What does a resume parser actually see?
Upload your resume and get the text an applicant tracking system extracts from it, every formatting problem that breaks along the way, and the fix for each one. No account, no cap, and nothing held back.
Upload the file you actually send
Not a copy, and not the text — the document itself. Almost everything that breaks a parser lives in the file rather than the words, and pasting quietly fixes those problems before anyone can see them.
Drop your resume here
PDF, DOCX or TXT, up to 4MB. Nothing is stored.
Resumes and parsers, answered
- What is an ATS, and does it really reject resumes?
- An applicant tracking system is the software an employer uses to receive and search applications. It does not usually reject anyone by itself — the damage is quieter than that. It reads your resume by extracting the text, and whatever it fails to extract simply is not there when a recruiter searches. A resume that parses badly does not get rejected; it stops turning up.
- How can you know what an ATS sees?
- Because we do the same thing it does. A parser reads a resume by pulling the text out of the file, and that is exactly the operation we run before checking anything. The text shown at the bottom of your result is not a simulation — it is the real output. Whatever did not survive it very probably does not survive theirs.
- Why can't I just paste my resume text?
- Because pasting would hide the very problems this checks for. Almost everything that breaks a parser lives in the file rather than the words: an image-only export with no text layer, letter-spacing that shatters a heading into single characters, contact details stranded in a PDF header, a two-column layout that unwinds in the wrong order. Copying and pasting quietly repairs every one of those. A pasted resume would come back looking fine while the actual PDF you send to employers fails, and a reassuring result about the wrong document is worse than no result at all.
- Does PDF or Word work better?
- Both are handled well, and neither costs you anything in this check. What breaks a parser is how a file was made, not which format it is — a PDF exported straight from Word or Docs is fine, while a PDF exported flat from a design tool may have no text layer at all. DOCX is marginally the safer of the two because its structure is explicit rather than reconstructed from positioned text. Plain .txt parses perfectly but loses all your formatting for the human who reads it next, and many application forms will not accept it.
- Is any of this held back until I sign up?
- No. Every finding, the score, the field-by-field checklist, and the full extracted text are shown to everyone, every time, with no cap. An account adds work this tool cannot do on its own: scoring your resume against a specific job posting, editing it against a template, and keeping a version per application.