Where should contact details go?

In the document body, near the top. Header and footer regions are treated differently by some systems, and details placed only there can be missed entirely. Repeating them in the body costs one line and removes the risk.

What does ResumeTune check for contact details?

Whether an email pattern or a phone number pattern appears anywhere in the extracted text. If neither is found, the format component takes a fifteen point deduction. It does not verify that the address is real or that the number is reachable.

Do LinkedIn and portfolio links count as contact details?

Not for that check, which looks for an email or a phone number. Links are still worth including as plain text, because a URL rendered only as a clickable icon or an image may not survive extraction at all.

Is an icon beside my email enough?

No. The icon is a graphic, so the address itself must be present as text. This is one of the most common ways a resume arrives with no reachable contact information despite looking complete on screen.

Updated August 13, 2026

Contact details and links parsers actually extract

Applicant tracking systems do not see a contact bar the way a person does. They receive a string of characters from the file, then look for patterns that resemble an email or a phone number — if they look for contact at all.

This guide is about which contact details and links survive as real text. It is not a tour of images, charts, or skill bars; that problem is broader and covered separately. After a parser has done its job, is there still an email, a phone number, and a usable URL in the recovered string?

ResumeTune’s free check is a useful example because its behaviour is public and fixed. It does not run a named-entity contact extractor, and it does not reconstruct LinkedIn or portfolio fields. It looks at the extracted string.

What “extract” means for contact details

Extraction is the first automated step after upload. The system opens a PDF or a DOCX and collects character strings. Icons, colours, and the visual grouping of a contact bar do not travel with that stream.

ResumeTune’s document worker uses two engines and no extra intelligence on top. PDFs go through unpdf, which reads the page text layer. DOCX files go through mammoth’s raw-text extraction, which walks the document body. Neither engine labels “this run is an email field.” They return text. Anything a later check knows about contact is inferred from that string.

A contact line that looks perfect on screen can still be missing from the extract. The design can be correct and the string empty. A plain line of typed text is often the version parsers actually keep.

Email addresses parsers can recognise as text

An email is extractable when it exists as selectable characters in the usual shape: local part, @, domain, and a suffix. ResumeTune’s format check uses a simple pattern for that shape. It does not validate that the mailbox exists. It asks whether the recovered text contains something that looks like an address.

That pattern fails on spam-dodge spellings — “name at company dot com,” “name [at] company.com” — and on addresses split across a graphic and a caption. A stylised @ drawn as an icon is not a character in the extract.

Put the address in the body as ordinary text, once, near the top. If a checker later says contact is missing, the usual cause is not that you forgot it on the designed page. It is that the extracted string never contained it.

Typed, selectable text in the form name@domain.tld.
Avoid “at / dot” spellings and image-only letterheads.
One clear line in the body is enough; repeating it in a graphic adds nothing to extraction.

Phone numbers that survive a digit check

Phone numbers are recognised as runs of digits with ordinary separators: spaces, parentheses, dots, hyphens, and an optional leading plus. ResumeTune’s check looks for that kind of run. It does not interpret country codes or reformat the number for a region.

A phone icon with no digits next to it is not a number. A number drawn into a banner is pixels. A number stored only in a header region may never enter the body extract. Very short fragments will not match.

Write the number as text a person could copy. Keep it near your name in the body. Hiding it behind a tap-target icon is not equivalent.

LinkedIn and portfolio URLs are not a contact “field”

LinkedIn and portfolio sites still matter to humans. In a text extract they are just URLs unless a product has a dedicated parser for them. ResumeTune does not. Its missing-contact finding is email or phone only. A resume that contains linkedin.com/in/yourname and a GitHub URL, but no email and no phone in the extracted string, still triggers the contact warning.

Write the link as visible text — the URL, or a path a person could type — not as a logo that implies a profile. The same rule applies to personal sites and GitHub.

A hyperlink on the word “Portfolio” with no URL showing can vanish depending on how the file was built. Some extractors keep the display text and drop the target. If the URL is not in a plain-text paste, do not assume a downstream ATS stored it as a structured link.

Write the URL as text: linkedin.com/in/yourname, yoursite.com.
A logo next to a blank space is not a profile.
ResumeTune does not score LinkedIn or portfolio presence; email or phone is the contact check.

Headers and footers versus the document body

Word and many PDF editors let you pin contact details in a header or footer so they repeat on every page. That is convenient for print and a hazard for extraction, because those regions are not always the same thing as the body.

ResumeTune’s DOCX path uses mammoth raw-text extraction, which reads the document body. Contact stored only in Word’s header or footer parts often never enters that string. The PDF path extracts page text with unpdf. A PDF has no labelled header the way Word does — it is a canvas of glyphs — so text in the top or bottom margin can still appear, interleave with body lines, or be skipped if it lives in an image instead of the text layer.

Put name, email, and phone in the main flow, near the top, as ordinary paragraphs. A header for page numbers is fine. Do not make the header the only copy of the details a recruiter needs.

Icon-only contact is a missing string, not a missing picture

This is the point that gets mixed up with “what ATS cannot see.” Images, charts, and skill bars are a general invisibility problem: the content was never text. Icon-only contact is that problem applied to the line recruiters use to reply.

Templates often replace the words email, phone, and LinkedIn with small glyphs. A person infers meaning from the envelope. A text extractor does not infer icons. If the glyph is a graphic and the adjacent run is empty, the extract has no address. If the address is typed next to a decorative icon, the address can still extract.

The fix is not “never use icons.” It is never letting the icon be the only carrier. Type the address and the number, then paste the file into a plain-text editor and confirm those characters survived.

What ResumeTune flags, and what it does not

After extraction, the free format check looks at the recovered string. It reports missing contact only when it finds neither an email-shaped token nor a phone-shaped digit run. One of the two is enough. That deduction is 15 points from the format component, not a separate “contact score,” and it is a text heuristic — not a judgement that you are unreachable in real life.

It does not parse a name, a city, a LinkedIn URL, or a portfolio. It does not know whether the email belongs to you. It does not distinguish a header from a body on a PDF canvas. It does not run an LLM on the free path.

A missing-contact warning means those patterns were absent in the recovered text, not that your designed page is blank. Move the details into the body, export again, and the finding should clear if the extract now contains them.

A two-minute check before you apply

You do not need ResumeTune to catch the majority of contact-extraction failures. You need the same preview a parser gets: the file without the design.

Open the PDF or DOCX you will actually upload, not a screenshot of a template.
Select your email and phone with the cursor. If they will not highlight, they are not text.
Copy the whole document and paste it into a plain-text editor.
Confirm the address and number appear as characters, not as a blank line where the icon bar was.
If either is missing, move them into the body as ordinary paragraphs and export again.

Where ResumeTune fits

Upload a PDF or DOCX on the homepage. The free path extracts text, then runs fixed readability and structure rules on what comes back — including the email-or-phone heuristic. No account is required. No AI model runs on that path.

The check can tell you whether those patterns were present in the recovered string. It cannot tell you whether a specific employer’s ATS will pre-fill contact fields or store your LinkedIn URL. Those systems are not public.

If you are choosing between a designed template and a plainer body-text version, run both and compare the extract. The version whose pasted text still contains your email and phone is the one parsers can actually use.

Frequently asked questions

Where should contact details go?: In the document body, near the top. Header and footer regions are treated differently by some systems, and details placed only there can be missed entirely. Repeating them in the body costs one line and removes the risk.
What does ResumeTune check for contact details?: Whether an email pattern or a phone number pattern appears anywhere in the extracted text. If neither is found, the format component takes a fifteen point deduction. It does not verify that the address is real or that the number is reachable.
Do LinkedIn and portfolio links count as contact details?: Not for that check, which looks for an email or a phone number. Links are still worth including as plain text, because a URL rendered only as a clickable icon or an image may not survive extraction at all.
Is an icon beside my email enough?: No. The icon is a graphic, so the address itself must be present as text. This is one of the most common ways a resume arrives with no reachable contact information despite looking complete on screen.