Free ATS resume checker
Paste your resume. In about thirty seconds you get a score out of 100, a breakdown across five dimensions, and the three issues costing you the most callbacks.
- Resume text never stored
- Scored in about 30 seconds
- Free — no account for the score
We don't store your resume text — only the report. One free check per day.
Most resumes that get no response were never read by a person. They were parsed by software, matched against the posting's keyword list, and ranked. The checker above runs that kind of pass and tells you where you're losing points — before you send the next fifty applications with the same problem in every one of them.
Three steps, about thirty seconds.
- 01
Paste the text, not the file
Copy the text out of your resume and paste it in. No upload, no template, no account. If you have a target role in mind, add it — the keyword scoring gets sharper when it knows what you're aiming at.
- 02
It scores five dimensions separately
Keyword match, quantified impact, action verbs, format and length, and red flags. Each gets its own score, so you can tell whether the problem is what you wrote or how you wrote it. A resume can parse perfectly and still say nothing.
- 03
You get the score and the three biggest fixes
The overall score, the five-dimension breakdown, and the three issues costing you the most — each with what to do about it. The full issue list and line-by-line rewrites are in the full report.
What the five scores actually measure
One number hides where the problem is. These five don't — a 40 on keywords and an 85 on format is a completely different fix from the reverse.
Keywords
Whether the terms the posting screens for appear in your resume at all — and whether they appear inside bullets describing relevant work rather than stacked at the bottom in a skills list.
Scores high when the exact terms from the role show up in context.
Scores low when you wrote "K8s" and the filter is matching on "Kubernetes".
Quantified impact
How many of your bullets end in an outcome someone could check. Scope, size, delta, time saved. This is the one that separates two candidates with identical job titles.
Scores high when bullets carry numbers you could defend in an interview.
Scores low on "responsible for" and "helped with" with nothing attached.
Action verbs
The verb that opens each bullet, and whether it says what you did or what you were near. Recruiters read the first two words of a bullet and decide whether to read the rest.
Scores high on verbs that carry ownership: built, shipped, led, cut, migrated.
Scores low on "worked on", "participated in", "assisted with".
Format & length
Whether a parser can read the document in the right order, and whether the length matches your experience. Two pages for a new grad is a length problem; five bullets for eight years is a different one.
Scores high on one column, standard section names, dates in a consistent parseable format.
Scores low on interleaved two-column text, tables, and contact details that only exist in the page header.
Red flags
The things a recruiter stops on. Unexplained gaps, dates that contradict each other, a claim that can't be true given the timeline, a title that doesn't match the work described under it.
Scores high when the timeline is coherent and nothing needs explaining.
Scores low when two roles overlap with no note, or a scope claim outruns the tenure.
What actually gets a resume filtered
- Two-column layouts
Many parsers read a page left to right, line by line. A two-column resume comes out interleaved: your job title lands in the middle of a skills list, and every field the ATS populates from that point on is wrong.
- Contact info in the header
Some parsers skip document headers and footers entirely. If your email and phone number only exist up there, the candidate record gets created with those fields blank — and nobody can reach you.
- Exact-string keyword filters
A recruiter's search is often a literal string match. "K8s" does not match "Kubernetes". "JS" does not match "JavaScript". Writing both spellings once each costs you nothing and removes the coin flip.
- Dates a parser can't read
"Summer 2024" and "Jan–present" are obvious to a person and ambiguous to a parser. Inconsistent date formats across entries produce gaps and overlaps that were never in your actual history.
- Renamed sections
"What I've Built" instead of "Experience" reads better and parses worse. Section headers are how the parser decides which block is work history, which is education, and which is skills.
- Tables, text boxes, and graphics
Text inside a table cell, a text box, or an image often never reaches the parser. If a skill exists only inside a designed proficiency bar, it is not on your resume as far as the software is concerned.
None of that is about how good you are at the job. It's about whether the document survives the first automated pass intact. Fixing it is mechanical, which is exactly why it's worth doing before you rewrite a single sentence.
One bullet, before and after
Responsible for improving the checkout flow; worked with the design team on the redesign.
Opens with "responsible for", so the verb says nothing about what you did. No scope, no outcome. A keyword filter takes "checkout" out of this and nothing else.
Rebuilt the checkout flow with design; cut drop-off at the payment step from 34% to 21% across two releases.
Ownership verb, an outcome an interviewer can ask you about, and the terms a payments-team posting screens for now sit inside the bullet describing the work — not in a skills list at the bottom.
A score is a diagnostic, not a verdict.
The number describes how your resume reads to the software and to a recruiter skimming it in a few seconds. It does not know your work. A researcher with two published papers and a badly formatted PDF can score below a thin resume with clean headings — that is a statement about the document, not the person.
Treat it like a spell-check for the mechanics. It finds those problems quickly and consistently: the parse failures, the missing terms, the bullets that stop before the outcome. Which experience to lead with, and what story your resume tells, is still your call.
We don't keep your resume text. It's sent to the model, scored, and dropped. What we store is the report itself, tied to a one-time token, so you can claim it if you decide to create an account.
Once you know what's broken
- AI resume polish
Paste your resume and a JD. Every bullet gets rewritten for that specific posting, with a before/after diff. Nothing invented — every word traces back to something you wrote.
- AI mock interview
Company-specific mock rounds with a written score report at the end. Worth running once the resume is getting callbacks.
- New grad 2027 tracker
Which 2027-start new grad and internship applications are open right now, checked against live postings.
FAQ
Is it really free?
Yes. One check per day, no account and no card. You see the overall score, all five dimension scores, and the top three issues without signing up for anything. The complete issue list and the rewrite suggestions are behind a free Applr account, which is also free to create.
Do you store my resume?
No. We don't store your resume text. It's sent to the model, scored, and dropped. What we keep is the report — the score, the dimension breakdown, and the issues — tied to a one-time token so you can claim it if you create an account afterwards. If you never claim it, the report expires on its own.
How accurate is an ATS score?
It's a consistent reading of the mechanical signals: parseability, keyword coverage, quantified outcomes, verb strength, timeline coherence. It is not a prediction that you will or won't get the interview — no tool can make that call, because the hiring bar depends on the role, the team, and who else applied. Treat a low score as a list of things to fix, not a judgment on your experience.
Do I need to paste a job description?
No. The optional target role field helps, though. Without it, keyword coverage is measured against what's typical for the kind of role your resume describes. With a target role, it's measured against what that role actually screens for. Full per-JD tailoring — mapping your experience to one specific posting — is what the resume polish tool does.
Why is my score lower here than on another checker?
Different checkers weight different things. Most free ones grade formatting and stop there, which is why a well-formatted resume with no outcomes in it can score in the nineties elsewhere. This one also scores whether your bullets carry results and whether your verbs claim ownership — the things a recruiter reacts to once the parser is done.
What format should I paste?
Plain text. Copy the text out of your PDF or Word file and paste it in — formatting doesn't survive the copy and doesn't need to. The format dimension reads the structural cues that do survive: section headers, date patterns, bullet length, overall length. And layout problems show up indirectly. If the text comes out of your PDF scrambled or interleaved, that's exactly what an ATS parser sees too.
Fix what the score found
The checker tells you what's wrong. Polish rewrites it against the JD you're actually applying to — first polish is free.