Can ATS Read Resume Headers, Footers, Text Boxes, and Icons? The Short Answer
Not reliably. Greenhouse lists a name or contact details placed in a header, footer or text box as a cause of an unsuccessful parse. Roche says header and footer text is sometimes dropped and advises applicants to avoid text boxes. Icons are the least documented case: no ATS vendor page reviewed for this article mentions them, but career centers and resume-checker vendors report that icons can disappear or turn into junk characters.
The safe version is to keep every piece of information in the main body as plain text and to write out the words or the address instead of relying on a symbol. If only a person will read the file, none of this costs you anything. For how a parser turns a file into data in the first place, see how an ATS resume parser reads your resume.
What Do ATS Vendors and Employers Say About Each Element?
Only one ATS vendor in this set publishes its own list of parse-failure causes. The rest is employer and university guidance, plus resume-checker vendors describing how parsers behave. The table separates them so you can see which statements are documentation and which are advice.
| Source | What it says | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Greenhouse | Lists resumes with the name and contact information in the header, footer or text box as a cause of an unsuccessful parse, and also names complex resumes with tables, headers and footers. Secondary summaries of the page add graphics, photos and word art. | Vendor documentation |
| Roche | Advises avoiding text boxes, images and graphics. Says information in the header and footer sometimes gets dropped, so all text should sit in the document body. | Employer guidance |
| Santa Clara University | Says ATS systems typically do not read headers and footers, and notes that Lever and iCIMS can struggle with resumes that include images or graphics. | University career center |
| Utah Valley University | Advises skipping headers, footers and text boxes, and says an ATS can’t read documents created with text boxes. | University career center |
| Universities at Shady Grove | Lists text boxes, images and graphics, and headers and footers as formatting to avoid, and says not to put contact information in the header. | University career center |
| CV Owl and TechInterview | Report that icons are skipped or show up as junk characters, and recommend words instead of icons. | Resume-checker vendors |
The sources agree on direction and differ on certainty. Roche says “sometimes,” Santa Clara says “typically,” and Utah Valley says text boxes can’t be read at all. Greenhouse is the only source that ties the problem to a named system. No source claims that every ATS fails on all of these, and none claims that any ATS handles them reliably. You rarely know which system a company runs, so the layout that no source warns against is the safer choice.
The icon claims rest on checker vendors and career guides rather than on vendor documentation. Treat them as likely, not proven.
Can an ATS Read Headers and Footers?
Sometimes, and you can’t tell in advance. A header or footer is a separate region of the page that repeats on every page, and parsers handle it differently from the body. Greenhouse names contact details placed there as a failure cause. One resume-checker vendor explains the likely logic: those regions usually hold page numbers, dates and file names, so some engines exclude them as boilerplate. On those systems, a resume with its contact details only in the header arrives with no contact information.
This is easy to do by accident. Enhancv notes that Word’s default resume templates often put contact details in a header field automatically, so you can have a header without having chosen one.
Two clarifications. First, “header” here means the page header area, not a section heading such as Experience. Standard section headings in the body are the opposite case: Santa Clara lists names like Work Experience, Education and Skills as ones ATS systems recognize. Second, a page number in the footer costs you nothing, because nothing in it needs to be read.
Can an ATS Read Text Boxes?
Unreliably. A text box floats on top of the page instead of sitting in the flow of body text, so an extractor may read it before the body, after it, or not at all. Greenhouse lists contact details inside a text box as a failure cause, Roche advises avoiding text boxes, and Utah Valley University says an ATS can’t read documents created with text boxes.
Two parsing guides describe the same pattern. CareerBldr says text from a text box tends to show up detached from its place on the page, often at the start or end of the extracted text. ATS Verification says a name inside a text box extracts after the body or not at all.
Text boxes are easy to include without knowing it. Sidebars and contact banners in downloaded templates are sometimes built from them. If your template has a sidebar, the guide to tables and two-column layouts covers that layout in detail.
Can an ATS Read Icons on a Resume?
Icons are the weakest-documented case. No ATS vendor page reviewed addresses them, so this section combines employer guidance on graphics with reports from resume-checker vendors.
CV Owl says icons reach a file as embedded images or as special characters. An image carries no text, and the Shady Grove career center says the ATS cannot parse graphics. A special character can survive if it maps to a standard Unicode symbol, CV Owl adds. TechInterview reports that an icon standing in for a label, such as an envelope instead of the word Email, parses as nothing or as a junk character, and that decorative fonts can map to the wrong Unicode.
How much this matters depends on how the icon is used:
- An icon next to a plain-text email address loses little. The address is still text.
- An icon that replaces the words does damage. Skill bars, star ratings and icon-only social links carry meaning that may not extract at all.
- A skill shown only as a graphic can’t be matched by a recruiter’s search. TechInterview points out that a manual boolean search still matches literal strings, so the tool names need to appear as plain text somewhere.
One more case is a precaution rather than a documented parser behavior. If an icon is a clickable link to your LinkedIn or portfolio, the address may exist only inside the link. Write the URL out as visible text.
Does Losing Contact Details or Icons Mean Automatic Rejection?
No source reviewed says so. Greenhouse describes the outcome as manual work: if a resume fails to parse, someone has to enter the candidate’s details into the fields, and a partial parse needs to be corrected and verified. TechInterview calls the widely repeated claim that 75% of resumes are auto-rejected by a robot “mostly folklore.”
The realistic cost is a blank or incomplete profile, and a recruiter who has to fix it or move on to the next candidate. No source reviewed publishes how often that costs candidates an interview, so be skeptical of any guide that quotes an exact figure without naming a study.
What Can You Use Instead of Headers, Text Boxes, and Icons?
Replace each element with plain text in a single top-to-bottom flow.
| If your resume has | Replace it with |
|---|---|
| Name and contact details in the header or footer | The first lines of the body, as ordinary text |
| A sidebar or banner built from a text box | A normal paragraph or bullet in the main flow |
| Phone, email or location icons | The plain text itself, or a short label such as “Email:” |
| Icon-only links to LinkedIn, GitHub or a portfolio | The URL written out as visible text |
| Skill bars, star ratings or dot meters | A plain list of skill names, with the level in words if it matters |
| A logo or decorative graphic beside your name | Remove it and keep your name as text |
A contact block that passes all of this looks like the example below. The details are made up.
Jordan Rivera
Austin, TX | jordan.rivera@example.com | (512) 555-0142
linkedin.com/in/jordanrivera | github.com/jordanrivera
Structure still has to come from somewhere. Use your word processor’s heading styles, bold job titles, consistent dates and a blank line between roles. Roche adds that an ATS returns all text in one color, so don’t let color carry meaning. Our guide on how to create a resume walks through a layout built this way.
How Can You Check Whether Your Resume Uses Any of These?
Run these checks on the exact file you plan to upload, because a template can contain all three without showing it.
- Check for headers and footers. In Word, double-click the top and bottom margins. If the area opens for editing and holds text, that text lives in a header or footer. In Google Docs, look at the top and bottom margins for the same.
- Check for text boxes. Click the sidebar or banner. A Shape Format tab in Word means it is a text box.
- Check the icons. Click one. A Graphics Format or Picture Format tab means it is an image or graphic, not text.
- Copy and paste. Select all text in the final PDF or DOCX, paste it into a plain text editor, and read what arrives. TechInterview adds a quick check: if you can highlight individual words in the PDF, it has a real text layer.
- Find your details. If your name, email, phone number or a skill is missing from the pasted text, it was in a header, footer, text box or graphic.
The test approximates what a parser sees but does not reproduce any specific ATS. For export steps and the file-level version of this test, see PDF or DOCX: which file format should you use for an ATS resume.
When Are Headers, Text Boxes, and Icons Fine to Use?
Use them when the reader is a person. An emailed PDF, a printed copy for an interview and a design-forward attachment to a networking message can use all three without any parsing cost. Roche’s guidance notes that many candidates keep two versions of their resume, one for the parser and one with more visual effort for people.
Skip them when any of these apply:
- The application is an upload form that fills in profile fields from your file.
- You don’t know which ATS the employer uses.
- The posting says nothing about format and you can’t test the file.
A single plain layout can serve both readers. If you build in a tool, run the same copy-and-paste test on its export. The 7resume resume builder is designed around ATS-friendly, text-based output.
Ready to build one? Create your resume with 7resume → You can also browse resume builders by role, including software engineer, marketing manager and data analyst, or read more in the ATS optimization category.