ATS resume checker
A free ATS resume checker that shows its working
Most ATS scores are a number with nothing behind them. This one is 12 published rules worth 113 points, each with its weight printed beside it and each telling you what to change. It runs free, in your browser, with no account and no model guessing at you.
In short
- The checker is free and needs no account. It runs in the editor as you type, and you can read your full score without paying anything.
- It scores 12 checks worth 113 points in total, normalised to a mark out of 100.
- Every check is a published rule with a stated weight. No language model is involved, so the same resume always scores the same.
- Scoring happens on your own machine. Your resume is not uploaded to be checked.
- A failing check names the specific thing to change, not a grade.
What an applicant tracking system actually does
An ATS is a database with a parser in front of it. Understanding those four steps is most of what there is to know, and it explains why the advice that circulates about keywords is only ever half the story.
- 1
It extracts the text layer
Not the pixels. If a PDF holds an image of a page, or the contact line sits inside a graphic, that text does not exist as far as the system is concerned. This is the single commonest way a good resume disappears, and it is entirely invisible to the person who sent it.
- 2
It splits the text into sections
By looking for headings it recognises: experience, education, skills. Invented headings ("Where I have made a dent") and sections dropped for brevity both break the split, and a document it cannot segment is one it indexes badly.
- 3
It fills structured fields
Name, email, phone, location, then each role with an employer, a title and a date range. This becomes your candidate record. Everything a recruiter later searches runs against these fields, not against your layout.
- 4
A person searches those records
Usually by keyword and by filters on title, location and dates. This is where the reading stops being mechanical: once you surface, a human decides in a few seconds, and what decides it is whether your bullets say what you did and what happened as a result.
The 12 checks, and what each is worth
These are the rules in full. The weights are the ones the editor actually applies, read from the same file the scorer reads, so this page cannot drift away from the score you see.
| Check | Points | Why it is scored |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email, phone and location | 14 | These four fields are the first thing a tracking system extracts, and they become your candidate record. If it cannot find a phone number or a location, the record is created incomplete and filtered out of searches that a complete one would have matched. |
| Email address is machine readable | 6 | Addresses obfuscated as "name [at] example dot com" fail the pattern match, so the record is created with no way to contact you. The habit comes from fear of scrapers and costs far more than it saves. |
| Experience, education and skills all present | 12 | Parsers segment a resume by looking for headings they recognise. A missing section is not read as brevity, it is read as an absence of that history, and some systems refuse to index a document they cannot segment. |
| Summary at the top | 6 | The summary is what a human reads first and what many systems excerpt into a candidate preview. Two or three sentences naming your role, your years and your strongest result do more work here than anywhere else on the page. |
| Enough bullets to describe the work | 10 | Keyword matching runs over the body of your experience. Three to five bullets per recent role gives it something to match against; a job title with no detail beneath it gives it almost nothing. |
| Bullets backed by numbers | 16 | This is the heaviest check, and it is aimed at the human rather than the machine. A percentage, a count, an amount or a time saved is the part of a bullet a reader remembers and repeats in an interview. |
| Bullets open with an action verb | 12 | Led, built, cut, shipped, migrated. The opening verb is what a skim reads and what a keyword search hits. A bullet that opens with a noun phrase describes a situation rather than something you did. |
| No filler openers | 6 | "Responsible for" and "Worked on" describe a job description rather than a person. They also displace the verb, which is the word most worth having at the front of the line. |
| A scannable list of skills | 10 | The skills block is the section keyword matching reads most literally. Twelve or more concrete, grouped skills is the point at which it stops being a formality and starts producing matches. |
| Length in the expected range | 8 | Roughly 400 to 800 words reads as one to two pages. Below that a reviewer cannot judge you; above it, the parts that matter get skimmed past rather than read. |
| No characters a parser can mangle | 5 | Decorative bullets, curly punctuation pasted from a word processor and emoji fall outside the standard PDF character set. They drop out of the extracted text layer, sometimes taking the rest of the line with them. |
| Every role carries dates | 8 | A tracking system places your roles on a timeline, and a role it cannot date is usually dropped from that timeline entirely. Undated roles are also the first thing a reviewer reads as a gap being hidden. |
| Total | 113 | Normalised to a mark out of 100. |
What the score does not measure
Worth saying plainly, because a checker that implies it predicts hiring outcomes is selling you something. This score measures whether your resume is machine readable and whether it is written the way readers expect. It does not know the job you are applying for, it cannot tell whether your experience is relevant to it, and it has no opinion on whether your claims are true.
A resume can score 95 and still be wrong for the role. Tailoring the language to the posting in front of you is the part no rule set can do for you, and it is worth more than the last ten points here.
Why there is no AI in it
A model asked to grade a resume will give you a different answer on Tuesday than it gave on Monday, cannot tell you which rule you failed, and quietly rewrites your history into the phrasing it saw most during training. None of that is what you want from a check.
Fixed rules with published weights are reproducible, auditable and fast, and they can point at the exact line to change. That is the whole argument. The same reasoning is why nothing here rewrites your bullets for you: the sentences should be yours, because you are the one who has to defend them in the interview.
Questions about ATS scoring
What is a good ATS score?
On this scale, 85 and above is strong, 65 to 84 is good, and below 65 needs work. The number matters less than which checks are failing: a resume losing points on quantified bullets has a different problem from one losing points on missing dates, and only one of those is about the machine.
Do applicant tracking systems really reject resumes automatically?
Rarely in the way people fear. The common failure is quieter: the parser extracts your history into structured fields, and anything it cannot read, a date it cannot find, a phone number inside an image, a heading it does not recognise, simply does not make it into the record a recruiter later searches. The resume is not rejected, it is filed incomplete.
Does this ATS checker use AI?
No. It applies a fixed set of published rules with fixed weights, which is why the score is reproducible and why each check can tell you exactly what to change. A model asked to grade a resume gives a different answer to the same document on different days, and cannot show its working.
Is the ATS check free?
Yes. Building, editing, previewing and checking your resume are all free and unlimited, with no account. You only pay when you want to download the PDF or Word file.
Run the check on your own resume
Open the editor and go to the ATS panel. If you already have a resume, upload the PDF or Word file and the fields fill themselves in, so you can score what you have got in about a minute. Nothing is uploaded anywhere: the parsing and the scoring both happen on your machine.
The template you pick also matters for parsing. If you do not know what system the employer runs, Minimal is the safest of the six.
Build it now, decide later
The editor opens with no sign-up screen. Write the whole thing, run the ATS check and see the finished PDF before you spend anything.
Open the builder$3 once when you download. No account, no subscription, nothing uploaded.