A Greenhouse application form asks for your resume first, tries to pull your name, contact details and work history out of it, then asks any questions the employer added before you submit. Greenhouse accepts .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf and .txt files up to 100 MB, but a file over 2.5 MB can upload successfully and still fail to parse, which means a recruiter's search may never find you even though your application went through.
The file limit that actually matters
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Greenhouse's own support article on candidate uploads states the upload cap plainly: files can be up to 100 MB, and the accepted types are .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf and .txt (Greenhouse, Supported formats for resumes, cover letters and other candidate uploads). That number is not the one to design around. A 100 MB file is almost never a resume; it is a resume with a photo, a watermark or an embedded video that someone forgot to compress. The number that matters is 2.5 MB, which is where parsing stops being reliable on the same page. Keep a plain text resume well under that, which is easy, since a clean one- or two-page document rarely passes a few hundred kilobytes.
The same support page notes that Greenhouse does not load externally linked images when it builds a preview of your resume, though images saved inside the file itself are unaffected. In short: nothing about your resume should depend on an image loading correctly, because the recruiter's view of your file may not show it.
How your resume becomes a candidate profile
Greenhouse's own documentation on candidate matching is direct about the limits of the parser: it extracts a narrow set of fields, skills, job titles, years of experience, employment dates and company names, and there is no mechanism that automatically advances or rejects anyone based on how well those fields match the posting (Greenhouse, Talent Matching Data Processing FAQ). A recruiter decides, after reading the match and the resume behind it. That makes clean parsing a visibility problem, not a pass or fail test. If your last job title lands in the wrong field, a recruiter searching for that title does not see you near the top of the list.
Greenhouse's guidance on failed parses names the usual causes: multi-column layouts, tables, headers and footers, text boxes and embedded graphics or image-based uploads (Greenhouse, Unsuccessful resume parse). Every one of those is a layout choice, not a content problem, which is why two candidates with the same experience can get very different results from the same form.
The MyGreenhouse account, and whether you need one
Greenhouse's candidate account, called MyGreenhouse, is optional and sits apart from any single employer's form. You sign up at my.greenhouse.io with your email, and sign-in afterward works without a password: you request a one-time code sent to your inbox instead (Greenhouse, MyGreenhouse FAQ for Candidates). One account works across every company that uses the feature, so you are not creating a new login for every employer's careers page. The same FAQ recommends uploading your resume as a PDF for the most reliable results, and notes the account keeps only one resume on file at a time; a fresh upload replaces the old one as your default.
Where an employer has turned MyGreenhouse on, you also get a "quick apply" option that reuses your saved profile, job alerts for that company, and a view of which applications are active (Greenhouse, MyGreenhouse candidate portal). Status tracking is limited to what the employer shares; the portal marks a rejected application inactive automatically a few days after a rejection notice, but silence does not mean rejection, since not every company pushes every update through.
What breaks the parse, and what fixes it
The format that survives is unglamorous: one-column from top to bottom, no sidebars, no tables used to line up a job title with its dates, section headings spelled out normally as Experience, Education and Skills, and contact information typed as ordinary text rather than placed in a header or a text box. Dates in a consistent Month YYYY format help the parser calculate your years of experience correctly rather than guessing from a range it cannot read.
Save the file as .docx when the posting does not specify a format. Where it does, follow it; Greenhouse's accepted list includes PDF, so a clean, text-based PDF exported from Word or Google Docs works just as well and protects your layout from font substitution on someone else's screen.
File naming matters more on Greenhouse than on most systems, because a recruiter working through a candidate list often sees the file name before opening anything. "Resume.pdf" or "Document1.docx" tells them nothing; "Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf" does. It costs nothing to fix and makes you easier to find again later in the same inbox, especially once you have applied to several roles at the same company and your old files start piling up under generic names.
Common mistakes
Applying with a resume template built around a two-column design is the most frequent one. Second is assuming the 100 MB upload limit means file size does not matter, when 2.5 MB is the real ceiling for a clean parse. Third is skipping the MyGreenhouse account and reapplying to the same employer months later with an outdated file, because there was no saved profile to update. Fourth is treating a long silence after applying as a rejection and giving up on following up, when the portal's status update depends entirely on what that employer chooses to share.
Check before you submit
Upload your file to the ATS resume checker before you send it to a Greenhouse form. It extracts the text the way a parser would and flags missing keywords against the posting you paste in, which tells you in advance whether your file is one of the ones that uploads fine but parses badly. Run your resume text through the character counter too; a tidy, consistently formatted file is also usually the shorter one.
A cover letter from the cover letter generator can pick up the same terms you confirmed are in your resume, so the two documents a recruiter reads side by side actually agree with each other.
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FAQ
What file size does Greenhouse accept for a resume?
Up to 100 MB will upload, but files over 2.5 MB often fail to parse cleanly even though the upload itself succeeds. Keep a text-based resume well under that limit; a plain one- or two-page document rarely comes close.
Do I need a MyGreenhouse account to apply?
No. It is optional and only available where the employer has turned it on. It saves you from re-entering your details at every company that uses Greenhouse and lets you track which applications are still active, but you can apply through the standard form without one.
Why does Greenhouse say my resume uploaded but I never heard back?
A successful upload is not the same as a clean parse. If the file used columns, tables, a header or embedded graphics, the system may have extracted your details in the wrong order or missed them, which makes you harder for a recruiter to find in a search even though nothing failed on screen.
