your CV from your LinkedIn data with Postulit, the templates are built single-column and keep all contact info in the document body, which is exactly what ATS parsers want. Less visually clever, more reliably read. That trade-off is almost always worth it.