The short answer (verified, August 2026): if you're applying to large healthcare employers, you're mostly writing for Workday — it runs hiring at 63% of the 46 largest healthcare employers we verified against their live careers portals (CVS Health, Cleveland Clinic, Cigna, Elevance Health, Centene, AdventHealth, Banner Health...). Use a single-column, text-based file, standard section headers, and exact-match keywords from each posting — then fix every field the portal parses, because recruiters filter on those fields, not your PDF.
Which systems actually read healthcare applications
From our portal-verified State of ATS 2026 dataset (743 large employers checked by hand, 707 verified, re-verified July 2026 — open data), the healthcare slice looks like this:
Workday — 63% of verified large healthcare employers. Abbott, AdventHealth, Banner Health, Baxter, Becton Dickinson, CVS Health, Cardinal Health, Centene, Cigna, Cleveland Clinic, Danaher, Edwards Lifesciences, Elevance Health, and more.
Oracle Cloud HCM — 15%. The #2 system in healthcare.
The long tail: Ascension runs iCIMS, Boston Scientific runs Eightfold, Johns Hopkins runs SAP SuccessFactors, Charles River runs SuccessFactors — and UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente are two of the last large employers still on Oracle's legacy Taleo, the fussiest parser on this list.No other sector concentrates this hard on one system — healthcare's 63% Workday share is the highest of any industry we track (retail is ~54%, investment banking's leader is Greenhouse at ~35%).
What this means for your resume
Single-column, text-based PDF or .docx. No tables, no text boxes, no graphics, no two-column layouts. If you can't select the text, the parser can't read it.
Standard section headers. "Experience," "Education," "Skills," "Certifications," "Licenses" — healthcare recruiters filter on licensure, so give it its own clearly-labeled section (RN, NP, PA-C, BLS/ACLS, state licenses with numbers omitted).
Fix the parsed fields — this is the big one. On Workday and Oracle portals, the resume you upload gets extracted into structured form fields, and those fields are what recruiters search and filter. Two extra minutes correcting titles, dates, and credentials in the form beats any formatting trick.
Exact-match keywords from each posting. Recruiter searches are literal: if the posting says "utilization management," write "utilization management," not "UM review." Spell out and abbreviate: "Electronic Health Record (EHR)," "Epic," "Cerner."
Applying to UnitedHealth or Kaiser? Extra caution. Taleo is the most formatting-fragile system still in wide use — plain fonts, no symbols, nothing decorative.
Check which system your target employer runs
Most resumes are screened by an ATS before a human sees them
Build an optimized resume in minutes or check your current score — both free.
It changes your formatting and your keyword strategy, and it's checkable in seconds: look up any large employer free — every attribution verified against the employer's live careers portal, re-checked weekly. Then run your resume through the free ATS checker (no signup, 3 checks a day) against that specific parser.
*Every number above is computed from the open, MIT-licensed State of ATS 2026 dataset — 743 employers checked, 707 verified, re-verified July 2026. If you find a record that looks wrong, tell us and a human re-checks it against the live portal.*
Ready to optimize your resume?
Build an ATS-optimized resume with AI in minutes.