Free ATS resume checker
Paste your resume and a job ad. See which keywords from the ad your resume is missing, and what might trip up a parser. It’s a quick gap check, not a score an employer sees.
- Nothing is uploaded or saved
- Results in a second
- Honest about what it can’t tell you
Uncovering the ATS myth
A checker is useful, but only if you know what it can’t do. The biggest myth is that an ATS is a gatekeeper robot hunting for reasons to bin your resume. Here’s the version that’s actually true.
The ATS auto-rejects resumes it doesn't like.
Most systems reject nothing. They store and organise applications so a recruiter can search them — and a person makes the call.
You have to beat an algorithm scoring your resume.
There's rarely a hidden score deciding your fate. There's a searchable database of candidates and a busy human skimming for fit.
A creative template gets you filtered out.
Plain, parseable text is safest, but the real filter is the recruiter's ten-second skim — not a font choice.
What an ATS actually scans
It’s a filing system, not a judge. Here’s what it really does with your resume.
Parses your text
It strips your layout and turns the resume into plain text — which is why tables, columns, and images can scramble.
Extracts your fields
Name, contact, job titles, dates, and skills get pulled into structured fields it can store and sort.
Indexes you for search
Recruiters search and filter that database by keyword, title, and location. This is where being findable matters.
Flags what it can't read
Anything it fails to parse cleanly can be dropped or garbled — the one place formatting genuinely hurts you.
Keywords aren’t the whole game
Keywords help a recruiter find you. They don’t get you picked. Stuffing a resume with terms only makes a human reject it faster.
What wins is relevant experience and clear, specific results — the keywords should fall out of writing about work you actually did.
A high score isn’t a high chance
A score checker gives you a number. The recruiter deciding your interview never sees it. A 95% “match” still loses to a clearer, more relevant resume sitting next to it.
Optimise for the person reading it, not the meter. The number is a starting line, not a finish line.