Free ATS Resume Checker

What an ATS actually does with your resume

An applicant tracking system is a database, not a reader. Before a recruiter opens anything, your file is parsed into fields — name, contact, one row per job, one row per school, a list of skills. Most rejections that feel unexplained happen in that step, because the parser could not find something it needed. In practice it tries to do four things:

• Extract contact details, usually from the first few lines. A name and email inside a header, a text box or an image is frequently missed entirely.
• Split the document into sections by heading. It matches conventional words — Experience, Education, Skills — so "Where I have worked" often produces an empty employment history.
• Read each role as employer, title and date range. Two columns, tables and timeline graphics are the classic cause of jobs being merged, reordered or dropped.
• Match the text against the keywords on the job requisition. This is where "tailoring" stops being advice and becomes arithmetic.

How to read your score

The score is the weighted share of the checks below that your resume passes. It is a parsing and completeness score, not a prediction of whether you will be interviewed — no tool can promise that, and the ones that do are guessing. Work top down: fix anything red before you touch anything amber.

• Contact details — email and phone found in the plain text, not only in a header.
• Sections — Experience, Education and Skills present under their conventional names.
• Length — roughly 250 to 1,100 words. Under that reads as thin; well over it gets truncated by some parsers and skimmed by every human.
• Bullets — achievements as separate lines rather than one dense paragraph.
• Quantified results — numbers, percentages, money, volume, time saved.
• Action verbs — bullets that start with what you did instead of "responsible for".
• Formatting hazards — runs of ALL CAPS, pipe characters and replacement characters, all of which indicate a layout the parser is struggling with.

What this score cannot tell you

Be sceptical of any ATS score, including this one. It is a useful checklist, not a verdict.

• Each employer configures their system differently. There is no universal pass mark and no single algorithm to optimise against.
• It reads text. It cannot see whether your file is a two-column layout or whether your headings are real text — paste the text you can select in the PDF, and if you cannot select it, the file is an image and no ATS can read it either.
• It does not judge whether you are a good fit, only whether the document represents you completely.
• Keyword coverage rewards overlap with the posting. Overlap you cannot defend in an interview is worse than a gap.

Formatting checklist

Everything here is about surviving the parse. None of it requires a design.

• One column. No tables, no text boxes, no sidebars.
• Contact details in the body of the document, not in the page header or footer.
• Standard section names: Experience (or Work Experience), Education, Skills.
• Real text, not an image of text, and no text baked into a logo or a chart.
• A common font and normal casing, with bold for emphasis instead of ALL CAPS lines.
• Dates in a consistent format, such as "Mar 2021 – Aug 2024", on the same line as the role.
• Standard bullet characters. Decorative glyphs and icons frequently parse as junk.
• Save as PDF when the posting allows it and DOCX when it asks for Word. Both parse well when the layout is simple; neither rescues a complicated one.

Before and after

Three rewrites of the kind the checks above ask for. Each keeps the same facts and changes what a parser and a recruiter can do with them.

• Responsible for the company social media. → Grew the company LinkedIn from 4,200 to 11,500 followers in 9 months, raising inbound demo requests 22%.
• Worked on improving the checkout. → Rebuilt the checkout flow with the payments team, cutting failed transactions 31% and p95 latency from 900 ms to 210 ms.
• Helped with onboarding new staff. → Ran onboarding for 14 new hires across two offices, shortening time-to-first-ticket from 3 weeks to 8 days.

What each score band means

ATS checker: common questions