Free ATS Resume Checker

How ATS Resume Screening Actually Works

If you are applying for US federal roles, the requirements are stricter and published: see the official USAJOBS resume guidance, which lists fields a federal resume must contain that a private-sector one does not.

When you apply through a large employer's careers portal, your file usually goes into an applicant tracking system such as Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS or Lever. The system does three things before any human is involved: it parses your document into structured fields, it matches that text against the requirements of the role, and it ranks or filters candidates on the result.

That means a resume can fail for two completely different reasons. Either the parse failed — your layout confused the extractor, so your experience never made it into the system correctly — or the match failed, because you described genuinely relevant experience using words the job description never uses. This checker scores both separately so you know which one is actually costing you.

What this checker measures

• Keyword match (35 points) — how many of the meaningful terms in the job description actually appear in your resume, weighted toward the ones that repeat in the posting.
• Formatting risk (20 points) — signals of layouts that commonly break parsers: tables, columns, graphics markers, unusual characters and contact details buried in a header.
• Section structure (15 points) — whether standard headings such as Experience, Education and Skills are present and recognisable.
• Impact and evidence (15 points) — strong opening verbs and quantified results, versus passive phrasing like "responsible for".
• Length (10 points) — whether the document sits in the range recruiters and parsers expect.
• Contact completeness (5 points) — email, phone, location and LinkedIn present in the body text.

A note on honesty

No third-party tool can see inside a specific employer's ATS configuration, and any tool claiming to replicate a particular system exactly is overselling. What is genuinely knowable is the set of parsing and matching behaviours these systems share, and that is what this score reflects. Treat it as a strong diagnostic, not a verdict.

The fastest way to raise your score

In practice, most of the gain comes from two changes. First, switch to a clean single-column layout with conventional headings — our free resume builder defaults to exactly that. Second, tailor the wording per application: pull the actual tools, certifications and job titles from the posting rather than sending one generic document everywhere. Tailoring per role typically moves keyword match more than any other single edit.

Once your resume is solid, do the same for your profile — recruiters check it. Our free LinkedIn profile optimizer applies the same principles to your headline and About section.