The header and footer regions of a document are page furniture — running titles, page numbers — and many resume parsers skip them by design. Put your name, phone, and email in the document header and your parsed profile can come out anonymous: work history intact, no way to contact you. Contact details belong in the body of page one.
Extraction libraries treat headers and footers as repeating page decoration, because in almost every document genre that is what they are. Skipping them prevents page numbers and running titles from contaminating the extracted text — a sensible default that becomes a trap for the one genre where people put their most important data there.
Word templates cause most of the damage: many polished designs place the name block in the literal header region because it keeps the layout stable. On screen and in print, nothing distinguishes it from body text at the top of the page. In the extraction, the difference is total — one is read, the other may not exist. The failure is silent and selective: your experience parses beautifully while the profile's contact fields sit empty, or get filled with a guess from somewhere else in the document.
Missing contact details fail differently across systems. Some portals mark required fields empty and force you to type them — annoying but survivable, if you notice. Worse are pipelines where the parse happens invisibly: sourcing tools that ingest resumes from job boards, agency databases, referral uploads. There, an unparsed email means candidate records that cannot be contacted, and nobody is checking on your behalf.
Second-page footers carry their own small trap: if your name and page numbering live in a footer, fine — that is what footers are for, and losing them costs nothing. The rule is directional. Content that may be safely lost belongs in headers and footers; content that must survive belongs in the body. Contact details are the single most must-survive block on the document.
Put your name as the first line of body text on page one, styled as large as you like — size is safe, position in the body is the point. Under it, on one or two plain lines: phone, email, city and country, LinkedIn URL as visible text. No icons standing in for labels, no text box framing the block, no columns splitting it.
To check an existing resume, click your name: if a header workspace opens rather than a text cursor in the body, relocate the block. Then run the copy-paste test on the exported PDF and confirm your email and phone appear in the pasted text. Two minutes of checking removes the most self-defeating parse failure a resume can have — being an excellent candidate with no reachable owner.
In Word or Google Docs, click directly on your name: if the app switches into a header-editing mode instead of placing a normal cursor, it lives in the header region. Move the block into the first lines of the document body and restyle it there.
Yes — that is the correct use of a footer. If a parser skips it you lose nothing, and human readers of a printed copy gain page attribution. Just ensure the authoritative contact block also exists in the body of page one.
No — behavior varies by parsing engine, and some read them fine. That variability is exactly the problem: you cannot know which engine reads your file. Placing contact details in the body costs nothing and parses correctly in every engine, so the choice is one-sided.
Upload your resume to the free scorer and check the parsed contact fields — if your email or phone did not survive, you have found the header trap before it cost you an interview.
