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ATS CV checker

Three checks in one: the text a parser pulls out of your CV, the record an applicant tracking system builds from it, and whether a recruiter searching for a specific job would find you at all.

Short answer: an ATS mostly does not score you and reject you. It files you, and a recruiter searches the file. The risk is being unfindable, not being marked down.

Paste rather than upload on purpose — what you copy out is close to what a parser extracts. Checked in your browser; nothing is uploaded or stored.

There is no standard ATS score (33 seconds)Where the ATS scores you see online actually come from, what employers really run instead, and the three things that genuinely help a CV get found.What it says: There is no single ATS score that employers agree on. The numbers you see come from CV-scanning sites, each with its own formula. What employers run is closer to a filing cabinet. Your CV is filed, and recruiters search it. So make sure a machine can read your CV, and that it carries the words they search for. Job Badger's free check shows you exactly that, in your browser.

What an ATS actually does with your CV

The story most people have been told is that an applicant tracking system reads your CV, scores it, and bins anything under a threshold. For the systems most employers run, that is not what happens, and believing it sends people chasing the wrong fix.

What it really does is closer to a filing cabinet with a search box. It parses the document into text, populates fields (name, email, title, employer, dates) into a record, and then sits there until a recruiter searches the database for a few terms lifted from the requisition. Nothing scores you. A search either returns you or it does not.

So there are three ways to lose, and only the first is about formatting. The parse garbles your CV. Or the parse works but a field comes out empty, so you cannot be filtered on. Or everything works and you simply do not contain the words the recruiter typed. The checker above covers all three. The genuine auto-rejection, incidentally, happens somewhere else entirely: the knockout questions on the application form, about work authorisation, location and years of experience.

What actually breaks parsing

Nearly always layout rather than wording: multiple columns read across instead of down, contact details stranded in a header or footer, text inside an image, tables whose borders survive as gibberish, and creative section titles a parser has no reason to recognise. A plainer document is not a worse document — it is one that arrives intact.

The full list is in the ATS-proof CV checklist. For structure conventions, the European Commission's Europass standard is a reasonable baseline.

Want a read on the content too?

This tool checks whether your CV can be read. Job Badger's free CV health check reads what it says — and tells you honestly where it is thin. Get the honest read → Or go straight to a real posting and have the letter written too.

Common questions

Does an ATS score my CV and reject it?
For most systems, no, and the belief that it does sends people chasing the wrong fix. An applicant tracking system is mostly a database. It parses your CV into fields and stores it, and then a recruiter searches that database for a few terms from the job. So the common failure is not a bad score, it is not appearing in the search at all. What does auto-reject is the application form itself: the knockout questions about work authorisation, location and years of experience.
Will an applicant tracking system reject my CV automatically for formatting?
Most systems do not auto-reject on formatting. What happens is worse in practice: your CV parses badly, so your experience lands in the wrong fields or goes missing, and a recruiter searching for a skill you actually have never sees you.
What does the recruiter search check do?
It pulls the meaningful terms out of a job posting you paste and splits them by whether your CV contains them. That is close to what a recruiter does with a boolean search over the database. It is not a score and we do not give you one, because no number we invented would correspond to anything real.
Are PDF or Word files better for an ATS?
Either parses fine in modern systems. The file type matters far less than the layout inside it. A single-column Word document and a single-column PDF both work; a two-column PDF causes problems in both formats.
Why does my CV lose text when I copy it?
Usually columns, text boxes or content inside an image. Parsers read the underlying text stream, so a two-column layout is often read straight across, mixing two unrelated jobs into one line. What you copy out is close to what the parser gets.
Do I need to match keywords from the job posting?
Use the posting's own words for skills you genuinely have, especially the exact job title. That is mirroring, and it helps a recruiter's search find you. Adding skills you lack is a different thing and gets found out at interview.

Built by Nenad Franjic. The guidance here is tested against real applications and their outcomes — including the rejections — rather than written from a content brief.