ATS Resume Checker
Paste your resume text and get a score out of 100 with the specific lines to fix. Paste the job posting as well and you also see which of its terms your resume never mentions. You never upload a file and I never ask for your email.
An ATS resume checker tests two things: whether an applicant tracking system can parse your resume into fields, and whether the text carries the words a recruiter will search for. Hardly any of these systems reject anyone on their own — recruiters filter and keyword-search inside them, which is why the wording decides whether a human ever opens your file. Oleg Sotnikov, a fractional CTO who has hired engineers for 25 years and presents at Google HQ on AI-assisted job search, built this checker to run those tests in the browser. Your resume is never uploaded or stored.
Check your resume
Paste the text, not the file. Open your resume, select all, copy, paste here. What lands in the box is roughly what a parser sees.
With a posting pasted, the check adds a keyword match and lists the terms the posting uses that your resume never does.
Everything runs in your browser. Your resume is never uploaded or stored, there is no email gate, and closing the tab erases it.
How to fix a failing resume
Four changes account for most of the score, in the order worth doing them.
One column, plain text
Rebuild the layout as a single column with plain headings. Tables, sidebars, and text boxes are where parsers drop half a career.
Mirror the posting's words
Use the posting's exact terms for the work you have done — not synonyms, and nothing you could not defend in an interview.
A number on every second bullet
Team size, budget, latency, revenue, release frequency. A bullet with no number reads as a job description rather than an achievement.
Cut the wind-up
Delete "responsible for", "duties included", and every adjective you apply to yourself. Start with the verb and let the result carry the line.
Start from a working layout: ATS-friendly resume templates
For a second pair of eyes on the whole search: AI-assisted job search coaching
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an ATS?
An applicant tracking system is the database a company runs its hiring in. Every application lands there and gets parsed into fields: name, contact details, employers, dates, skills. A recruiter then searches and filters that list. Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, and Ashby are common ones, and your resume's job is to survive the parse and answer the searches.
Do ATS systems really auto-reject resumes?
Mostly no. The widely repeated claim that three quarters of resumes are thrown out by software has no solid source behind it, and few systems are configured to reject anyone on their own. What happens is quieter: a recruiter searches the database for the skills named in the posting and reads the top of the result list. A resume that never uses those words gets no rejection email — it simply never appears.
How do I make my resume ATS-friendly?
Single column, plain section headings, real text instead of images, contact details in the body rather than the page header, and dates written the same way in every role. Then use the posting's vocabulary for the work that is honestly yours. Save it as a .docx or a text-based PDF, and confirm it copy-pastes cleanly into a plain text editor.
What is a good ATS score?
On this checker, above 75 means nothing on the page is working against you, 50 to 74 means it parses but the evidence is thin, and below 50 means a rewrite. Scores are not comparable between tools: each one weighs its own rules and none of them is the system a given employer runs. The per-check list under the score is the real output.
Should I stuff keywords into my resume?
No. Repeating a term does not lift you in a recruiter's search, and white text or a hidden keyword block ends the application the moment a person opens the file. Use the posting's words for the work you have actually done, inside your own sentences, and leave out anything you could not talk through for five minutes.
A Second Opinion on Your Resume
Thirty minutes, no charge. Bring your resume and the posting you want, and we go through what a hiring manager sees in the first ten seconds.
I have hired engineers for 25 years and run the interviews from the other side of the table.
Related reading
Notes on hiring, interviews, and how AI is changing both sides of the table.
