See your CV the way the software sees it

Three steps, about a minute

1. Upload the file

   PDF or DOCX. The text is extracted in your browser, the same way a parser extracts it, so what is scored is what the software would actually receive.

2. Read the breakdown

   Sections, dates, contact details, measurable results, keyword coverage. Each rule says what it looked for and what it found instead.

3. Fix it in the editor

   Your data is carried into a template that parses cleanly, and the score moves as you type. You are correcting the document, not chasing a number.

What the checker looks at

• Sections a parser expects. Experience, education and skills under headings a machine recognises, rather than under a title you invented.
• Contact details in the body of the page. A phone number in the header of a PDF is frequently dropped, and an application nobody can answer is worse than none.
• Dates in one consistent form. Mixing March 2024 with 03/24 makes a parser guess, and a wrong guess turns four years of work into four months.
• Results with a number in them. Reduced load time by 40% is searchable and checkable; responsible for performance is neither.
• The vocabulary of the job ad. Paste the advert and the check becomes specific: which of its terms your CV uses, and which it never mentions.
• Length against experience. Two pages are normal after a decade of work and suspicious after one year; the rule reads the two together.

About the checker

What is an ATS?

An applicant tracking system is the software an employer uses to receive applications. It reads the file you send, tries to pull out name, contact details, jobs, dates and skills, and stores the result as fields in a database. A recruiter then searches those fields. If the software cannot find a section, it is as if you had not written it.

Does an ATS really reject CVs automatically?

Rarely by itself, and that is the more useful way to think about it. Most systems do not delete anybody; they rank and filter. A CV that parses badly is not thrown away, it simply never comes up in the searches a recruiter runs, which has the same effect and leaves no trace.

Which CV format is safest for an ATS?

A PDF whose text is real text, in one or two columns, with ordinary section headings and dates written the same way throughout. What breaks parsing is not the format but the furniture: contact details inside the header of the page, sections drawn as images, tables used for layout, and icons standing in for the words phone or email.

How is the ATS score calculated?

From the CV as it appears on screen, not from what is stored in the database: the rules read the document itself, the same way a parser would. They check that the expected sections exist, that dates are consistent, that experience is described with measurable results and, when you have pasted a job ad, how much of its vocabulary appears in your text. The score is deterministic: the same CV always gets the same number.