Free resume checker
Most resume checkers score you against invented criteria. This one reads your PDF the way an applicant tracking system does, measures the layout, and tells you what it found — including the text it would keep, so you can see the damage yourself.
Your file is read in this browser tab and never uploaded. We do not receive it, store it, or see what it says.
What it checks
Eight things, all of them observable in the file. There is no “recruiter appeal” rating here, because nobody can measure that from a PDF — and a score built on guesses is worse than no score.
- Whether there is any text at all
- A resume exported as an image, or scanned, has no text layer. It looks perfect to you and arrives blank to a parser. This is the single most expensive mistake and the easiest to miss.
- Columns and sidebars
- We measure where your lines sit on the page. If your text runs in two vertical bands, a parser reads straight across them and interleaves your skills into your job titles.
- Contact details in plain text
- An email written inside an icon or a graphic is invisible. We check that an address and a phone number exist as characters a machine can copy.
- Section headings it recognises
- Parsers classify content by heading, matching a known vocabulary. "Experience" is found; "My Journey So Far" is not, and everything under it goes unlabelled.
- Employment dates
- Your timeline is built from start and end dates. Roles without them can be dropped when results are sorted by recency.
- Measurable results
- We count the lines carrying a number that is not a date. This is the difference between describing a job and showing what you did with it.
- Weak openers and filler
- "Responsible for" describes the job description rather than your work. We flag the usual phrases so you can replace them with an outcome.
- Decorative symbols
- Skill-level dots, stars and icon fonts arrive as mojibake or as nothing. They also tell a reader less than a plain word would.
Why your file is not uploaded
A resume is the most sensitive document most people send out: full name, address, phone number, every employer. There is no reason a checker needs a copy of it on a server, so this one does not take it.
The PDF is parsed by code running in this browser tab, on your machine. Nothing is transmitted — not the file, not the text pulled out of it, not the score. Close the tab and there is nothing left anywhere.
You can verify that: open your browser’s network tab before checking a resume and watch that no request carries it.
After the check
Most of what this tool flags is a formatting decision, not a writing problem — and formatting is the part you can fix in an afternoon. If the report says your layout has two columns or your headings are not recognised, the shortest route is to rebuild the content in a format that does not have those problems in the first place.
Our builder uses one single-column layout for exactly that reason, and the examples by profession show it filled in for eight different fields.