Upload Your CV for a Free ATS Scan

Upload a PDF, DOCX or TXT file and the scanner does what an applicant tracking system does when your application lands: it extracts the raw text, works out where your sections begin and end, reads your dates and job titles, and decides how much of your document it can actually understand. Anything it cannot parse is content a recruiter will never see, however good it looks on your screen.

The report comes back in three parts. Parsing and formatting flags the structural problems — multi-column layouts, tables, contact details hidden in a page header, images carrying text, fonts that extract badly. Keywords compares the language in your resume against what employers in your field screen for, and lists what is missing. Structure and content looks at whether your bullets carry measurable results and whether your sections are named the way parsers expect.

The whole thing takes under 30 seconds, needs no account, and can be repeated as often as you like — which matters, because the useful workflow is scan, fix one thing, scan again.

• Parse rate — how much of your text a machine can read. A scanned or image-based PDF scores near zero here and is invisible to screening software.
• Layout risk — columns, tables, text boxes and headers that reorder or drop your content when flattened.
• Section detection — whether Experience, Education and Skills are found under headings a parser recognises.
• Keyword coverage — the hard skills, tools and credentials your target roles ask for, and which of them your CV never mentions.
• Evidence quality — whether your bullets contain numbers, or only describe duties.
• Length and density — whether the document fits the expectations for your experience level.

You can check several of these yourself before uploading anything: the ATS font and formatting checker detects columns, tables and risky fonts in your browser, and the keyword extractor pulls the terms out of a specific job posting so you know what to match against.

Large employers receive hundreds of applications per opening and rarely open every file. The screening software reads your resume first and the recruiter searches within the results — by tool, by certification, by years of experience. A resume the parser mangles is not ranked badly; it is frequently not in the result set at all, which is why strong candidates get silence rather than rejection.

The fixes are usually unglamorous and fast: one column instead of two, standard section headings, no tables, a normal font, a file name with your name in it, and the same vocabulary the job posting uses. None of that requires rewriting your career — it requires making the document legible to a machine that has no imagination.

If your current file fights the parser at every turn, rebuilding is often faster than patching: the free resume builder starts from a single-column, ATS-tested template and exports a clean PDF, and the complete ATS resume guide explains the reasoning behind each rule.