Greenhouse vs Lever, as each of them documents it

These two get compared constantly, and almost every comparison online is made up. This one is built from the two vendors' own support articles, with every claim linked, and it says plainly where the documentation runs out.

The short version

If you read nothing else: Greenhouse gives you rules you can satisfy, and Lever gives you almost nothing to satisfy. The one documented difference with a real consequence is not about the file. It is that two of Lever's employer-side settings can switch off or skip parsing entirely without telling you, while Greenhouse's documented constraints all apply to the document in your hands.

So: write one plain, single-column, text-based document, keep it well under 2.5 MB, and on a Lever application type your details into the form rather than trusting the pre-fill. That is the whole practical difference.

Side by side

Every cell below is drawn from a vendor's own words. Where a vendor has published nothing on a row, the cell says so rather than filling the gap with a guess. Read the two vendor pages first if you want the quotations in context: Greenhouse and Lever.

The size limits are not the same kind of limit

This is the most commonly mangled row in any comparison you will read online, so it is worth stating on its own.

Greenhouse's 2.5 MB is a parse ceiling. The vendor's own description of a failure is that the resume "has only been attached to the candidate" and its details must be typed in by hand. The upload worked. The reading did not.

Lever's 10 MB is an upload ceiling, stated in an article about managing candidate files. Nothing Lever publishes says its parser reads a file of any particular size, or that the parser handles every type the uploader accepts.

Structured fields versus free text

Both vendors parse on upload and hand the result to a human. The difference is how much of your resume arrives as a labelled value a recruiter can sort on, and how much arrives as text someone has to read.

One caveat on the Greenhouse column, because it is easy to overstate. The only field-level list Greenhouse publishes comes from the Talent Matching data-processing FAQ, not from the general candidate-profile parse. Greenhouse documents the general parse as auto-filling "appropriate fields" without enumerating them. So the honest reading is that the five categories above are the only categories Greenhouse has confirmed in writing, not a complete field map. A recruiter searching by years of experience on a Greenhouse site is filtering on a structured value; a recruiter searching for a phrase in your summary is searching free text, on either system.

Multi-page resumes: the honest answer is that there isn't one

You will find confident claims on both sides. Neither vendor has published anything that supports them.

• Greenhouse publishes no page limit and no statement about page two. Its failure list names columns, tables, headers, footers, text boxes, graphics, photos, word art, letter-spaced words, placeholder-looking data, suffixes and abbreviations. Page count is not in it.
• Lever publishes no failure list at all, so there is nothing to read a page count into.
• The one adjacent fact either vendor offers is about weight, not length. Greenhouse attributes overshooting its 2.5 MB limit to "a lot of high-quality images", which is a file-size observation, not a page-count observation.

Absence of a published rule is not a published permission. A two-page resume is not documented as unsafe on either system, and it is not documented as safe either. Treat the question the way you would treat any undocumented behaviour: pick the option that has no documented failure mode attached to it. One page where one page will do is that option, because the failure modes both vendors do document are all layout problems, and a second page gives those problems more room.

What this means for how you should format a resume

Take the intersection. Everything below is a restatement of a rule one of the two vendors published, and none of it contradicts anything the other one says. If you only ever apply to one of them, this still holds.

The print-safe template satisfies every item in both lists. If you want a layout with some presence to it, the classic template still meets every documented rule on this page, because all of those rules are about structure rather than restraint.

Where the two genuinely diverge

Not in the file. In what happens to it after it arrives.

Neither vendor documents how a partial or empty parse is shown to a recruiter. Treat both files as the beginning of a conversation rather than the whole of it: put your name, your current role and your most relevant employer in the first three lines, where they are visible to a human whether or not a machine extracted them.

Questions people actually ask

Which is better for resume parsing, Greenhouse or Lever?

Neither is documented as better, and the question cannot be answered from public sources. Neither vendor publishes a parse accuracy figure, a benchmark, or a conformance test. What can be compared is documentation, and on documentation Greenhouse is far ahead: nine named failure modes, a stated parse ceiling, a stated placeholder rule, and 28 listed languages, against three named fields and an upload ceiling. If you want a defensible rule: write to Greenhouse's published constraints. They are stricter than anything Lever publishes, and Lever publishes nothing that they break.

Do I need a different resume for Greenhouse and for Lever?

No. Every layout rule Greenhouse publishes is compatible with what Lever publishes, and Lever adds no documented requirement beyond file types and a size ceiling. One document, written to the Greenhouse rules, satisfies both. The difference between the two systems is in how much of your resume reaches the employer as labelled values, not in what the file has to look like.

Is a two-page resume safe on Greenhouse or on Lever?

Neither vendor publishes anything about page count, so no two-page resume is documented as safe or unsafe by either. Greenhouse's failure list names columns, tables, headers, footers, text boxes, graphics and letter-spaced words, and length is not among them. Lever publishes no failure list. The documented problems are all layout problems, and a second page gives layout problems more room, so keep to one page wherever the content allows it and let a second page be the result of real content rather than a design decision.

What is the maximum resume file size for each?

Greenhouse: 2.5 MB, as a limit on parsing. A larger file can still be attached to the candidate, and its details then have to be typed in by hand. Lever: 10 MB, as a limit on uploading, stated in an article about managing files rather than about parsing. Nothing says how large a file Lever's parser will read. Because the two limits measure different things, treat 2.5 MB as the number that matters and you will be inside both.

Which file format should I upload?

A text-based PDF or a DOCX. Greenhouse tells candidates to upload a PDF for best results and names .docx and .pdf in its own documentation. Lever's uploader documents .doc, .docx, .pdf and .txt, phrased as "such as", which is an illustrative list rather than a complete one. Neither vendor documents a picture-of-text PDF, and Greenhouse names resumes uploaded as an image as a cause of a failed parse. If you export a PDF, open it and try to select the text on the page: if you cannot select it, it is a picture.

What happens if I anonymise my resume for a blind application?

On Greenhouse, the vendor documents that the parser discards data it judges to be placeholder. A name written as "First Last" and a town name are skipped, because that information "can't be definitively proven as real or fake" in the other direction, while the phone number and the first line of the address still parse. Fake company names such as "Company 1" and "Any Company" are named as the kind of data that gets discarded. If you are offered a blind process, use the employer's. Greenhouse's own answer to this is its Anonymize resumes feature. Lever publishes nothing on the question at all.

Does either vendor score or rank my resume?

Neither publishes a scoring or ranking rule. Greenhouse's Talent Matching documentation describes which data is processed for that feature, and is explicit that it does not extract fields beyond skills, job titles, years of experience, employment dates and company names, but it does not describe a score or a ranking formula. Lever publishes nothing about matching. Where a job posting advertises an automated ranking or screening feature, treat it as a separate product from the resume parser. That is how both vendors write about it, and it is why a resume written for a parser and a resume written for a ranking model are not the same exercise.

• Greenhouse sources Unsuccessful resume parse — the 2.5MB parse ceiling, the nine failure modes, the partial-parse behaviour, the placeholder-data rule
  MyGreenhouse FAQ for Candidates — PDF guidance and the instruction to review parsed data before submitting
  Resume parsing with non-English languages — the 28-language list
  Talent Matching Data Processing FAQ — the only field list Greenhouse publishes
  Anonymize resumes — the supported way to blind a resume
• Lever sources Understanding Resume Parsing — the one-paragraph article naming three extracted items
  Adding and deleting resumes — the file types and the 10MB upload limit
  Configure Your Lever-hosted Job Site — the skip-email-parsing setting
  Lever Career Site Options — the Postings API exception, where no auto-parsing runs
  Adding candidates and Submitting referrals — when the parse triggers
• What neither vendor publishes Page limits or multi-page behaviour, parse accuracy figures, ranking or keyword rules, per-employer parser configuration, and any statement about what happens to text the parser could not classify.