By Peter Miller · Published August 11, 2026 · Last updated: October 8, 2026
8 min read
Your UK CV reads fine on screen, but Greenhouse imported your 2022 role under a 2018 internship. That's not a keyword problem. It's usually a file-type or column choice you made five minutes before you hit Apply.
Check your resume for free after you fix layout, and compare what the checker extracts to what you see in Word. If jobs arrive out of order, don't tweak bullet wording yet. Fix the fork below first.
Tonight you're not rewriting your career story. You're choosing DOCX vs PDF, one column vs two, and a date style Greenhouse can read without guessing.
Pick your fork in sixty seconds
- Word allowed? Save DOCX from Word or Docs, not a design export.
- Paste test scrambled? Rebuild one column before you touch keywords.
- PDF only? Search your phone number inside the file. No hit means no text.
What Greenhouse actually imports from a UK CV
Greenhouse is an applicant tracking system many UK employers use on careers pages. Before a recruiter searches your name, the portal turns your upload into fields: employer, title, start date, end date, degree, skills.
Parsing is linear. It reads top to bottom and commits to whatever order it finds. UK CV templates often fight that with sidebars, skill grids, or contact bands sitting in header zones.
Greenhouse ATS resume optimization UK CVs work on when the imported profile matches the document you wrote. If dates vanish or skills attach to the wrong job, the recruiter sees a broken record, not a polite rejection note.
Job searching is stressful enough without a layout trick hiding your phone number. None of this means your experience is weak. It means the file never arrived intact.
Compare your habits to US resume vs UK CV differences when you are applying to a UK arm of a US firm. You can keep UK spelling, but the upload still needs a parser-friendly skeleton.
Greenhouse ATS resume optimization UK CVs: DOCX vs PDF
Two decisions drive most Greenhouse formatting fixes for UK CVs in 2024 uploads: file type and column layout. Run both comparisons before you rewrite bullets.
DOCX vs PDF for Greenhouse UK applications
| Factor | DOCX | |
|---|---|---|
| Best when | Portal accepts Word and CV lives in Word or Google Docs | Posting requires PDF or you need locked layout after a clean export |
| Typical failure | Hidden tables from templates still present in the XML | Design-tool export with non-selectable text |
| Quick test | Show table gridlines in Word | Ctrl+F your phone number inside the PDF |
Before: Canva two-page UK CV saved as PDF for a Greenhouse posting that also accepts DOCX.
After: Single-column DOCX from Word with 11-point Calibri, standard headings, and Month Year dates on plain lines.
Read PDF vs Word for ATS when the careers page is silent. Default to DOCX unless PDF is mandatory or your DOCX exports worse than a text-based PDF.
One column vs two column for UK CVs
| Layout | What you see | What Greenhouse often receives |
|---|---|---|
| One column | Long scroll, skills at the bottom | Jobs stay grouped with their dates |
| Two column | Skills beside each role | Sidebar skills inserted between job bullets |
Select all, paste into Notepad or TextEdit, and read top to bottom. If Python from a sidebar appears between two bullets for the same employer, Greenhouse received that same scramble.
Before: Narrow left column for skills, wide right column for roles, contact row in a coloured header band.
After: Contact block in body text, then Experience, Education, Skills as stacked sections with no sidebars.
Copy-paste UK CV header for Greenhouse
Drop this at the top of page one as normal body text. Delete lines you do not use. Do not put the block in a Word header field.
Copy-paste contact block
[Full name]
[City, UK] · [phone] · [email] · [linkedin.com/in/handle]
[Target title matching the Greenhouse posting]
Experience
[Job title], [Company], [City]
Jan 2022 to Present
- [Bullet with metric or scope, e.g. cut report turnaround from 5 days to 2 days for a 12-person team]
UK CV habits that break Greenhouse imports
I've screened stacks of these in Greenhouse for UK roles, and the file that wins is boring, single-column, and explicit about dates.
Photos and personal detail blocks
UK templates sometimes include photos or long personal sections. Greenhouse does not extract a portrait into a useful field, and heavy top banners push contact lines into zones parsers skip.
Slash dates and mixed formats
Mixing 03/2021, Mar 2021, and 2021 on the same CV forces a guess. Pick Month Year and keep it on the same line as the role.
Creative section titles
Headings like My Journey or Core Toolkit do not map to Experience or Skills. Rename to the plain words the form expects.
This will not fix applying to roles you are not qualified for. It stops a qualified UK CV from dying in the parser because the template looked clever on a phone screen.
Confirm the Greenhouse import before you submit
After you pick DOCX or PDF and flatten to one column, upload the file to the free ATS resume checker and read the extraction line by line. Missing jobs, missing dates, and misplaced skills are the three flags to fix.
If the template itself is the problem, rebuild from a plain base with the free resume builder and save a DOCX backup even when the portal asks for PDF.
Save the boring file and move on
Greenhouse ATS resume optimization UK CVs comes down to two comparisons: DOCX vs PDF when the posting allows a choice, and one column vs two when the paste test fails. Fix those forks, standardise Month Year dates, and drop photos from the upload copy.
Run the paste test, search your phone number in the PDF, and only then tune bullets for the posting. When the imported profile matches your CV, you are competing on experience instead of layout.
Pair a clean CV with a short letter from the cover letter generator so the packet reads consistent to a human reviewer.
Frequently asked questions
Upload DOCX when the portal accepts Word and your CV is built in Word or Google Docs. Use a text-based PDF only when the posting limits you to PDF or when your DOCX uses features that export badly. Skip Canva PDFs, scans, and photo exports because the text is often not selectable.
Only if you treat the sidebar as decorative. Put every date, job title, employer, and skill the recruiter must see in a single main column. If a plain-text paste scrambles your jobs, the layout is not safe regardless of how polished it looks on screen.
Photos do not add parseable text and they can push contact lines into header zones some imports skip. For Greenhouse applications, drop the photo and repeat name, phone, and email as body text at the top of page one.
Use Month Year ranges spelled out, such as Jan 2020 to Mar 2024, on the same line as the role. Avoid slash dates like 01/03/2020 that parsers read as US or UK order depending on the guess.