Does the ATS Read Hebrew? Comeet, Greenhouse, Lever & Workable — RTL Support and What It Means for Your CV

You applied through a Comeet link with a Hebrew CV and heard nothing. Your friend applied to a Greenhouse posting with the same kind of CV and got a callback. Was it the resume — or did the ATS silently mangle your Hebrew before a recruiter ever saw it?

Short answer, up front: every major ATS used in Israeli tech will store and display a Hebrew CV. Not every one of them will parse it well — and almost none of them will match Hebrew keywords the way recruiters actually search. The gap between "supports Hebrew" and "works in Hebrew" is where applications quietly die.

Here's the system-by-system breakdown, the failure modes we see in practice, and the rule we recommend for choosing your CV language per pipeline. (For how these systems filter in general — scoring, knockout questions, ranking — see our full teardown of how Comeet, Greenhouse and Workable filter your CV.)

"Hebrew support" is four different things

When people ask "does Greenhouse support Hebrew," they're really asking four questions, and the answers differ:

1. Display. Can the recruiter open your CV and see correct Hebrew? Yes, everywhere. Your PDF renders as a PDF. This is the least interesting layer, and it's the one vendors mean when they say "we support all languages."

2. Parsing. Can the system extract your name, phone, employers, dates and skills into structured fields? This is where right-to-left text gets messy. Hebrew resume parsing has to handle RTL ordering, mixed Hebrew-English lines ("מפתחת Backend ב-AWS"), and section headers it wasn't trained on. When parsing fails you become a candidate record with a blank work history and a garbled name — sortable by nothing, searchable by nothing.

3. Keyword search and matching. When a recruiter searches the candidate pool, or the ATS ranks applicants against the job description, what language is that happening in? In Israeli tech the posting is usually in English, the tech terms are always in English, and recruiters overwhelmingly search in English. A Hebrew CV with "ניהול צוות של 12" doesn't surface for a search on "team lead."

4. The workflow around you. Automated emails, scorecards, knockout questions — these follow the company's setup language, not your CV's.

Layer 1 works everywhere. Layers 2 and 3 are where the language of your CV changes your outcome.

System by system

Comeet — built in Israel, used by a large share of Israeli-local companies. This is the one system where Hebrew is a first-class citizen: Hebrew UI for recruiters, Hebrew postings are normal, and Hebrew CVs are the expected input for many of its customers. If the posting itself is written in Hebrew and the company runs Comeet, submitting a Hebrew CV is safe — and sometimes the better cultural signal for local, non-global companies (banks' tech arms, insurance, government-adjacent).

Greenhouse — global system, popular with Israeli scale-ups and multinationals' Israeli sites. It stores and displays Hebrew fine. Its parsing and candidate-matching pipeline, though, is built and tuned for left-to-right languages; in our testing, Hebrew CVs come through with partial field extraction more often than English ones, and mixed-direction lines are the most common breakage. More importantly: companies that run Greenhouse in Israel are, almost by definition, global-facing — their recruiters work in English, their hiring managers review in English.

Lever — same category as Greenhouse: global product, English-first pipeline. Hebrew won't crash anything, but you're relying on a human opening the PDF rather than on the structured data working for you.

Workable — sits in between. Decent multilingual handling, used by smaller Israeli companies and startups. Same practical logic applies: the posting's language tells you what the pipeline expects.

The pattern worth internalizing: the ATS follows the company, and the company's language follows its market. You're not really choosing per-ATS; you're choosing per-company-type, and the ATS is a strong tell for which type you're facing.

The rule: match the posting, default to English

If you take one thing from this article:

• Posting in English → English CV. Always. This covers effectively every Greenhouse and Lever pipeline in Israel, and most of Workable.
• Posting in Hebrew, Israeli-local company → Hebrew CV is safe, especially on Comeet. Keep your tech stack, tool names and certifications in English inside it — that's how they'll be searched.
• Not sure → English. An English CV parses correctly in every system on this list. A Hebrew CV parses correctly in some. That asymmetry is the whole decision.

This is the ATS-mechanics half of the language question. The other half — recruiter expectations, company culture, role type — has its own decision framework: Hebrew CV vs English CV, which one when.

If you do submit in Hebrew: five failure points to avoid

1. Two-column layouts. RTL plus multi-column is the hardest case for text extraction. One column, top to bottom.
2. Scanned or image-based PDFs. If you can't select the text in your PDF viewer, the ATS can't either. Export from a real editor, never a photo or a flattened design tool.
3. Hebrew-only tech terms. Write "Python", "Kubernetes", "CI/CD" in Latin characters even mid-Hebrew-sentence. Recruiters search these exact strings.
4. Fancy fonts and text-as-outline exports. Some design tools convert Hebrew text to curves to preserve the look — which deletes your text layer entirely.
5. Contact details in Hebrew. Your name in Hebrew is fine in the header, but include name, email and phone in Latin characters too. Auto-parsed fields feed the recruiter's screen and their email tool.

How to check what the ATS actually sees

You don't have to guess. Two checks, two minutes:

The select-all test. Open your PDF, select all, paste into a plain-text editor. If words come out reversed, scrambled or missing — that's roughly what a parser gets.

The match test. Run your CV against the actual posting in the Match Analyzer. It reads your resume the way an ATS does — extraction first, keyword match second — and shows you the score plus which required keywords it couldn't find in your text. If skills you definitely have show up as missing, that's a parsing or language-mismatch problem, not a skills problem. Resume Adaptation can then rewrite the bullets around the real gaps without touching your facts.

FAQ

Does Comeet support Hebrew resumes? Yes — Comeet is an Israeli-built ATS and Hebrew CVs are a normal input for it: display, parsing and recruiter workflow all handle Hebrew. If the posting is in Hebrew and the company is Israeli-local, a Hebrew CV on Comeet is a safe choice.

Does Greenhouse parse Hebrew CVs correctly? Greenhouse stores and displays Hebrew without issues, but its parsing and matching are tuned for left-to-right languages, and field extraction from Hebrew CVs is less reliable — especially with mixed Hebrew-English lines or multi-column layouts. Since Greenhouse users in Israel are mostly global-facing companies, submit in English.

Should I send a Hebrew or English CV to an Israeli tech company? Match the posting's language, and default to English when unsure. English parses correctly in every major ATS; Hebrew parses correctly in some. Keep technology names in English either way.

How do I know if my CV parsed correctly? Select-all-and-paste your PDF into a text editor — reversed or scrambled output means parsers struggle too. Then run it against a real posting in a match checker and look for "missing" keywords you actually have; those are extraction failures you can fix with a simpler layout.

Korotchaim is built for the Israeli tech job market — Hebrew + English, and tuned to how Comeet, Greenhouse and Lever actually screen. Check any job for free — no signup, 30 seconds.