Putting your email and phone number in a resume's document header or footer risks a parser never reading them. In UnchartedCareer's ATS Autopsy, a test of 48 synthetic resumes read by three local open-source text extractors (pdfplumber, pdfminer.six, python-docx) in June 2026, header and footer placement lost the email address 66.7% of the time. Read that as a floor on what can go wrong in the reading step, not a verdict on any named ATS. The fix is free and quiet. Put your name, email, and phone in the body text at the top of page one, outside the header and footer bands.
By UnchartedCareer
Last updated: July 2026
A document header is not the top of your resume. It is a separate region your editor repeats on every page, stored apart from the body text. When a text extractor opens the file, it walks the main body flow first, and the header and footer band can get skipped or dropped somewhere the parser does not look.
The same June 2026 test recorded a structural signal for exactly this. Across the header layout, only 3 of 9 reads captured the header and footer contact band at all. The rest walked past it. When the band goes uncaptured, the name, email, and phone sitting inside it are gone from the extracted text, and that text step is the first thing these systems run before they map anything to a field. That number is a floor on the reading step, not a scorecard for any commercial product.
Across the header layout, the extractors lost 25% of all scored fields, 18 of 72 field reads, in that June 2026 corpus. The loss sat in the three fields parked in the header. The email, the name, and the phone each failed 66.7% of the time, 6 of 9 reads apiece. The footer layout behaved the same way and lost the email 66.7% of the time as well. Both figures are a floor on what the reading step can drop, not a verdict on any named ATS.
The format split is worth your attention. In the same test, the DOCX files read cleanly, since python-docx pulled the header text every time, and the losses landed in the PDF reads, where 37.5% of fields in the header layout dropped. Most people send a PDF. A PDF is where the header band went missing.
Most people who hit this never chose it. A lot of designed templates, especially the two-column ones sold as modern, park your name and contact line inside the document header so a colored sidebar can run the full height of the page. The insert-header feature in Word and Google Docs does the same thing when you use it for your contact line.
If you started from a downloaded template, and your name repeats on every page, or it sits above a horizontal rule you cannot click into as normal text, your contact details are probably in the header band the June 2026 test watched drop.
Yes, and that is the confusion to clear up. Visually, your name and contact line belong at the top. The problem is not the top of the page. It is the document header region, the repeating strip that Word and Google Docs place above the top margin.
Your name can sit at the very top of the page and still be safe, as long as those characters live in the body text and not in that special header zone. The visual position and the underlying region are two different things, and a parser only reads the second one.
You can test your own file in under a minute, and you should do it at least once, because it shows you what the machine sees instead of what you see.
The fix follows straight from that. In your editor, move your name, email, and phone out of the header and footer and into the first lines of the body on page one. Delete the header and footer regions if they only held contact details. Re-export the PDF and run the copy-paste test again. When the contact line pastes cleanly at the top, you have closed the gap that dropped the email two times out of three in the test.
The copy-paste test tells you whether your contact text is selectable and roughly where it lands. It will not tell you how a specific field-mapper pairs your job title with your employer, and it will not flag every section further down the page that quietly failed to parse. You are reading raw text with your eyes, which catches the obvious drop and misses the field-level mapping that happens after extraction.
Do the check above by hand at least once, so you know what the machine is blind to. When you want the two-minute version that reads your file the way a parser does and flags which fields did not come through, run it through the free ATS resume scan at /free-ats-resume-scan. Same logic as this page, faster.
Practice the hard questions now, so the real ones feel easy.
Get me readyNo credible study backs the claim that 75% of resumes are auto-rejected. The trail ends at Preptel, a vendor that folded in 2013. Here is what an ATS really does.
A clean single-column PDF reads as well as Word. In our June 2026 test, layout, not file type, is what broke the machine read. Here is how to check your resume.
In one classic study, graduating professional-school students who negotiated gained 7.4% on average over their first offer, and Pew found about two in three U.S. workers who asked got more than the opening number. Here is how to ask once, well.