Lever ATS resume format

Your profile is the first impression

Lever turns your CV into a structured candidate profile and keeps the original file attached to it. In the pipeline view, the profile is what a recruiter scans. The PDF is one click further away, and on a busy day that click does not always happen.

So the goal is a file that produces a clean profile: correct name, correct current title, work history in order with dates that parsed.

Format rules that matter here

• One column. A sidebar can interleave with the main column when the file is flattened to text, which scrambles your work history.
• Nothing in the header or footer. Contact details placed there are frequently dropped. Put your name, email and phone in the body of the first page.
• Standard section headings. Work Experience, Education, Skills. Not *Where I Have Made An Impact*.
• Month YYYY dates. *March 2022 to Present* is read reliably. *03/22* often is not.
• No tables or text boxes. Both are common causes of missing or reordered content.
• Selectable text, not an image. If you cannot select a line with your cursor, no parser can read it.

Lever postings are often startup postings

Lever is common at startups and scale-ups, where a founder or hiring manager frequently reads applications directly rather than a recruiting team screening on keywords first.

That changes what to optimise. Scope and ownership travel further than a keyword list: what you actually ran, what you decided, what happened as a result. Keep the parse clean so you get read, then make sure there is something worth reading.

Before you send it

Run the CV and the posting through the checker to see which of the role's terms you already cover, or paste the job link and have the rewrite done for you.