How We Score

Job Match score — 8 factors

When you provide a job description, your Job Match score is a weighted average of eight factors. Weights reflect how much each factor typically matters to whether a resume clears an ATS filter and a first recruiter screen — they're a judgment call, not a scientific constant, and may be refined over time.

• Requirement Coverage30%
• Skills Match20%
• Experience Alignment15%
• Responsibility Match10%
• Keyword Alignment10%
• Job Title Alignment5%
• ATS Readability5%
• Resume Structure5%

A missing critical, mandatory requirement (e.g. a required certification with zero supporting evidence) applies an additional, visible penalty and a hard ceiling on top of the weighted average above — a pile of otherwise-strong sub-scores can never fully mask a confirmed critical gap. When a category has nothing in the job description to grade against (e.g. no responsibilities were listed), that sub-score falls back to a neutral, clearly-labeled placeholder rather than a real measurement — see "Fallback scores" below.

Confirmed ATS defects also cap the overall score. If we detect something an ATS genuinely can't read (no detectable email, garbled text, no Experience heading), your overall score is capped: one defect can't score above 82, two above 75, three above 68, and never below a floor of 55 for the cap alone. Strong content shouldn't hide a resume that can't be parsed, and the results page always names the exact problem.

The "up to +N pts" on a recommendation is an upper-bound estimate of how much the overall score could rise if that item were fully fixed. It's calculated from the score weights above, not a guarantee.

General resume check — no job description

Without a job description, there's nothing to match keywords, skills, or experience against — so the overall score is a weighted average of three resume-quality factors instead:

• ATS Readability40%
• Resume Structure30%
• Content Quality30%

Fallback scores

Some sub-scores (like Skills Match or Responsibility Match) only mean something if the job description actually mentioned anything in that category. When it didn't, we don't show 0 (which would unfairly punish a gap that isn't your fault) or 100 (which would look like an unearned perfect score). Instead we show a fixed, neutral number and label it explicitly as "not enough information to score" wherever it appears — never a number that quietly looks like a real measurement.

ATS Compatibility simulation

The "ATS Compatibility" outlook (Likely to parse cleanly / Some parsing risk / High parsing risk) is a simulation of common ATS parsing behavior — linear text extraction, standard section detection — derived entirely from your ATS Readability score and the specific confirmed defects we found (e.g. missing contact info, an undetectable Experience section, garbled text). It does not name, and does not claim to reproduce, the actual behavior of any specific vendor's system (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, or otherwise), and it never produces a numeric probability — real ATS behavior varies too much by vendor and configuration for that kind of precision to be honest.

ATS-Friendly Resume Templates

Beyond checking your original resume file, ResumeChecker provides a resume generator with standard single-column ATS-friendly templates (Harvard Classic, Software & Tech Lead, Modern Clean, Executive Leadership, Entry-Level & New Grad):

• Single-column layout: Avoids the tables, text boxes, and sidebars that are a common source of parsing issues in ATS software.
• Standardized section titles: Maps custom headings to universal ATS categories (Professional Experience, Technical Skills, Education, Professional Summary).
• DOCX & PDF export of your own resume: From your results page, rebuild your analyzed resume as a clean Word document or a text-selectable PDF. The template gallery itself offers copy-and-paste text and .TXT downloads.