Short answer: treat headers and footers as unreliable places for anything a parser needs to read. The risk is documented by both an ATS vendor (Greenhouse) and a parsing vendor (RChilli), and career-centre guidance points the same way — though it is worth separating what each source actually says from the folklore around it, because a resume that parses badly is not the same as a resume that gets auto-rejected. The practical rule that follows from every source in this article: put your name, email and phone in the body of page one. The full checklist lives in our ATS-friendly resume format guide.
Where the risk is documented
Greenhouse lists "Resumes with the name and contact information in the header, footer, or text box" — and, separately, "Complex resumes with tables, headers, and footers" — among its documented causes of an unsuccessful resume parse (Greenhouse). That is an official help-centre page describing when the product's parsing fails, which makes it the most direct source on the question.
RChilli, which sells the parsing engines embedded in many ATS products, says the same thing from the parser's side: "As a resume parser cannot read information in headers, putting contact information in it is not a good idea." (RChilli)
If you want a feel for why placement matters at all, parser vendor Textkernel's framing helps: "The vast majority of problems in parsing are not from processing the plain text, but from conversion to plain text." (Textkernel) When your file is converted to plain text, anything stored outside the main document flow — a header, footer or text box — is at the mercy of that conversion step. "It looks fine to me" is not evidence a parser saw it.
What career services and employers say
Roche's careers FAQ, an employer-side page about resume parsing, warns that "Information in the header and footer sometimes gets dropped by the ATS completely" (Roche careers). George Mason University's career office is blunter: "Do not use headers/footers for your name" because "Some systems ignore these areas" (GMU). These are practitioner sources rather than vendor documentation, but they point the same direction as the vendors above.
SEEK's Australian career advice also tells candidates to avoid "headers, footers, or tables that may not display correctly on different computers" — but note the reason it gives is display on different machines, not parsing (SEEK AU). Advice can be right for more than one reason; this advice happens to be right for a reason its source didn't state.
Notice the pattern in who says what. The vendor documents (Greenhouse, RChilli) describe what their software does with a header; the career-centre pages translate that into rules for candidates; the job board adds display reasons of its own. When you weigh any piece of ATS advice, the same hierarchy applies: an official vendor page about its own parsing outranks a career centre's rule of thumb, and both outrank an unsourced percentage on a resume-tool blog. The advice in this article happens to agree across all three layers, which is exactly when you can follow it with confidence.
The 25% figure nobody can source
You will also meet a specific number attributed to Jobscan: that 25% of ATS miss contact information placed in a header. We could not verify it. The claim appears only as a second-hand attribution on a resume-tool site, and the original Jobscan study behind it was not found (the second-hand page we found). We are not saying the number is wrong — we are saying that nobody repeating it shows their work, so it should not be repeated as fact. The vendor pages above justify the advice on their own, without an unverifiable percentage attached.
Parse failure is not rejection
It is worth being precise about what a header problem actually does. If a parser skips your header, the failure mode is that your contact details do not land where the recruiter expects them — the application is not rejected, but a recruiter who cannot find your email cannot interview you either, which amounts to the same outcome on a bad day. The documented risk is content lost or misplaced during parsing, not an automatic rejection; the distinction matters because the fix is trivially cheap (move two lines of text into the body) while the fear (the system hates your resume) is misplaced. This is the same parse-versus-reject distinction behind the viral 75 percent rejection statistic, and it applies to layout questions too — see two-column resumes and ATS for the sibling risk.
| Claim | What the source says | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Header/footer contact info breaks parsing | "Resumes with the name and contact information in the header, footer, or text box" — Greenhouse's unsuccessful-parse causes | Official (ATS vendor) |
| A parser cannot read headers | "As a resume parser cannot read information in headers, putting contact information in it is not a good idea." (RChilli) | Official (parser vendor) |
| Header content sometimes vanishes | "Information in the header and footer sometimes gets dropped by the ATS completely" (Roche careers FAQ) | Practitioner (employer FAQ) |
| Some systems ignore headers | "Some systems ignore these areas" (GMU career office) | Practitioner (career centre) |
| Avoid headers for display reasons | SEEK AU advises against headers/footers that "may not display correctly on different computers" — its stated reason is display, not parsing | Practitioner (job board) |
| 25% of ATS miss header contact info | Second-hand attribution to Jobscan; the original study was not found — treat as unverified | Unverified figure |
One more nuance: this advice is about the file you upload. Many application forms ask you to type your contact details into fields anyway, and pasting from a clean body copy is easier than retyping from a header. Even where the portal parses the document for you, a header-placed phone number is one more thing that can land in the wrong field — the body copy pastes exactly where you aim it.
What to do
- Put your name, phone, email, location and LinkedIn URL as plain text at the top of the body on page one — every source above supports this
- Give each contact detail its own line rather than separating them with symbols; RChilli's formatting tips mark symbol-separated contact lines as wrong (RChilli)
- Keep page numbers in the footer if you like them — just never anything the system must read
- If a template forces the header region for your name, pick a different template rather than fighting it — the format guide lists what parses reliably
- After exporting, select-all copy the PDF into a plain-text editor and check that your details survived
How to check your own resume
The fastest check is mechanical. Run your resume through the free resume checker and see whether your email and phone appear in what it extracts; or upload the resume with a job description in the matcher and look at the extracted fields next to the keyword results. If your details survive extraction, the header question is settled for the file you actually send. For a comparison of which checking tools are genuinely free, see free resume checkers.