Upload your resume and get an instant ATS score. Analyze keywords, formatting, and structural hierarchy.
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We scan for keywords, formatting, and compatibility.
Receive your ATS score with recommendations.
Identifies missing keywords and suggests industry terms.
Checks for ATS-friendly formatting and tables.
Evaluates section organization and readability.
Compares skills against job requirements.
Verifies essential sections are present.
Rates strength of achievements.
Most resumes are not rejected because the candidate is wrong for the job. They are rejected because an applicant tracking system could not read them, could not find the words the employer searched for, or scored them lower than the pile above yours. Screening software is not judging your career; it is converting your document to plain text, matching it against a set of terms, and ranking the result. Anything that survives that conversion intact keeps its full meaning in front of a recruiter. Anything that does not is simply never seen.
Multi-column designs, tables, text boxes and sidebars are reassembled in whatever order the parser happens to walk them. Your experience can end up interleaved with your education, with no way for a recruiter to reconstruct it.
Headers and footers are routinely stripped during conversion. Putting your name, phone number or portfolio link there means a recruiter may have no way to reach you even when they want to.
Employers search for the language in their own posting. If the job asks for stakeholder management and your resume says client relations, you can describe identical work and still fail the match.
Bullets that describe responsibility rather than outcome rank poorly and read worse. "Responsible for reporting" gives a system nothing to match and a recruiter nothing to remember.
A scanned or photographed PDF contains no selectable text. The parser extracts an empty document, and an empty document scores zero regardless of what is printed on the page.
Creative labels such as "Where I Have Been" or "My Toolkit" do not map to the standard sections software expects. Unrecognised headings leave your content orphaned and unsearchable.
The score is a composite of six checks, and the number matters far less than which sub-score is dragging it down. A 62 caused by missing keywords is a ten-minute fix. A 62 caused by formatting that scrambles every section is a rebuild. Read the bands below, then fix the lowest sub-score first.
Parses cleanly, covers the language of the role, and quantifies its achievements. Send it. Re-check only when you change target role.
The structure is sound but a keyword cluster or two is missing. Compare against the specific job posting and add the terms you genuinely hold.
Either keywords are thin or achievements are unquantified. Rewrite the experience bullets with numbers and mirror the posting wording before applying.
Something structural is failing — a parser-breaking layout, an image-only file, or far too few relevant terms. Fix the format first, then the content.
There is no universal pass mark. Every employer configures its own thresholds, and many do not filter on score at all — they filter on exact keyword presence. Use the number to rank your own resumes against each other, not as a verdict on your candidacy.
Formatting advice for resumes tends to be aesthetic. These rules are not: each one exists because a specific parsing step fails without it. They are also the fastest fixes on this page, because they change nothing about your experience.
Two-column resumes are read column by column, so your left-column job titles merge with your right-column skills. Keep multi-column only for small, non-critical blocks like a skills list.
Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications, Projects. Deviating from these means the parser cannot tell where one section ends and the next begins.
Export from your editor rather than scanning a printed copy. If the recruiter can select your name with a cursor, the parser can read it too.
Progress bars, rating stars, logos and skill meters carry no extractable text. Everything you communicate visually inside them is invisible to screening software.
Write "Product Manager, Acme Corp — 2021–2024" rather than splitting the employer and dates into separate visual blocks, which get separated again during conversion.
Standard system fonts and embedded text render reliably. Decorative or non-Latin fonts can convert to garbled characters, which quietly destroys every keyword they contain.
A single generic resume will always underperform a tailored one, because the match is recalculated for every posting. Tailoring does not mean rewriting the document — it means aligning the language you already use with the language the employer used.
Highlight the skills, tools and responsibilities that repeat in the posting. Those are the terms the search is run against, and the ones you must be sure appear.
Match each term to real experience. Mirror the wording for skills you hold — "Kubernetes" rather than "container orchestration" — and drop the ones you do not.
Score the tailored version before you send it. The gap between your generic and tailored scores is usually large enough to change the outcome.
An ATS resume checker is a tool that reads your resume the way an applicant tracking system does — parsing sections, extracting skills and experience, and scoring how well the document matches a job description. Ours reviews keyword coverage, formatting that breaks parsers, section structure and achievement strength, then returns an ATS score with specific fixes.
There is no universal pass mark, because every employer configures its own thresholds and filters. In practice, resumes that clear automated screening tend to sit above 70, and anything under 50 usually means missing keywords or a formatting problem that stops the parser. Treat the score as a ranking signal rather than a verdict: it tells you how you compare, not whether you are qualified.
Text boxes, multi-column layouts, tables, headers and footers, icons, images, and non-standard section headings are the usual culprits. Columns and tables frequently scramble the order of your experience when the file is converted to plain text, and anything placed in a header or footer is often dropped entirely — including contact details.
Yes. PDF is safe when it is a text-based export rather than a scan of a printed page, and DOCX is still the safest choice for employers who ask for editable files. A scanned or image-only PDF contains no selectable text, so the parser extracts nothing and the resume can be rejected before a recruiter ever opens it.
They do, and only when you genuinely have the skill. Applicant tracking systems rank candidates largely on how closely the language of your resume mirrors the posting, so a resume that says "stakeholder management" for a job that asks for "client relationship management" can score badly despite describing the same work. Mirror the wording for skills you actually hold and drop the ones you do not.
One page for under ten years of experience, two pages for anything beyond it. Length is rarely what sinks a resume — filler does. Recruiters and parsers both favour dense, specific bullets, so cut anything that does not add a skill, a scope or a result.
Re-check it each time you apply for a different kind of role. A single generic resume will always underperform a tailored one, because the keyword match changes with every posting. Running it through the checker before each application takes under a minute and is the cheapest improvement available to you.