Free ATS Resume Checker

When applications go quiet, the reason is not always your experience. Sometimes it is the document. A resume that looks right on screen can arrive at the other end with its two columns run together, or with no phone number at all, because the number was typed into the page header and the software never went in there.

Upload the file, whether you call it a resume or a CV, and you will see the raw text that comes out of it, line by line. Every layout, font and contact problem we find comes with the fix, before you open an account or type in a card.

Drop your resume here or choose a file.

PDF & DOCX only. Max 2MB file size.

Upload Your Resume

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Line-numbered text extracted from an uploaded resume file next to its readability findings

Three Things Looking at the Page Will Not Tell You

File analysis showing text that extracts as unreadable characters because of broken glyph mapping

The File That Extracts as Nonsense

Some PDFs that come out of design tools look immaculate and copy out as symbols. The letter shapes are drawn correctly, but the font never records which shape stands for which character, so anything that pulls text from the file gets junk. Select a paragraph, paste it into a plain text box, and you will see it. Most people never think to try. We run the extraction for you and put the result on the screen.

Finding card explaining contact details trapped in the page header and how to move them

The Phone Number Nobody Receives

In Word and in PDF the page header is a separate layer from the body of the document. Put your name, email and number up there and most parsers walk straight past them. Your application lands with nothing to call you on, and nobody on the other side has any reason to suspect something went missing. On your screen it all still sits exactly where you left it.

Panel listing hidden text detected in a resume file and the affected words

The Words You Did Not Put There

Some resumes carry text no human eye can find: keywords set in white on white, or shrunk under four points. It usually arrives inside a template somebody downloaded, or it is left over from an edit two versions ago. Scrolling will not turn it up. The parser reads every word of it, and from the recruiter's side it reads as an attempt to game the filter. If your file has any, we show you the exact words.

Get your resume score now!

Upload your resume to instantly see your ATS score, detect critical issues, and get improvement tips.

Drop your resume here or choose a file.

PDF & DOCX only. Max 2MB file size.

Upload Your Resume

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We Do Not Blur the Locked Card

Getting a number out of a resume tool is easy. Knowing what to write instead is the part that costs you an evening.

Whatever we find on the file itself comes with its fix, and that side is free. On the content side you get your score, where in the resume the points went, every critical finding in full, and three fixes written out. The written fix text for the remaining findings is what the paid plan buys.

A locked finding is not smeared out to make you curious. You cannot read the text on the card, but you can see which section it belongs to, how serious it is, and how many points it is taking off. That is enough to judge whether the rest is worth paying for, which is the point.

The paid side also rewrites a bullet with AI and hands back three versions for you to pick from, so nothing quietly overwrites what you wrote. Paste in a job ad and you get a separate match score for that ad, plus the terms it asks for that your skills and certificates never mention.

Monthly is $17.49 a month. Three months comes to $11.66 a month, charged as $34.99 every three months. Six months is $9.33 a month, charged as $55.99 every six months. Amounts are charged in US dollars. The cancel button sits on your subscription screen next to the date of your next payment, and access runs to the end of the period you have already paid for.

Get your resume score now!

Upload your resume to instantly see your ATS score, detect critical issues, and get improvement tips.

Drop your resume here or choose a file.

PDF & DOCX only. Max 2MB file size.

Upload Your Resume

Privacy guaranteed

Results screen showing open findings alongside locked ones with their severity and point cost visible

How It Works

UPLOAD

Upload the File Itself

PDF or Word (.docx), up to 2 MB. No card, no account. Upload the file rather than pasting the text, because the layout, font and header checks only have something to work with when the actual document is in our hands.

Upload screen accepting PDF and Word resume files up to 2 MB

READ

Read the Raw Text

The text pulled out of your file appears with line numbers, open from the start. Did your sections keep their order. Is your phone number in there at all. Did the letters survive. You do not need to know anything about parsers to answer that; you only need to read it.

Line-numbered raw text extracted from a resume with readability findings beside it

REVIEW

Take the Heaviest Findings First

Each finding names the section it came from and the points it is costing, and the list opens with the expensive ones. Start at the top and your first half hour buys you the most. Click a finding and it takes you to that line in your resume.

Findings panel sorted by severity and points lost, with jump-to-line buttons

FIX

Fix It and Let It Rescore

Edit in the builder. Roughly half a minute after you stop typing, the content score works itself out again. The layout and font findings belong to the file you uploaded, and there is no file in the builder, so those do not recalculate here. To confirm you have cleared them, download the new version and upload it again.

Resume content score recalculated in the builder after edits were applied

Get your resume score now!

Upload your resume to instantly see your ATS score, detect critical issues, and get improvement tips.

Drop your resume here or choose a file.

PDF & DOCX only. Max 2MB file size.

Upload Your Resume

Privacy guaranteed

Before You Upload

The raw text extracted from your file. Every problem found on the file side, each one with instructions for fixing it: scanned pages with no text layer, multi-column and sidebar layouts, tables and text boxes, contact details stuck in the header or footer, fonts that are not embedded or sit under 9pt, broken character mapping, hidden text, password protection, form fields, decorative bullets and icons. Then your score, the points lost per category, every critical content finding in full, and three content fixes written out. No card. An account only comes into it when you want to keep the result, edit the resume here, or come back to it later.

Most of them read text you paste in. We open your file. A two-column layout, a number left in the header, a font with broken character mapping, words hidden in white on white: none of that lives in the text, it lives in the structure of the document, so a pasted copy cannot show it. Extraction runs through an open-source engine widely used in resume parsing. The score behind it is a fixed rule set, not a model's opinion, so the same file scores the same every time. Five weighted categories: whether the file reads at all is the heaviest at 30 points, then evidence in your bullets at 26, completeness at 16, clarity and consistency at 14 each. A category that does not apply to your resume is dropped from the total rather than scored zero.

Ask it. For wording it is genuinely useful. But what you paste into a chat window is text, not the file you are about to send, and it has no way of telling you what a parser gets out of that file. That is the first thing on our screen. There is a rewriting tool in here too, on the paid side. Order matters though: sort out whether the document reads before you spend an evening on adjectives.

Not hard. There is a cancel button on the subscription screen in your account, so no email to write and nobody to get hold of. The date of your next payment is on the same screen, and cancelling leaves your access running until the end of the period you paid for. Amounts are charged in US dollars: $17.49 a month on monthly, $34.99 every three months on the quarterly plan, $55.99 every six months on the six-month plan. There is no annual plan and no free trial.

On the file side, completely. Layout, tables, fonts, headers and character mapping have nothing to do with language, and a Spanish or Japanese document is checked the same way. On the content side, part of it runs: section structure, missing sections, contact details, bullet length and whether you use numbers. These stay off on purpose: verb variety, the readability formula, date-format checking, cliche detection, the keyword-density band and the list of standard section titles. All six were tuned on English, and running them on another language would take points off you for no good reason.

Depends where you are applying. Large employers in the US and the UK almost always route applications through one, and so does anything you submit through a company careers page rather than by email. At a twenty-person firm a human usually opens the file directly. Either way the same two things decide what happens next: whether the document can be read without effort, and whether the content lines up with the ad. The fixes serve both readers.

Mostly not, and we deliberately do not score them. A photo does not make your file unreadable, though it is worth knowing that US employers tend not to expect one while plenty of European ones do. There is no single correct date format. One page is a preference, not a rule, and squeezing two pages into one usually wrecks the spacing and costs you readability. We do not suggest stuffing keywords either. When we find hidden ones we report them as a problem. Two questions are being asked here: does the document read cleanly, and does what it says match the job.

Yes. Every finding jumps you to the exact place in the builder and you edit it there. On a paid plan you can have a bullet rewritten and choose from three versions; none of them replaces your text on its own. Once the file reads cleanly, the OwlApply job board ranks openings against that resume, so the closest fits come up first.

Get your resume score now!

Upload your resume to instantly see your ATS score, detect critical issues, and get improvement tips.

Drop your resume here or choose a file.

PDF & DOCX only. Max 2MB file size.

Upload Your Resume

Privacy guaranteed

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Free ATS Resume Checker

Drop your resume here or choose a file.

PDF & DOCX only. Max 2MB file size.

Upload Your Resume

Privacy guaranteed