See your resume the way the ATS does.

What the checker looks at

Most ATS checkers count keywords and stop. This one starts where real systems start — with extraction — because a resume the parser cannot read scores zero on everything else.

Parseability

Whether the text can be extracted at all (scanned PDFs cannot), how many columns the layout has, tables and text boxes in Word files, images, the number of fonts, body text size, contact details hidden in headers or footers, page count and file size.

Sections and dates

Standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills, Summary, Projects, Certifications), creative names that parsers will not map, and whether roles carry dates in a consistent format.

Contact details

An email address, phone number, city and LinkedIn URL that a parser can find near the top and file correctly.

Writing quality

Bullets versus paragraphs, action verbs at the start of bullets, how many bullets contain a number, bullet length, first-person pronouns, clichés like “results-driven”, and overall length.

Keyword match

With a job description pasted in: which of the posting’s skills and terms appear in the resume and which are missing — the biggest factor in how an ATS ranks applicants.

The mistakes that actually break parsing

• Text inside images or text boxes. Icons for phone and email, a name in a graphic, a sidebar built as a text box — parsers skip all of it.
• Tables for layout. Cells are read in an order the parser chooses, so “Senior Engineer — 2021” can become “2021 Engineer Senior”.
• Contact details in the page header. Several systems ignore headers and footers entirely.
• Creative section names. “My journey” is not filed under Experience; “Toolbox” is not Skills.
• Scanned or “printed to image” PDFs. No text at all. Export from the editor instead of scanning.
• Letter-spaced headings. Wide tracking can make “EXPERIENCE” extract as “E X P E R I E N C E” — invisible to a human, fatal to a section detector. DopeResume’s templates cap tracking below that threshold.

Questions

What is an ATS and why does it matter?

An applicant tracking system is the software employers use to collect applications. It extracts the text from your file, files it into fields (name, employer, dates, skills) and lets recruiters search and rank candidates. If the extraction goes wrong — text in an image, columns read in the wrong order, a section it cannot name — the recruiter never sees what you wrote.

How is the score calculated?

Five categories add up to 100: parseability (30), sections and dates (20), contact details (10), writing quality (25) and keyword match (15). Every point is tied to a specific check you can see in the report; there is no hidden weighting. Without a job description the score is scaled to the 85 points that can be checked.

Is a two-column resume bad for ATS?

Not automatically. Modern parsers read most two-column resumes correctly when the PDF contains real text in reading order. Older systems sometimes read across columns. The checker reports the column count and shows you the extracted text so you can see the order yourself.

Do you keep my resume?

No. The file is analysed in memory to produce the report and discarded. The optional AI suggestions send the extracted text to the AI provider for that one request and it is not stored either.

Can the checker guarantee I pass a specific ATS?

No tool can — every system parses a little differently and recruiters set their own filters. What the checker does is remove the known failure modes and show you exactly what a standard parser extracts, which is what most systems are built on.

What does “Fix it in the editor” do?

It takes the extracted text, structures it into sections with AI, and opens it in the DopeResume editor, where every design exports real-text PDF and Word files. You can then apply the suggestions and download.

Building from scratch instead? Start with a complete example for your job or pick one of the templates — every one exports real PDF text.