See what a machine reads from your resume
Applicant tracking systems do not read your resume the way you do. They extract text from the file and try to find fields in it. This runs that extraction on your file and shows you the result — the text it recovered, the fields it found, and the lines where two different parsers would disagree about the reading order.
It runs entirely in your browser — not as a promise, but because there is no route on this server that accepts a resume file at all. Open your network tab and watch it not happen.
Drop a PDF or Word file here
It is read in this tab. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and there is nothing to pay for.
What the check reads from your resume
The same things an applicant tracking system tries to pull out of a file before a person sees it. Each comes back marked as read cleanly, worth a look, or not found.
- Your name
- Read from the first line, which is where parsers look for it. If the top of the file is an address or a logo, the name may not come back at all.
- Email and phone
- The email matched exactly, and the phone checked as a real number in its country's format rather than any run of digits.
- Location and links
- A “City, Region” pair from the contact block, and your links. A PDF keeps the address behind a link apart from its text, so “LinkedIn” can come back as a word with no URL — the check says when that happened.
- Each role's title, employer and dates
- Split into the fields an applicant tracking system stores. A date written as 03/04/2023 is flagged, because its month is ambiguous and only the year can be trusted.
- Your sections
- Experience, education, skills, projects and the rest, found by their headings. A heading it does not recognise is kept as a section of its own rather than guessed at.
- Reading order
- A PDF is read two ways — in the order the file stores its text, and line by line across the page — and every line where the two disagree is listed. Columns and text boxes are the usual cause.
What this does not tell you
It cannot tell you whether a particular employer’s system will accept your resume. Nobody can: those systems are private, they differ from each other, and anyone selling you a “guaranteed to pass” score is guessing. What this shows is narrower and checkable — the text a parser gets out of your file, and which fields are recoverable from it. If your name, your email or your job titles do not come back here, that is a real problem in the file itself, and it is fixable.
Build a resume from scratch instead, or read what we store.
Questions about the checker
Is this ATS resume checker really free, with no sign-up?
Yes. There is no account to make, no limit on how many files you check, and no paid version of the check waiting behind it. It costs almost nothing to run, because the work happens on your computer rather than ours: the page loads the parser into your browser, and your file is read there. If you want to fix what it finds, the builder is free on the same terms, and its PDF, Word and plain-text downloads are free too.
Is my resume uploaded anywhere when I check it?
No. Your browser opens the file and parses it in the same tab, and there is no route on this server that accepts a resume file at all, so there is nowhere for it to go. You can watch it not happen: open your browser's developer tools, choose the Network tab, and check a file. When you close the tab, the result is gone. If you choose to open the result in the builder, it is passed along inside the tab's own session storage, never through the server.
Why doesn't this checker give my resume an ATS score?
Because nobody outside an employer can compute one that means anything. Applicant tracking systems are private, they differ from each other, and every employer configures its own, so a percentage from a website measures the website's own rules. What can be checked is narrower and real: whether your name, contact details, job titles, employers and dates come back out of the file as the right fields. If they do not come back here, the problem is in the file itself — and that is something you can fix.
Which resume file formats can the checker read?
PDF and Word — .docx, and the older .doc — which are what application forms ask for. RTF files are read too, and so are the “Word” downloads some websites make, which are often a web page with a .doc name. A password-protected file cannot be read by any parser, so save a copy without the password first. A scanned PDF or a photo of a resume is a picture of text rather than text, so very little comes back from it; export a fresh PDF from the document you wrote instead. A PDF is read two ways, in the order the file stores its text and line by line across the page, and the lines where those disagree are listed for you.
What should I fix first when a field comes back wrong?
Start with your name, email and phone, because a record without them is hard to act on. Then the roles: a job title, employer or date that lands in the wrong field usually means the layout moved text around — a second column, a table or a text box. We measured the column case on 36 resumes. In one column every bullet came through intact; with a sidebar, reading line by line broke about half of them. Moving everything into a single column of plain text fixes most of it.
What should I check after the file reads cleanly?
The words. A file that parses cleanly has stopped being the problem, and what is left is whether your resume shows what a particular posting asks for. Paste the job description and your resume into the keyword scanner to see which requirements your resume demonstrates, which it only lists in a skills line, and which it never mentions. Then run your bullets through the bullet point checker, which flags a line that names a duty without saying what you did or what came of it.