Free Resume Checker
Paste your resume and get an instant score on ATS readability, keyword match, formatting, action verbs, and impact. See exactly what to fix — then rebuild it in Drafted's AI resume builder in minutes.
What Does a Resume Checker Do?
A resume checker analyses your resume and gives you objective, structured feedback on the factors that determine whether it gets past automated screening and lands in front of a human recruiter. The uncomfortable truth is that most resumes fail long before a hiring manager reads them — not because the candidate lacks experience, but because the document has formatting problems, missing keywords, or weak bullet points that automated systems penalise.
A good resume checker doesn't just tell you "your resume needs work." It tells you exactly what to fix: which section headings are non-standard, which bullet points don't include a measurable result, which keywords from the job description you pasted in are absent from your resume, and whether your contact information is in a place the ATS can find it.
Drafted's resume checker is built to surface those specific, actionable fixes — not vague suggestions. After you see the report, you can open the AI resume builder and fix every issue directly, then download a polished PDF. You can also browse our resume examples hub to see what a strong, ATS-optimised resume looks like in your field before you rewrite.
What Gets Scored: Eight Categories Explained
ATS Readability
Can an applicant tracking system parse your resume without scrambling the content? This score checks for two-column layouts, text boxes, tables used as design elements, non-selectable text, and header/footer placement of contact info — all common causes of ATS failure.
Formatting
Are your section headings standard? Is the font consistent? Are dates formatted uniformly? Poor formatting signals sloppiness to both the ATS and the human who eventually reads the document. The checker flags every inconsistency.
Action Verbs
Bullet points should begin with strong, specific action verbs — "Led," "Reduced," "Designed," "Launched." The checker identifies bullet points that start passively ("Was responsible for," "Helped with") and flags them for rewriting.
Quantified Results
Numbers turn vague claims into evidence. The checker counts what percentage of your bullet points include a measurable result — a number, percentage, dollar figure, or time saving — and shows which ones are missing them.
Keyword Match
Paste in the job description and the checker produces a gap report: the terms the employer used that don't appear in your resume. This is the single highest-impact fix most job seekers can make.
Length
Too short means missing sections. Too long means padding that dilutes your strong points. The checker flags resumes that fall outside the optimal range for your experience level and suggests which content to cut or expand.
Contact Information
Is your phone number present? LinkedIn URL? City and state (not full address)? Is your email professional? Missing or inappropriate contact details are an instant disqualifier, and the checker catches all of them.
Typos & Grammar
Spelling errors and grammatical inconsistencies signal carelessness. The checker runs a final pass on your text and highlights anything that looks like it should be reviewed before you apply.
The 15-Point Resume Checklist
Before you run any automated checker, go through this list manually. These are the fundamentals — the things that should already be right before the tool finds the finer issues.
- Full legal name at the top, in a larger font than body text
- Professional email address (not a nickname or outdated provider)
- Phone number with area code — one number is sufficient
- City and state (or city and country for international roles) — not your full street address
- LinkedIn URL, shortened and verified it works
- Professional summary of 2–3 sentences: role + years of experience + one standout achievement
- Work experience in reverse chronological order (most recent first)
- Job title, company name, city, and date range (month and year) for every role
- At least 2–4 bullet points per role, each beginning with an action verb
- At least 50% of bullet points include a number, percentage, or concrete result
- Education section with institution name, degree, and graduation year
- Skills section listing both hard skills (tools, software, languages) and relevant soft skills
- Standard section headings — no creative alternatives that confuse ATS parsers
- Consistent formatting: same font, date format, and bullet style throughout
- One to two pages maximum for most job seekers with under 10 years of experience
Common Mistakes That Fail ATS — and How to Fix Them
Applicant tracking systems are stricter than most job seekers realise. These are the formatting and content errors that cause otherwise qualified candidates to get filtered out before a human ever sees their application.
Multi-column resume templates look polished in a PDF viewer but confuse most ATS parsers. The software reads left-to-right, top-to-bottom and may jumble your content — mixing education into experience, or reading your contact details mid-page.
A clean single-column layout guarantees the ATS reads your sections in the correct order. Drafted's templates are all single-column by design, so this issue is eliminated automatically.
Many Word and Google Docs resume templates place your name and contact details in the document header. Some ATS systems skip headers entirely, which means your phone number and email may not be captured.
Place your name, email, phone, and city in the first section of the body text — not in a header or footer element. The ATS will always read body text.
Creative headings like "Where I've Been," "My Toolkit," or "What I Do" might feel personal, but ATS systems are trained to find specific labels. "Where I've Been" will not be recognised as Work Experience.
Stick to: Summary (or Professional Summary), Experience (or Work Experience), Education, Skills (or Core Competencies), and Certifications. These are universally recognised by ATS software and hiring managers alike.
If a job description mentions "Salesforce CRM" and your resume only says "CRM software," the ATS keyword match will score that as a miss — even though you likely mean the same thing.
Read the job description and use the employer's exact phrasing. If they write "cross-functional team collaboration," use that phrase — not "working with multiple teams." Keyword matching is literal.
Some designers and Canva-style resume tools export resumes as image-based PDFs — the text looks right on screen but is actually a picture that the ATS cannot read at all. Your resume scores zero for every text-based criterion.
Open the PDF and try to highlight a word. If you can select text, the file is readable by ATS. Drafted exports only selectable-text PDFs, so this is never an issue when you build with us.
How to Read a Job Description for Keywords
The job description is a cheat sheet. The employer has told you exactly what they want — you just need to read it strategically. Here's how to extract every keyword worth including in your resume.
Step 1 — Read the "Requirements" and "Qualifications" sections first. These contain the non-negotiable skills and experience the ATS is programmed to find. Every item you genuinely have should appear somewhere in your resume using the same words the employer used.
Step 2 — Identify repeated words and phrases. If the same skill or quality appears in three different parts of the posting — say, "data analysis" in the summary, the requirements, and the responsibilities — the employer considers it critical. Make sure it appears in your skills section and at least one bullet point.
Step 3 — Note specific tools, software, and certifications. "Microsoft Excel" is different from "spreadsheets." "Google Analytics" is different from "web analytics tools." Use the exact product or system name. See our resume skills list for a comprehensive catalogue of in-demand tools by industry.
Step 4 — Look for soft skills hidden in the language. Phrases like "fast-paced environment," "collaborative team," "strong communicator," and "detail-oriented" are signals about culture and work style. Where these are genuine to your experience, work them into your summary or a bullet point naturally.
Step 5 — Paste the full job description into Drafted. The keyword gap report will show you side-by-side which terms appear in the posting but are absent from your current resume — so you don't miss anything through manual scanning.
See your resume score in seconds
Paste your resume into Drafted, get your ATS and content score, and fix every issue in the same tool — no separate software needed.
Start Building ResumeHow Drafted's Builder Fixes Issues Automatically
Running a resume checker and getting a list of problems is only useful if fixing those problems is straightforward. Drafted closes the loop between diagnosis and repair in a single tool.
When you build or import your resume in Drafted's AI resume builder, the same scoring logic that powers the checker runs in the background. ATS formatting is guaranteed by the template engine — you cannot accidentally create a two-column layout or put your contact info in a header, because the builder doesn't allow those structures. Every template exports as a selectable-text PDF.
For content fixes, the AI actively assists: if a bullet point doesn't include a measurable result, Drafted can suggest a rewrite. If a skill from the job description is missing, the skills suggester flags it. If your summary sounds generic, you can regenerate it with a single click. The result is that you don't need to manually implement every finding from the checker — a large part of the fix happens when you rebuild in Drafted rather than trying to patch a problematic Word document.
Before and after the rebuild, you can re-run the checker to confirm your score has improved. Most users see a significant jump after switching from a multi-column template to one of Drafted's clean single-column layouts alone — before they even address the content.
Before and After: The Same Experience, Two Very Different Resumes
Here's a real-world illustration of how a resume checker's findings translate into a concrete improvement. Both versions describe the same five years of work. Only one will pass an ATS and impress a hiring manager.
Objective: Looking for a challenging position where I can use my skills in a dynamic environment.
Work History:
- Responsible for customer service
- Helped manage the team
- Worked on improving processes
- Assisted with inventory
Score issues: no action verbs, no numbers, vague objective instead of summary, non-standard heading "Work History," no keyword match, passive phrasing throughout.
Professional Summary: Customer-focused retail supervisor with 5 years of experience leading teams in high-volume store environments. Consistently exceeded satisfaction targets and reduced stock discrepancies by 30%.
Experience:
- Managed a team of 9 associates across two shifts, maintaining a department customer satisfaction score of 4.6/5
- Redesigned the daily stock audit process, reducing inventory discrepancies by 30% within three months
- Resolved an average of 25 customer escalations per week with a 91% first-contact resolution rate
- Trained 6 new hires on POS systems and store procedures, reducing onboarding time from 2 weeks to 8 days
The "after" version passes ATS keyword checks for terms like "customer satisfaction," "inventory," "team management," and "onboarding." Every bullet starts with an active verb and includes a specific number. The summary replaces the useless objective statement with a two-sentence pitch that gives a hiring manager an immediate reason to keep reading. To build a resume like this for your own experience, use the AI resume builder and let Drafted handle the transformation.
What job seekers say
"I ran my old resume through the checker and immediately saw why I wasn't getting callbacks — two-column layout, no numbers, missing keywords. Fixed it in the builder in 20 minutes."
"The keyword gap report was the most useful thing I've seen in a job search tool. I added six missing terms from the job description and got an interview within a week."
"I didn't realise my contact info was in the header and invisible to the ATS. That explains everything. Ten minutes in Drafted and the new resume actually looks professional too."
Testimonials shown are placeholders for illustration and will be replaced with verified customer reviews.
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We respect your inbox. One useful email at a time.Frequently asked questions
What does a resume checker actually check?
Drafted's resume checker evaluates your resume across eight dimensions: ATS readability (whether an applicant tracking system can parse your file), formatting (section headings, font consistency, layout cleanliness), action verbs (whether bullet points start with strong verbs), quantified results (whether achievements include numbers), keyword match to the job description you paste in, resume length, contact information completeness, and spelling and grammar. Each category receives a score, and the tool highlights specific lines to fix.
Is the resume checker really free?
Yes. You can check your resume and receive a full score and feedback report at no cost. If you then want to fix your resume in Drafted's AI builder and download the improved PDF, that download costs a one-time fee of $1.99.
What does ATS-friendly formatting actually mean?
ATS-friendly means your resume can be read correctly by applicant tracking systems — the software most companies use to screen applications before a human sees them. Key requirements: use standard section headings, avoid text boxes and multi-column designs that confuse parsers, keep fonts simple and selectable, and save as a standard .pdf or .docx file. Drafted's templates are built to pass every major ATS parser.
How do I find the right keywords to add to my resume?
The most reliable method is to read the job description carefully and identify every skill, tool, certification, and methodology mentioned — especially those that appear more than once. Copy the exact phrasing the employer uses. Paste the job description into Drafted's resume checker to get a keyword gap report showing which terms are missing from your resume. See our resume skills list for additional industry-specific keywords.
How long should a resume be?
For most job seekers with under 10 years of experience, one page is the target. For senior professionals, managers, or academics, two pages is acceptable. Three pages or more is rarely appropriate outside of academic CVs. The resume checker flags resumes that are too long or too short and suggests specific cuts or additions.
What are the most common reasons a resume fails ATS?
The five most common ATS failures are: using a two-column layout with text in boxes that the parser reads out of order; putting contact information in a header or footer where some ATS tools cannot read it; using non-standard section headings like "My Story" instead of "Professional Summary"; saving the file as an image PDF rather than a selectable-text PDF; and missing keywords from the job description entirely. Drafted's resume checker flags all five.