Frequently asked questions
Including the ones a resume tool would rather not answer — starting with whether the score on this site means anything.
How applicant tracking systems really work
The questions with the most wrong answers on the internet.
- Is there really such a thing as an ATS score?
- No — and this tool shows one, so it is worth being precise about what it is. Real applicant tracking systems such as Workday, Greenhouse and Taleo do not calculate a 0-100 rating of your resume. Every score you have seen, including ours, comes from a third-party tool applying its own rules. Ours is a checklist of mechanical problems that are known to cause parsing failures, expressed as a number so you can tell whether you are making progress. It is not a prediction, it is not an employer’s opinion, and no score here is passed to anyone.
- Do 75% of resumes really get rejected by an ATS before a human sees them?
- There is no reliable evidence for that figure, and it is the most repeated statistic in this industry. It is usually traced back to a vendor’s marketing rather than to research. What is well established is narrower and more useful: applicant tracking systems parse your resume into fields, and when parsing fails — because of columns, tables, headers or images — your experience can end up in the wrong field or in no field at all. That is a real, fixable failure, and it is what this tool checks for.
- How can I test my own resume without any tool at all?
- Open your PDF, select all the text, copy it, and paste it into a plain text editor. That takes about ten seconds and shows you roughly what a parser receives. If the order is scrambled, if your job titles and companies run together, or if nothing pastes at all, an ATS is likely to have the same trouble. This site has the same view built in as "Read as text" in the builder, but the copy-paste test needs no software and no trust in us.
- Will putting keywords in white text or tiny font get me past an ATS?
- No, and it is one of the fastest ways to be rejected outright. Parsers extract text regardless of its colour or size, so hidden keywords are read exactly like visible ones — and then a recruiter opens the file and sees a block of invisible text, which reads as an attempt to deceive. Several large employers explicitly screen for it. Anything you cannot defend in an interview belongs off the resume.
- Do small companies use applicant tracking systems too?
- Usually yes, because it now arrives bundled rather than bought. Most small firms hire through a job board or an HR platform that parses resumes as a standard feature, so the parsing step happens whether or not anyone chose an "ATS". The practical consequence is that machine-readability is worth getting right even for a ten-person company.
About these tools
What the checker measures, how accurate it is, and what it will not do.
- How accurate is this ATS checker?
- It is accurate about mechanics and makes no claim about outcomes. The rules cover things that are objectively true or false about your document — whether a heading is one a parser recognises, whether your dates are consistent, whether your contact details can be extracted, whether the text is real text. It cannot tell you how a specific employer has configured their system, because nobody outside that company can. Treat the score as a list of removable risks, not as a forecast.
- What score should I be aiming for?
- Above 80, and after that stop. The scoring is designed so that the last few points cost far more effort than they return — a 95 and an 85 fail for the same reasons, which is to say none of the mechanical ones. Once you are past 80, your time is better spent tailoring the content to a specific posting with the Job Description Matcher than polishing a number.
- Does this use AI to write my resume?
- No, deliberately. Every suggestion comes from a rule someone wrote and anyone can read, which is why the same resume always produces the same score and every finding cites a reason. AI writing tools invent employers, dates and metrics that you then have to defend in an interview. If you want to use an assistant anyway, there are prompts here built to give it your real facts instead of letting it generate from nothing.
- Why does an empty resume score badly instead of scoring nothing?
- Because an empty document is not neutral — it is unsubmittable, and a score of zero says that more clearly than a blank screen. A category you have no content for cannot earn points. As you fill sections in, the score climbs for reasons the panel names one by one.
- Can this guarantee I get an interview?
- No, and any tool that says otherwise is selling something. What this removes is the category of failure where you never hear back because software could not read your document. Everything after that — whether your experience fits, whether the timing is right, whether 400 other people applied — is outside what any resume checker can see.
Cost, accounts and the catch
The question everyone arrives with, given how the rest of this market works.
- Is this actually free, or free until I try to download?
- Free at every step, including the PDF, with no watermark and no account. The pattern you are bracing for is real and it is the reason this exists: the major builders let you write the whole document and then ask for payment at the download button, typically a trial around $1.95–$2.95 that renews near $24–$30 every four weeks. There is no payment screen here at any point, because there is no payment system.
- What is the catch?
- There is no upsell, and the honest limits are these. There is no server, so nothing syncs between your devices and nothing can be recovered if you clear your browser data — export a JSON backup and the problem goes away. The analysis is rule-based rather than AI, so it misses nuance a language model would catch. And it will not write your resume for you, on purpose.
- Do I need to create an account?
- No. There is no account system, no email capture and no login anywhere in the product. Nothing is remembered about you between visits except the resume in your own browser, which you can delete by clearing this site’s data.
- Can I use this for more than one job application?
- Yes, and that is the intended way to use it. You can keep several resumes, mark one as your master copy, and tailor a duplicate to a specific posting without touching the original. All of them stay in your browser.
Privacy
What leaves your device, and how to check rather than take our word for it.
- Is my resume uploaded anywhere?
- No. There is no server to upload it to — every tool is JavaScript running on your own device, and your resume is stored only in your browser’s local storage. You can verify it in about a minute: open your browser’s developer tools, select the Network tab, and use every feature including the PDF export. The only requests are for this site’s own files, plus Google Analytics if you allowed it — and analytics is disabled outright on the builder, so the one page holding your resume reports nothing.
- Does anything on this site contact a third party?
- Two things, both under your control. Google Analytics counts page visits, but only after you allow it — decline the prompt, or set Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, and it never loads. It is also switched off completely on the builder, so the page holding your resume is never measured. Separately, pressing Send on the contact form posts that message to our form provider. Neither has any access to your resume.
- What happens to my resume if I clear my browser data?
- It is deleted permanently, and no copy exists anywhere for us to restore. That is the direct trade-off of having no server, and it is worth planning for rather than discovering: export a JSON backup from the builder, which takes one click and gives you the complete document in an open format you can re-import in seconds.
Formatting and templates
The choices that decide whether your document survives being parsed.
- Why do two-column resumes and Canva templates cause problems?
- Because a parser reads a page as a single stream, and a two-column layout has to be flattened into one before it can be. That flattening is where sidebars, text boxes and icon-based contact details get interleaved with the main column, so a job title from the left can end up attached to a date from the right. Designed templates look excellent to a person and are the most commonly reported parsing failure. Every template here is single-column by construction — there is no setting that could produce two.
- Should I send a PDF or a Word document?
- Send a PDF unless the posting asks for something else, provided the PDF contains real text. The failure case is a PDF exported as an image — it looks perfect and a parser extracts zero characters from it, which is how "my resume looks great" and "I never hear back" end up both being true. The export here draws real, selectable text, and there is a test in the build that decompresses the generated file and asserts your name, employer and bullet text are recoverable.
- Should my resume have a photo?
- Not in the US, UK, Canada or Australia. Many employers there discard resumes with photos to reduce discrimination risk, and an image gives a parser nothing to read. In parts of Europe, Asia and Latin America a photo is conventional or expected, so this is one of the few resume rules that genuinely depends on where you are applying.
- How long should my resume be?
- One page under roughly ten years of experience, two pages beyond that, and rarely more. The Length Advisor here gives your true page count and names specifically what to cut, shorten or merge rather than telling you that you are over.
- Do fonts and icons matter?
- Fonts barely matter as long as they are ordinary; icons matter more than people expect. A glyph used for a phone or email marker is often extracted as a random character or dropped, which can corrupt the contact line — the one part of your resume that has to survive. Label your contact details in words.
Using the builder
Importing, exporting and getting your existing resume in.
- Can I import a resume I already have?
- Yes, and the import doubles as the most useful test on the site. Drop in a PDF and it is parsed the way an applicant tracking system parses it, then you get a review screen showing what came through and what did not — before anything is applied. Every field the parser could not find is a field a real system is likely to miss too.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes, after your first visit. The application caches itself, so the builder, the analysis and the PDF export all keep working with no connection. That follows from having no backend rather than being a feature that was added.
- Why is my imported resume missing sections?
- Almost always because the original document is hard to parse — which is the finding, not a bug. If a heading is non-standard, or the layout has columns, the importer struggles in the same places an employer’s software will. The review screen is showing you a preview of that failure while you can still fix it.
Something not answered here?
Ask on the contact page. Questions that come up more than once end up on this page, so asking is genuinely useful even when the answer only helps you.