ATS Resume Checker
Find out whether the software between you and a recruiter can actually read your resume.
Runs in your browser. Your resume is never uploaded.
What to fix
Keywords from the advert
Matched terms appear in your resume; missing ones do not. Add the ones you can back up — and only those.
Fixing these in the resume editor gives you a single-column PDF with a real text layer and conventional headings, which clears most of this list at a stroke.
What an applicant tracking system actually does
It collects applications and parses each resume into fields — name, employer, job titles, dates, education, skills — so that a recruiter can search and filter across hundreds of them. The popular image of a robot rejecting you is mostly wrong: what usually happens is quieter and worse. Your resume parses badly, your record ends up half empty, and you never surface in the searches that would have found you.
So the useful question is not "will I pass the filter" but "does my resume survive being read by software". That is a question with a definite answer, and it is the one this tool measures.
The five things this checks
Parsing. Whether there is a text layer at all, whether the layout is one column or two, and whether the text extracts cleanly. A PDF that is really an image scores zero here and it does not matter what else is right — nothing downstream can read a word of it. A sidebar is the next most common problem: you see two columns, the parser reads one stream and splices them together.
Sections. Whether your headings are ones a parser recognises. "Experience", "Education" and "Skills" map onto fields. "My Journey" and "What I Bring" map onto nothing, and the content under them can end up in the wrong field or none at all.
Contact details. Whether an email address and phone number appear as text. An icon in place of a label leaves a parser with a string of digits and no idea what they are, and an address inside an image is not there at all.
Content quality. This part is for the human who reads it after the software. How many of your bullet points contain a number, how many begin with "Responsible for" rather than a verb, whether anything is written in the first person, and whether the whole thing is long enough to say anything.
Job match. Only when you paste an advert. The checker takes the terms that advert stresses and tells you which ones your resume never uses. Matching is literal, because that is how the software you are up against works: if the advert says "Kubernetes" and your resume says "container orchestration", a keyword search does not join those up.
Why nothing here is an AI opinion
Every finding above is a measurement. A text layer either exists or it does not. A heading either matches a known form or it does not. A bullet either contains a digit or it does not. That means the checker gives you the same answer twice, can always tell you exactly why it said something, and never invents a confident-sounding judgement about your career. Where it cannot know something — whether your experience is actually relevant, whether your writing is any good — it says nothing rather than guessing.
Frequently asked questions
Is my resume uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read into this browser tab and checked there. Nothing crosses the network, which matters more here than almost anywhere else on this site — a resume is your name, address, phone number and employment history in one file. You can verify it: open your browser’s network tab while you run a check, or disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded. It still works.
What is an ATS, and does my resume really go through one?
An applicant tracking system is the software an employer uses to collect and sort applications. It parses your resume into fields — name, employer, dates, skills — so recruiters can search and filter. Most medium and large employers use one. It does not usually reject you outright, but a resume it parses badly becomes a half-empty record that is harder to find and easier to skip.
Does this use AI?
No, and it does not need to. Everything it reports is measurable: whether the file has a text layer, whether it is one column or two, whether your headings are ones a parser recognises, whether an email address is present, how many of your bullet points contain a number, and which words from a job advert never appear in your resume. A deterministic check gives you the same answer twice and can tell you exactly why.
What is the single most important thing it checks?
Whether the PDF contains real text. A surprising number of resume builders render your page to an image and wrap it in a PDF. It looks flawless to you and arrives as a blank document to the software. You can test this yourself on any resume in about a second: open it and try to select a line of text. If nothing highlights, no parser can read it either.
Why does it ask for the job description?
Because a score against generic criteria is not worth much. Pasting the advert lets the checker work out which terms that particular employer stresses and tell you which ones your resume never says. It is optional — everything else is checked without it.
Should I just stuff in the missing keywords?
No. Add the ones you can genuinely back up, in the places they belong, and leave the rest. Keyword stuffing is obvious to the human who reads the resume after the software has filtered it, and a term you cannot discuss in an interview costs you more than the filter ever gained you.
Can I check a Word document?
Not yet — PDF only. Most of what this checks is specific to how a PDF is put together: whether it has a text layer at all, how the text is positioned, whether columns will interleave. A .docx carries none of that, so checking one would mean a quieter report pretending to be the same thing. Export to PDF and check that, which is what you should be sending anyway.