Check whether your resume parses cleanly.

What actually happens to your application

Applicant tracking systems are common at very large employers: Jobscan detected one on the career sites of 97.4% of the Fortune 500Source in 2026. The software can store, parse, search, filter, and rank applications; employers can also configure screening questions that disposition a candidate automatically. Those choices vary by employer and are not visible to a public resume checker.

What you can check from outside is whether the file produces a readable record and whether the posting’s relevant language appears where it is truthful. A resume saved as an image can produce incomplete or empty text. A two-column layout can interleave unrelated lines. Important details in headers or footers can be missed. Those are document risks you can inspect and fix without pretending to know an employer’s private rules.

But I read that most resumes are auto-rejected

You will see a figure claiming 70 or 75 percent of resumes are discarded by software before a human sees them. It traces back to a 2012 sales deck from a company selling the cure, and no study supports it. We will not repeat it, and it is the same reason we will not hand you a percentage against a named employer: that setting lives inside the employer’s system, so anyone quoting it invented it.

The truth is more specific. Employer-configured knockout questions can reject or disposition an application, and filters can change what a recruiter sees. Resume parsing by itself is not proof of either outcome. Because those employer rules are private, the useful outside check is whether your file produces readable text and whether your real evidence is findable. You can test both in the box above.

What our score actually measures

The Readiness Score grades six things we can measure from your document alone: impact, structure, skills, evidence, writing and clarity. The weights are printed on the page, and the calculation is deterministic: the same resume always scores the same. A complete, quantified resume aimed at a real occupation reaches 100. It is not tuned to hold you a few points short so you keep paying.

It is not an ATS score, and we will not call it one. When you paste a real job posting, you also get a Match Score: which of the posting’s requirements your resume already answers, and which it does not. That is a comparison between two documents we can both see, which is why we are willing to put a number on it.

The short list actually worth doing

Export a real PDF with real text in it. Use one column for anything that matters. Put your job titles where a human reads first, because titles firstSource is what the eye-tracking says they fixate on. Use the posting’s own words for skills you genuinely have. That is most of it.

The long version, including the myths that cost you the most effort, is in what an ATS actually does. It is free to read and takes about seven minutes.

The formatting failures that actually cost you

These are the ones that can turn a good resume into an unreliable record. A resume exported as an image, or scanned, has no selectable text layer. Some employer systems use OCR, but results vary; this browser checker may extract little or nothing. Multi-column layouts can also produce an interleaved reading order in some parsers, mixing sidebar text into the main body.

Contact details placed in the document’s header or footer may be skipped or separated from the right section, so confirm that this checker extracts your phone number and email. Inconsistent date formats can produce unreliable employment ranges. Skills shown only inside a graphic, rating bar, or star widget may not contribute searchable text unless the system performs useful OCR.

None of these require a subscription to fix. They require a single-column layout, real text, a conventional section order and consistent dates, which is what every template here does by default, so the boring half is handled before you start.

Keyword matching, without the superstition

Vocabulary overlap is real and it matters, because a recruiter searching the database types words and gets back the records containing them. If the posting says “accounts payable” and your resume only says “AP”, a literal search for the full phrase may not find it. Writing it as “accounts payable (AP)” gives both readers and search tools the full term.

What does not work is the folklore built on top of that: pasting the job description into your resume in white text, stuffing a keyword block at the bottom, or listing skills you do not have. White text is trivially extracted by any parser and reads to a human as an attempt to deceive. A keyword you cannot discuss becomes a problem the moment someone asks about it. The useful version of this is narrow: use the employer’s own words for the things that are genuinely true of you.