Free résumé check
Can software read your résumé?
Paste your résumé and find out what an applicant tracking system actually gets: which sections come through, what arrives scrambled, and exactly what to change. Takes about a minute.
How it works
Step 1
You paste the text
Open your résumé, select all, copy, paste. What you can copy out of the file is what an applicant tracking system gets when it reads it — so pasting is the test, not a shortcut around one.
Step 2
We read it the way software does
Six checks: contact details, section headings, dates, job titles and employers, bullet structure, and layout damage — the scrambled words and run-together columns that mean a multi-column design collapsed on the way in.
Step 3
You get the specific fixes
A score for readability, what each check found in your document, and the exact edits to make. No keyword padding, because that would be guessing at a search we can’t see.
Questions
- Is this an ATS score?
- Not the kind you’re used to. Most "ATS scores" mix two different things: whether software can read your file, and how many words from a job posting you echoed back. Only the first is measurable from your résumé alone, so that’s the only thing this scores. The second depends on a recruiter’s search terms, which nobody outside the company can see.
- Why paste text instead of uploading my PDF?
- Because we’d read it too well. A modern AI model can make sense of a PDF that a fifteen-year-old parser turns to mush, so scoring the file directly would grade a document that doesn’t exist on the employer’s end. The text you can copy out of your own file is a fair approximation of what their software receives.
- What score should I be aiming for?
- 75 or above means the document survives reading cleanly and the effort is better spent on what it actually says. Below 50 means something structural is breaking — usually columns, a header, or a text box — and it’s worth rebuilding in one plain column before you send it anywhere else.
- Do you keep my résumé?
- No. The text is read once to write the answer and is never written to a database or a file. There’s no account, no email required, and nothing to delete afterwards.
- Will fixing this get me more interviews?
- It removes a reason to be dropped before anyone reads you; it doesn’t create a reason to be picked. A clean résumé still lands in a pile of clean résumés. That part is a different problem, and it’s the one we built the rest of Skillfolio for.