ATS Resume Checker

An applicant tracking system stores applications and makes them searchable. It parses your file into fields — name, employers, dates, titles, skills — and a recruiter searches those fields. Nothing rejects you automatically for a low score, because there is no score inside an ATS. What does happen is that a resume which parses badly becomes a resume that does not appear in the search.

So the useful question is not “what score does the ATS give me”. It is “when this file is parsed, does the right text end up in the right field”.

Your file is put through the same extraction a parser performs, and the result is compared against what you meant it to say. Text that lives inside an image or a scanned page is reported as unreadable rather than silently scored as empty. Multi-column layouts, tables and text boxes are flagged where they interleave content that should be sequential.

Section headings are checked against the ones parsers recognise, dates against the formats they can read, and job titles against the fields they land in.

Keyword matching is real but it is not stuffing. A term counts when it appears somewhere a recruiter’s search would look — in a role, in a project, in a skills section — not when it is repeated in white text at the bottom of the page. That trick has not worked for years and is grounds for rejection when it is noticed.

The report names the terms a specific posting asks for that your resume does not evidence, and separates the ones you can fix by rewording something you have already done from the ones that are genuine gaps.

Does a low ATS score mean I will be rejected?

No. Applicant tracking systems do not score or reject candidates — they store and search applications. What a parsing problem costs you is visibility in that search, which is why the report names specific parsing failures rather than producing a single verdict.

Should I use a plain single-column resume?

For most applications, yes. A single column parses predictably, and nothing about a two-column layout has ever been shown to help a human reader enough to be worth the parsing risk. Design matters far more in fields where the resume is itself a portfolio piece.

Do I need to match the job description word for word?

No, and it reads badly when you do. Use the posting's vocabulary where it genuinely describes what you did, and leave the rest alone. Claiming a skill you do not have survives exactly one interview question.

Is a PDF or a Word file better?

A text-based PDF is fine for nearly every modern system and preserves your layout. The file that causes trouble is a PDF exported as an image, or a scan — there is no text in it to extract.

• Full resume analysis
• Match your resume to a job description
• Build a resume that parses cleanly