Where your email silently vanishes: contact details in the header
The short answer
Putting your name, email and phone number in the header of a Word document is a 6 point finding in our published rule set. Six points is small. What it can cost you is not.
Word headers and footers are not part of the document body. They are a separate region, repeated on every page, stored apart from the content. A well known class of parser reads the body and never touches them. When that happens, your entire work history comes through perfectly and the three fields a recruiter needs in order to reply do not come through at all.
The system then holds a complete, well written, quantified resume belonging to nobody it can contact.
Why this one is worse than its weight
Most findings on the list degrade something. This one removes the thing the whole document exists to produce.
A resume is not an end in itself. It is an argument that ends in a conversation, and the conversation needs an address. Everything else on the page is in service of a recruiter deciding to type your email into a message. If the email is the one piece that did not survive the parse, every other point you earned is stranded.
That is why it is worth treating this as more urgent than the number suggests. Six points will barely move your grade. The failure it describes ends the application.
Why people do it
Nobody puts contact details in a header by accident of judgement. It is usually a reasonable decision made for a good reason.
Headers repeat on every page, so a two page resume carries your name on both without you managing it. Headers sit above the top margin, which buys back vertical space on a crowded page. Many resume templates ship with the contact block already in the header, so the choice was made by whoever built the template and inherited silently by everyone who used it.
The design logic is sound. The parsing consequence is invisible. That combination is exactly why this shows up so often.
How to check in under a minute
Open your resume in the program you wrote it in. Click directly on your name at the top of the page.
If the cursor lands in the text and you can edit the line normally, your contact block is in the body. Nothing to do.
If you cannot click into it with a single click, or the area greys out, or you have to double click to enter a separate editing region, your contact block is in the header. That is the finding.
The second test works on the exported file rather than the source, and it is the one that actually matters, because the export is what you send. Open the PDF, select all, copy, and paste into a blank plain text document. Look for your email address. If it is missing from the paste, or if it appears in a strange position relative to everything else, the header is behaving as a separate region.
The fix
Move the contact block into the body of the document. Put your name, location, email, phone and any links in ordinary paragraphs at the top of the first page, above your summary.
You lose the automatic repetition on page two. That is a real loss and a small one. A recruiter reading page two of your resume already has page one. In practice, a name on the second page is a convenience rather than a requirement, and if you want it there, adding it as a plain line at the top of the second page costs you nothing and keeps it inside the body.
While you are in there, it is worth confirming the block is complete. Contact block is a separate 7 point check inside the 15 point completeness category, and it covers whether the expected fields are actually present rather than where they live. A missing phone number is an empty box a recruiter has to chase, which is friction at exactly the wrong moment.
The fields worth having are the ones application forms ask for on every single posting, and those turn out to be remarkably consistent. We measured them across real openings in what ATS application forms actually ask for, and having them ready in one place is also what stops you retyping the same six answers on every form, which we cover in the six fields you fill in every time.
Footers have the same problem
Everything above applies to footers, and footers attract a particular habit worth naming: putting a portfolio link, a LinkedIn URL or a personal site in the footer of the page.
Those are exactly the fields a hiring manager reaches for when they are interested and want to see more. Putting them in the least readable region of the document is an unfortunate trade. If a link is worth including, it is worth including in the body.
The pattern this belongs to
Headers, footers, text boxes and tables are all the same class of problem, and recognising the class is more useful than memorising the cases.
Each one is a place where the document you see and the document a parser reads disagree. To you, a header is at the top of the page, which is the most prominent position there is. To a parser, it is outside the region being read. Text boxes float above the body rather than sitting in it, and content inside them is an 8 point check for the same reason. Tables store their content cell by cell, so a parser can flatten them into the wrong order, which is another 8 points. We cover both in tables and text boxes in a resume.
The rule that falls out of it is simple enough to apply without remembering any of the individual weights. If a piece of information matters, put it in the ordinary flow of the document. Anything load bearing belongs in the body: your name, your contact details, your employers, your dates, your bullets. Decoration can live wherever it looks best, because nothing depends on a parser finding it.
What to do next
Check the header first, because it is a one minute test with a disproportionate consequence, and because unlike most of this list it is completely invisible from the outside. Then work down the published weights in order rather than fixing whatever you noticed most recently.
The full ranked list, with the point value attached to every check, is in what actually breaks a resume in an ATS. Before any of it, confirm the file is not locked and does have a text layer, because those two are worth 35 points each and are covered in the two resume files that score zero.
If you would rather see the findings for your own document than reason from the general case, the free ATS checker runs every published check in your browser, shows each finding against the line that triggered it, and uploads nothing.
This is the finding people are most surprised by, which is why the free ATS checker from iapplyai.app reports it explicitly rather than folding it into a general formatting score. It runs in your browser and keeps your file there.
