Brassring is the applicant tracking system most candidates underestimate. Originally a standalone product, then absorbed into IBM Kenexa Talent Acquisition Suite in 2012, then divested to Infor Talent Management in 2018, the platform now powers hiring funnels at dozens of Fortune 500 employers: AIG, Cigna, Hertz, Toyota North America, several Tier-1 US health systems, and most of the largest insurance carriers. It is unfashionable to talk about. Workday, Greenhouse, and Ashby get the press. Brassring quietly screens a sizable fraction of US enterprise applications, and its parser was designed in an era when DOCX was the dominant resume format and resume "design" meant Times New Roman 12. Submitting a modern multi-column PDF tuned for Ashby into a Brassring requisition is a near-guaranteed parse failure. This guide covers what Brassring actually does to a resume, the five quirks that trip up most candidates, the file and format rules that consistently parse cleanly, and a fully worked enterprise resume example tuned to its strengths.
What Brassring Is and Who Still Uses It
Brassring began life in the early 2000s as a stand-alone enterprise ATS, was acquired by Kenexa in 2006, then acquired by IBM in 2012 as part of the $1.3B Kenexa deal that built out IBM's HR Smarter Workforce business. In 2018, IBM divested most of its HR Workforce Management portfolio to private equity, and the assets became part of what is now Infor Talent Management. Despite three corporate owners, the underlying Brassring platform code base, including its parser, has not been rebuilt from scratch. The system is reliable and stable, but its core resume-parsing logic dates back to a pre-2010 era of resume conventions.
Companies known to use Brassring in 2026
Insurance and financial services: AIG, Cigna, several large Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates, regional credit unions.
Manufacturing and auto: Toyota Motor North America, Hertz, several Tier-1 auto OEMs and suppliers.
Healthcare: a number of large IDNs (Integrated Delivery Networks) and academic medical centers running Infor's healthcare-aligned configuration.
Government contractors and legacy Fortune 500: still common in companies that built their HRIS stack between 2008 and 2014 and have not migrated to Workday or SuccessFactors.
The pattern: Brassring tends to persist at companies that built their enterprise HR systems in the late 2000s and early 2010s and that have very high switching costs (regulated industries, large unionized workforces, complex compliance configurations). If you are applying to an established US insurance carrier, a major regional health system, or a legacy Fortune 500 manufacturer, the requisition is more likely to be Brassring than candidates expect.
5 Brassring Quirks That Modern Resumes Fail
The single biggest mistake candidates make with Brassring is assuming it behaves like Workday or Greenhouse. It does not. The parser is older, the rendering engine is older, and the data model that recruiters search is keyword-frequency weighted in a way modern AI-first ATS platforms have moved past. Five specific quirks cause most parse failures.
1. Multi-column layouts fragment
Brassring reads strictly top-to-bottom in left-to-right order. A two-column resume with skills in a left sidebar and experience on the right produces output where the sidebar's full content appears first, then the body content, jumbled. Hiring managers viewing the parsed text see a garbled document. Use single-column layouts only.
2. Headers and footers are dropped or read into the body
Contact information placed in a Word header or footer is either lost entirely or pulled into the middle of the parsed text. Always put name, phone, email, and LinkedIn URL in the main document body at the top of page one.
3. Text boxes are invisible to the parser
Brassring's text extraction routine ignores content placed inside Word text boxes. If you used a "highlights" callout box, a skills-snapshot widget, or any boxed element from a designed template, that content is gone from the parsed record. The recruiter sees nothing where the box was.
4. Hyperlinks are stripped
Brassring strips clickable hyperlinks during parse. If your LinkedIn URL is hidden behind the text "View profile," the URL is lost. Always write the URL out in plain text: "linkedin.com/in/yourname."
5. Tables are read cell-by-cell, not row-by-row
If you formatted your work history in a table (a common pattern in older resume templates), Brassring reads each cell as a separate text block. The result is a flat list of disconnected words with no relationship between dates, titles, and bullets. Use paragraph and list formatting only.
Bonus quirk: PDFs parse worse than DOCX
Unlike modern parsers, Brassring's PDF extraction can lose font hinting, italics, and bullet point characters. DOCX is the safer choice in Brassring even though most ATS guides recommend PDF in 2026. Submit DOCX when the application allows both.
Brassring Resume Format Rules
The format that consistently parses cleanly in Brassring is what veterans of enterprise hiring call the "boring resume": single-column, no design elements, conventional section headings, plain bullets, and a DOCX file submission. If you are sending the same resume to a startup using Ashby and a Fortune 500 using Brassring, keep two versions. The Ashby-tuned PDF can carry a touch more visual structure; the Brassring DOCX cannot.
Do
- Submit as DOCX (preferred) or, if required, a text-based PDF exported from Word.
- Use single-column layout for the entire resume body.
- Use conventional section headers: Summary, Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications.
- Use Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, or Helvetica at 10.5 to 12 point body size.
- Put contact information in the main document body at the top of page one.
- Write dates as "Jan 2021 to Mar 2026" or "01/2021 to 03/2026"; avoid "Q1 2021" or sidebar dates.
- Spell out acronyms once on first use (Customer Relationship Management, CRM).
- Use standard bullet characters and indentation; avoid custom bullet glyphs.
- Repeat the most important target keywords two to three times across summary, experience, and skills.
Don't
- Submit a Canva, Figma, or design-tool-exported PDF where text is rendered as a graphic.
- Use a two-column layout with a sidebar; Brassring will fragment the read order.
- Put contact info in a Word header or footer; it will be dropped.
- Use text boxes for any content; the parser ignores them entirely.
- Use tables to lay out experience; the parser flattens cells into disconnected words.
- Hyperlink your URLs behind anchor text; write URLs in plain text.
- Use icons or special characters for contact info (phone glyphs, email glyphs, location pins).
- Include a headshot or any embedded image.
- Stuff white-text or off-canvas keywords; modern Brassring deployments include keyword-stuffing flags in recruiter view.
A Brassring-Optimized Enterprise Resume Example
Below is a working resume for a senior enterprise sales role formatted to parse cleanly in Brassring. It uses single-column layout, plain section headers, standard bullets, and writes keywords out in long form so the frequency-weighted parser indexes them.
James K. Patterson
Hartford, CT | 860-555-0142 | james.patterson@example.com
linkedin.com/in/jamespatterson
SUMMARY
Enterprise sales executive with 12 years closing complex insurance and financial services accounts in the $500K to $4M ACV range. Consistent President's Club performer at Cigna and AIG. Built and grew the Northeast regional book from $8M to $38M annual recurring revenue across 18 named accounts. Track record of selling into Chief Risk Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and General Counsel buyer roles.
EXPERIENCE
Senior Enterprise Account Executive, Cigna Group Insurance | Jan 2021 to Present
- Closed $14.2M in new annual recurring revenue across 9 Fortune 500 employer-group medical and dental accounts; ranked #2 of 38 senior AEs nationally in 2024 and 2025.
- Led 18-month enterprise sales cycle into a Fortune 100 manufacturer resulting in $4.1M ACV across medical, dental, vision, and disability lines, displacing a 12-year UnitedHealth incumbent.
- Co-developed and launched named-account expansion motion that grew average wallet share from 38% to 67% across the top 12 existing accounts ($6.4M incremental ARR).
- Mentored 4 mid-market account executives through quota attainment; all 4 achieved 110% or higher in 2025.
Enterprise Account Executive, AIG Financial Lines | May 2017 to Dec 2020
- Sold cyber-liability, directors-and-officers, and professional-liability coverage into Fortune 1000 accounts in the Northeast; achieved 134% average quota attainment over 4 years.
- Built territory from $8M to $19M annual recorded premium across 22 named accounts in 38 months.
- Closed the largest cyber-liability policy in territory history ($2.8M annual premium) at a Tier-1 hospital system following 14 months of executive-sponsor cultivation.
Account Executive, AIG Property and Casualty | Mar 2013 to Apr 2017
- Managed renewal and expansion of $34M property and casualty book across 84 mid-market commercial accounts.
- Achieved 96% retention rate and 18% net new ARR growth annually for 4 consecutive years.
EDUCATION
B.S. Finance, University of Connecticut | 2013
CERTIFICATIONS
Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU), 2019
Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC), 2017
Series 6 and Series 63 (FINRA), 2015
SKILLS
Enterprise account management, complex sales cycles, executive-level prospecting, Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, sales forecasting, territory planning, named-account strategy, request-for-proposal response, contract negotiation, cyber-liability insurance, directors and officers insurance, professional-liability insurance, employer-group benefits, medical and dental sales, MEDDIC, Force Management, Challenger sale methodology.
Three things make this resume Brassring-friendly. First, every section uses a plain text header in all-caps, which the parser indexes reliably. Second, every employer-role pair is written as a single paragraph followed by bullets, with no table formatting. Third, the skills section spells out target keywords in their long form (Customer Relationship Management appears nowhere as just "CRM"), and frequency-weighted phrases like "enterprise account" and "named account" appear two or more times across the document.
Keyword Strategy for a Frequency-Weighted Parser
Modern ATS platforms like Ashby and Greenhouse use semantic matching: synonyms and related concepts often satisfy a keyword requirement even if the exact word is missing. Brassring is older and weighted more heavily on exact-string frequency. A resume that mentions "Salesforce" once may rank below a resume that mentions "Salesforce" three times, even when both candidates have identical experience. Three tactical rules follow from this.
- Mirror the job posting's exact phrases at least twice each. Copy the 8 to 12 most important phrases from the job description verbatim and weave them into the summary, two bullets in the most recent role, and the skills section.
- Write both the long form and the abbreviation. "Customer Relationship Management (CRM)" indexes for both queries. Write the long form once and use the abbreviation in subsequent mentions.
- Do not stuff white-text keywords. Brassring's current recruiter interface flags resumes with hidden-text keyword stuffing. The candidate ends up below the line where a clean keyword-tuned resume would have ranked.
For broader ATS keyword guidance that works across Brassring, Workday, Greenhouse, and iCIMS, see our ATS optimization guide and the ATS resume score guide.
Brassring vs Workday vs Greenhouse: What's Different
Treating all three the same is a mistake. The format that ranks well in Greenhouse can fail outright in Brassring. The table below maps the key parser differences candidates should know.
| Dimension | Brassring | Workday | Greenhouse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preferred file type | DOCX | DOCX (pre-fill workflow) | PDF or DOCX, both reliable |
| Multi-column layouts | Fragments badly | Often misreads sidebar | Usually parses correctly |
| Text boxes | Ignored entirely | Inconsistent parse | Usually parsed |
| Tables for experience layout | Flattens cells, breaks relationships | Causes pre-fill errors | Usually parsed |
| Hyperlinks behind anchor text | Stripped | Partial | Preserved |
| Headers/footers for contact info | Dropped | Dropped | Usually preserved |
| Matching approach | Keyword frequency, exact-string weighted | Skills Cloud entity match plus structured fields | Keyword index plus recruiter manual review |
| Semantic synonym handling | Limited | Moderate (Skills Cloud) | Moderate |
| AI candidate scoring | None native (recruiter-driven) | Optional via Workday HCM AI add-on | Native Greenhouse Sourcing AI |
The summary: Brassring rewards plain, dense, exact-keyword resumes; Workday rewards structured pre-fill alignment with the candidate profile; Greenhouse rewards a balance of both with more tolerance for design. If you cannot tell which platform the requisition uses, the Brassring-safe format is the most conservative choice and works on the other two as well. See our companion guides on Workday formatting and Greenhouse formatting for platform-specific rules.
5 Common Brassring Submission Mistakes
Submitting a designed PDF from Canva or Figma
Brassring cannot reliably extract text from PDFs where text is rendered as graphics. Open the file and try to select a paragraph. If your cursor highlights a bounding box, regenerate the resume from Word.
Two-column layout with a sidebar
The "modern resume" two-column format kills Brassring parses. Skills end up before experience, dates end up disconnected from roles, and recruiters see a jumbled record.
Contact info in a Word header
Brassring drops Word headers and footers from the parsed record. Name, phone, and email are lost. Put contact info in the document body at the top of page one.
Using tables for experience entries
Tables fragment in Brassring's parse output. Use paragraph and list formatting only. If a template used a table, convert it to text before submission.
Burying acronyms without spelling them out
A recruiter searching for "Customer Relationship Management" will not find your resume if you only wrote "CRM." Write both forms at least once each.
Ignoring the parsed-text preview
Most Brassring requisitions include a candidate-portal preview of the parsed resume after upload. Review it. If the preview is jumbled, your application is jumbled.
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