ATS File Types and Size Limits by Vendor

What file types does Workday accept? Is there a size limit on Greenhouse or Lever that quietly kills your upload before a recruiter ever sees it? The honest 2026 answer is that only some ATS vendors publish candidate-facing file lists and size limits at all, several of the pages that do are login-gated, and plenty of numbers circulating on resume blogs come from neither. The table below lists what each vendor's own documentation says — nothing else — with every cell linked to its source and gated sources flagged as not verified. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says not published: that means we could not find a public page, not that no limit exists. And note that one product can carry two limits at once — an upload limit and a smaller parsing limit — so read both columns. The format basics are in our ATS-friendly resume format guide.

Why there is no single answer

Three of the biggest systems configure file handling per employer, which is why firm universal claims about them are impossible. Oracle documents Taleo's attachment formats as administrator-configurable — the list an employer accepts is a setting, not a product constant (Oracle Taleo docs). SAP ships conflicting format lists for older SuccessFactors candidate experiences and explicitly warns that lists are tenant- and version-specific (SAP KBA). Workday's public parsing guidance names no file types or sizes at all (Workday doc); the "5MB max" you may have seen reported comes from applicants on a forum and is configured per employer tenant — not verified (NVIDIA developer forum).

What each vendor documents

Every row below cites the vendor's own page where one exists. Rows marked not published reflect our search, not a claim that the vendor has no rules — for those, the form you are filling in is the authority.

Upload limit versus parse limit

The trap in this topic is that two different limits coexist. Greenhouse accepts uploads up to 100 MB but stops parsing at 2.5 MB, and its own example of an over-limit file is one with "many high-quality images" (Greenhouse) — so a graphics-heavy 3 MB resume fails parsing while uploading fine. Bullhorn similarly pairs a 10 MB general attachment limit with a smaller 4 MB parsing limit, though that page is gated and not verified (Bullhorn KB). A text-based resume is a few hundred kilobytes, so the practical rule is simply: keep the file lean, because the smaller number is the one that governs parsing.

And the number-one documented parse-killer is the same everywhere: image content. Greenhouse lists graphics, photos, word art and image uploads among its parse-failure causes (Greenhouse); Lever states it "cannot parse information from image files (like JPG or PNG)" (Lever); Workday says to use resumes without images or image-based styles (Workday doc); parser vendor Textkernel documents that image-only documents cannot be parsed without OCR, which about 5% of documents need (Textkernel); Bullhorn notes scanned resumes may require manual data entry (Bullhorn KB). That is every vendor in this table that documents parsing at all, naming the same cause.

AI ranking is not automatic rejection

Every vendor above that documents AI features describes scoring and surfacing candidates, not deciding. Greenhouse states "AI never automatically advances or rejects candidates" (Greenhouse) and that it "does not assign a single numerical score to rank candidates" (Greenhouse AI principles). Ashby says "The AI never 'ranks' or gives numerical ratings to applicants, a human must always be involved in decision-making" (Ashby). Lever's Talent Fit is "not intended to filter out candidates" (Lever). Workday's HiredScore page advertises "AI-driven candidate grading" without saying who makes the final call (Workday).

The one mechanism documented to reject automatically is the knockout or disqualification question: Oracle describes Taleo's "disqualification questions … used in requisitions to screen candidates" (Oracle Taleo docs), and in the Enhancv 2025 recruiter sample one of the two setups with content auto-rejection configured ran on Bullhorn — a configuration, not a default (Enhancv). Keep the categories straight: file-type and size problems are documented parse failures, not documented rejections — the distinction we trace in full in do ATS reject 75% of resumes?.

How widely used is each of these systems?

For scale, the Jobscan 2026 ATS Usage Report (6th edition, published 2026-08-20) checked the career pages of all Fortune 500 companies and found an ATS at 97.4% (487 of 500); within that set Workday has "over 40%" and SuccessFactors 12%, while Taleo is described as "decreasing" and iCIMS as "enduring" with no share given (Jobscan). The same report's broader dataset — 13,130 companies from Jobscan's scan data, a different denominator from the Fortune 500 count — puts Greenhouse at 19.0%, Workday at 17.5%, Lever at 15.6% and iCIMS at 14.4% (Jobscan). Mind the sourcing: these are shares of companies Jobscan checked, not of all employers, and Jobscan sells ATS-optimisation tools. iCIMS's own homepage claims "More than 4,400 companies across 200 countries – including a quarter of the Fortune 500" (from a search excerpt) (iCIMS).

What to do

• Keep the file small and text-based — where both limits are documented, the parse limit is the smaller one, and image content is every documenting vendor's top parse-failure cause
• Follow the portal over any table: Taleo formats are admin-configured and SAP lists are tenant-specific, so the same product can accept different files at different employers
• If a mobile form offers a paste-plain-text path, as Taleo does, it is a legitimate fallback when a file will not parse
• Never send an image-only or scanned resume — that is the one file problem every documenting vendor treats as fatal to parsing
• For the PDF-versus-Word question vendor by vendor, see PDF or DOCX for ATS resumes

How to check your own resume

Lever documents the fastest test: "try highlighting text in the document with your cursor. If you cannot highlight text, the document is likely not parseable" (Lever). Then run the file through the free resume checker to see exactly what a parser extracts — name, contact details, titles, dates — and paste the target job description into the matcher to check keyword coverage on the extracted text. A file that extracts cleanly is under every documented limit that matters. The layout rules that keep it that way are in the ATS-friendly format guide, with the documented failure modes broken out for headers and footers and two-column layouts.

Sources

• Greenhouse — Supported file types for resumes and cover letters
• Greenhouse — Unsuccessful resume parse
• Greenhouse — AI/ML Security & Privacy
• Greenhouse — AI principles
• Lever — Understanding resume parsing
• Lever — Adding and deleting resumes
• Lever — Talent Fit in Lever
• Oracle Taleo — attachment formats
• Oracle Taleo — plain-text resume parsing on mobile
• Oracle Taleo — supported languages / third-party parsing (login-gated, not verified)
• Oracle Taleo — disqualification questions
• Workday — candidate resume parsing guidance
• Workday — HiredScore AI for Recruiting
• NVIDIA developer forum — applicant-reported 5MB max (not verified)
• SAP KBA 3777956 — SuccessFactors resume field formats
• SAP KBA 2081556 — size limit (login-gated, not verified)
• SAP KBA 2271789 — format lists are version-specific
• SAP News — SmartRecruiters acquisition completed
• SmartRecruiters — Winston Match
• Ashby — candidate files and file categories
• Ashby — AI
• EQT — acquisition of PageUp
• Flinders University — PageUp rollout
• Charles Sturt University job ad naming PageUp (search excerpt)
• JobAdder — company background
• iCIMS Community — bulk file transfer formats (login-gated, not verified)
• Jobscan on iCIMS (2023 archived analysis)
• iCIMS — homepage (search excerpt)
• Bullhorn KB — resume parsing
• Bullhorn KB — 4MB parsing error (login-gated, not verified)
• Bullhorn KB — file attachment FAQ (search excerpt)
• Bullhorn — about (search excerpt)
• Textkernel — resume parser getting started
• Enhancv — Does ATS reject resumes? (2025 recruiter study)
• Jobscan — 2026 ATS Usage Report