How Lever actually reads your resume
Lever is built for sourcer-heavy teams. Boolean searches, quick snapshots, and one short free-text answer usually decide who advances. Here's what recruiters look for — and how to write yours.
Parser type
Full-text extraction; indexes resumes, recruiter notes, and feedback forms together. Lever uses stem-based search (searches for "collaborating" will match "collaborate," "collaborated," "collaborative") but does not expand acronyms — a resume saying "SEO" will not appear when a recruiter searches "Search Engine Optimization" (Jobscan Lever guide).
Formatting pitfalls
- Images and graphics: Lever cannot parse images, icons, or skill-bar graphics. Any content rendered as an image is invisible (Jobscan Lever guide).
- Tables and complex bullet styles: Can break Lever's parser and cause section misidentification (Resumly.ai Lever guide).
- Non-standard section headers: Lever reads resumes as plain text and maps content to internal fields. Non-standard headers risk misclassification (Resumly.ai Lever guide).
- Acronyms not spelled out: Both the acronym and the full form must appear for complete search coverage, since Lever does not expand either direction (Jobscan Lever guide).
How recruiter search works
Lever searches across resumes, notes, and feedback forms simultaneously. Recruiters type keywords; the system returns all candidates whose combined profile text contains the stem. There is no automatic scoring or ranking — Lever does not score resumes; humans do. The recruiter sees a list of matching candidates and reviews manually (Jobscan Lever guide).
What parse failure looks like
Lever accepts Word (.docx), PDF, RTF, HTML, ODF, and WordPerfect files. Image-based PDFs (scans) will create a blank text index — the file is stored but the candidate does not appear in any keyword search. A Resumly case study showed a generic PDF scoring 0% match, while a reformatted version with standard headings and keywords reached 85%+ and generated an interview invitation within 48 hours (Resumly.ai Lever guide).
Other employer systems
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