Free ATS resume checker

What is an ATS, and why does it matter?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software employers use to collect, parse, and filter the resumes they receive. Before a recruiter reads your resume, the ATS converts it to text and scores it against the job — so if your formatting scrambles in the parser or you’re missing the role’s key terms, you can be filtered out before any human sees your experience. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo and iCIMS are the systems you’ll run into most often on large-employer job boards. We’ve found no trustworthy public figure for what share of employers run one, so we won’t quote you a percentage — but if you’re applying through a form rather than a person, assume your resume is parsed before it is read.

What does this checker look for?

This checker reads the plain text you paste and runs its own nine checks. Six are text-based versions of checks in CVory’s editor score: contact details (an email address and a phone number), action-verb-led bullets, quantified achievements, no weak filler phrasing, a clearly labelled skills section, and an education entry. The other three are the checker’s own: a sensible length (150–900 words), a real bullet-point structure, and dates for a work timeline. The editor’s score has none of those three and instead checks for a professional summary, at least one role with bullets, and a single-column template — and some of the shared checks use different thresholds — so the same resume can score differently in each. With a job description added, it extracts the posting’s recurring terms and flags the ones missing from your resume. For how the editor’s nine checks are scored, see how CVory’s ATS score works.

What do two edits actually do to the score?

Here is a real run. The 160-word excerpt below — a working operations coordinator’s resume, by the checker’s own word count — scores 67 out of 100: it passes six of the nine checks and fails three. It has contact details, a sane length, real bullets, skills, education and dates. What it lacks is verbs and numbers. Rewriting four duty-led bullets so they open on a verb fixes the action-verb check and the weak-phrasing check together and takes it to 89. Adding a figure to three of those same bullets takes it to 100. Nothing else about the resume changed — no new job, no new skill, no longer document.

Priya Raman
Operations Coordinator
priya.raman@example.com | +1 415 555 0142 | Oakland, CA

SUMMARY
Operations coordinator with five years in logistics and vendor management, focused on keeping fulfilment predictable through peak season, keeping carrier costs under control, and giving the warehouse team a schedule it can actually plan around.

EXPERIENCE

Operations Coordinator, Brightline Supply, Oakland, CA (2022 - Present)
- Responsible for the weekly carrier schedule and the daily exception queue.
- Worked on a vendor scorecard with the procurement team and presented it at the monthly review.
- Helped with onboarding for new warehouse staff and kept the training deck current.
- Coordinated the peak-season staffing plan with three regional warehouse leads.

Logistics Associate, Kestrel Freight, Oakland, CA (2019 - 2022)
- Duties included booking shipments, chasing delayed pickups and answering carrier queries.
- Tracked inventory counts across both sites each week and flagged discrepancies to the site manager.

SKILLS
NetSuite, Excel, carrier negotiation, inventory reconciliation, vendor management, SQL basics

EDUCATION
BSc Business Administration, San Jose State University (2019)

Edit one: open every bullet on a verb (67 → 89)

Four bullets described duties rather than outcomes. The checker wants at least 40% of bullets to start with a strong verb, and it fails any resume containing “responsible for,” “duties included,” “worked on,” “helped with” or “in charge of” — so this one rewrite clears two checks at once.

• Responsible for the weekly carrier schedule and the daily exception queue.

  Owned the weekly carrier schedule and the daily exception queue.

• Worked on a vendor scorecard with the procurement team and presented it at the monthly review.

  Built a vendor scorecard with the procurement team and presented it at the monthly review.

• Helped with onboarding for new warehouse staff and kept the training deck current.

  Trained new warehouse staff at onboarding and kept the training deck current.

• Duties included booking shipments, chasing delayed pickups and answering carrier queries.

  Booked shipments, chased delayed pickups and answered carrier queries about transit times.

Edit two: put a number in three of them (89 → 100)

The quantified-achievements check wants at least a quarter of bullets to carry a figure — a percentage, a count, an amount, time saved. Three of the six bullets already described measurable work; they just never said by how much.

• Owned the weekly carrier schedule and the daily exception queue.

  Owned the weekly carrier schedule and cleared a 40-ticket exception queue daily.

• Built a vendor scorecard with the procurement team and presented it at the monthly review.

  Built a vendor scorecard with the procurement team that cut late deliveries 18%.

• Trained new warehouse staff at onboarding and kept the training deck current.

  Trained 12 new warehouse staff at onboarding and kept the training deck current.

Every score on this page was produced by running the checker above over these exact texts. If you paste the excerpt into it, you will get 67.

Frequently asked questions