Free tool
ATS resume checker
Upload or paste your resume and get an instant, transparent readiness check. Add a job description to see how your keywords line up. Free, no login, and nothing is stored.
What is an ATS, and what this checks
An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is the software most employers use to receive and read resumes. Before a person sees your application, the ATS pulls your text apart into fields: name, contact, work history, education, skills. If your resume is built so the software can read it cleanly, your experience lands where a recruiter expects it.
This checker looks at the parts you actually control. The analysis runs entirely in your browser. If you upload a file, our server converts it to text and immediately discards it; nothing you paste or upload is ever stored.
- Contact details a parser can find near the top.
- Standard section headings like Experience, Education, and Skills.
- Bullet points, so each achievement sits on its own parseable line.
- Concrete numbers in your bullets, which read stronger to people and to keyword matching.
- A sensible length that fits the page.
- Clean plain text, free of decorative glyphs or column artifacts that scramble when parsed.
How to use it
Step 1
Paste or upload your resume
A PDF, a Word file, or plain text. The readability checks run in your browser. Uploads are converted to text on the server and discarded immediately, so there is nothing to delete afterwards and no account to create.
Step 2
Add the job description, if you have one
This is the part worth doing. Without a posting the checker can only grade structure. With one it also reports which terms from the posting your resume already supports and which it does not, which is a far more useful answer than a number.
Step 3
Read the gaps as information, not as a to-do list
A missing term is not an instruction to paste that term in. If the posting wants something you have genuinely never done, the honest move is to leave the gap and prepare to talk about it. Adding it is the failure mode this whole product exists to prevent.
Step 4
Fix the structural problems first
Headings, bullets, contact details and clean text are objective and quick. Those are worth fixing for every application you will ever send, which makes them the highest-return edits on the page.
An honest word on ATS scores
No tool can promise that a specific employer ATS will rank you, because every company configures and tunes theirs differently. Anyone selling a single magic ATS score is guessing.
What you can control is whether your resume is clean, parseable, and honestly matched to the role. That is what this page measures, and nothing more.
What this checker cannot tell you
Four limits, stated here rather than discovered later. A checker that will not name its blind spots is asking you to take the rest on faith.
- It cannot tell you how a particular employer has configured their system. Two companies running the same ATS can score the same resume differently, and neither publishes the rules.
- It cannot tell you whether a recruiter will like your resume. Parseability and persuasion are different problems, and only one of them is machine-checkable.
- It cannot judge whether a claim on your resume is true. That is your call, and it is the reason the tailoring product refuses to add anything you did not write.
- It cannot see formatting that survived conversion to text. A two-column layout that reads badly in a parser may still look fine once converted, and the reverse is also true.
After the check: fixing what it found
Structural fixes are yours to make and they are quick. The harder half is vocabulary: saying what you actually did in the words the posting uses, without drifting into things you did not do.
Three guides cover that in detail: how to find the right keywords in a job description, what the match score does not tell you, and what to do when the job wants a skill you do not have.
If you would rather not do the rewrite by hand, Resumiz tailors your resume to one posting using only experience already in it, and shows you every change it made. 3 runs a month are free. It is also worth knowing how that compares to the other tools in this category, including the ones that score rather than rewrite.
Questions about ATS checking
Is this ATS resume checker really free?
Yes. No account, no card, no usage cap, and no email required. It is free because it is a diagnostic: it tells you what is wrong, and we would rather you find that out here than lose an application to a parsing problem you could have fixed in five minutes.
Do you store my resume?
No. The readability analysis runs in your browser. If you upload a PDF or Word file, our server converts it to text so the browser can read it and discards the file immediately. Nothing you paste or upload is written to a database, and no account exists to attach it to.
What is a good ATS score?
There is no such number, and anyone who gives you one is making it up. Real applicant tracking systems are configured per employer and most do not produce a single score at all. What this page reports is whether your resume is structurally readable and how its vocabulary overlaps the posting. Treat both as diagnostics, not as a grade.
Will adding more keywords get me past the ATS?
Stuffing keywords you cannot support is the most common way people damage an application. It can raise a match percentage while making the resume read worse to the human who gets it next, and it leaves you unable to speak to a line on your own resume in an interview. Use the keyword overlap to find genuine matches you forgot to mention, not to manufacture new ones.
Should my resume be one page?
Fit the page to the history. The checker flags lengths that are implausible for the content rather than enforcing a page count, because a rigid one-page rule costs experienced candidates real evidence.
Does a PDF break applicant tracking systems?
A text-based PDF is usually fine. The failure case is a PDF that contains an image of a resume rather than text, which a parser cannot read at all, and heavily designed multi-column layouts that convert to text in an order no human would choose. If this checker can read your file, a parser very likely can too.
What is the difference between this checker and the tailoring product?
This page diagnoses. It tells you whether your resume is readable and where its vocabulary misses the posting. The tailoring product does the rewrite, using only experience already in your resume, and returns a fabrication-risk score and a line-by-line log of every change it made. The checker needs no account; tailoring includes 3 free runs a month.
How is this different from Jobscan?
Jobscan goes deeper on per-keyword ATS diagnostics than this page does, and that is worth saying plainly. The difference is what happens next: Jobscan hands you a score and a keyword to-do list and leaves the rewrite to you. Resumiz does the rewrite under a no-fabrication constraint and shows its work.
More on how the tailoring itself works, including what it refuses to do, is on the FAQ and on the page about Sherlock, the part that reads your resume for evidence.