Resume PDF ATS Checker
What a parser reads in your resume PDF, and what trips it up — checked on your device.
Job description (optional)
Matched as plain text on your device: words and short phrases, with simple plurals folded. No synonyms and no AI.
Choose your resume above to compare it with this job description.
| Keyword or phrase | Job ad | Resume |
|---|
How often each keyword appears in the job ad and in your resume; missing ones first. Only add keywords that are true for you.
What a parser gets from
- Problems
- 0
- Warnings
- 0
- Passed
- 0
- Words extracted
- 0
Checks
Contact details and headings found
Section headings
Extracted text
About the Resume PDF ATS Checker
Before a recruiter reads your application, job portals and applicant-tracking systems (ATS) turn your resume into plain text and pick your contact details, jobs, education and skills out of it. A PDF can look perfect and still give them very little: pages that are pictures, text turned into outlines, fonts whose characters don’t map to letters, sidebars read across the page, contact details tucked into a header or behind an icon.
This checker extracts the text of your PDF the way such parsers do and shows it three ways — in reading order, line by line across the page, and in the order it is stored in the file — then flags the problems it can measure, each with a fix. Paste a job description to see which of its keywords and phrases your resume contains. Everything runs in your browser: the resume is never uploaded, and nothing is judged or scored by AI.
How to use it
- Choose your resume PDF, or drag it onto the box.
- Optional: paste the job description into the box below to compare its keywords with your resume (you can paste it before or after choosing the file).
- Read the checks — problems first — and the fix under each one.
- Compare the extracted text with your resume. Switch between Reading order, Line by line and Order in the file: anything missing, garbled or jumbled there is what a parser gets.
- Fix the source document, export a new PDF and check it again. Copy or download the report to keep it.
Examples
resume.pdf — skills and languages in a left sidebar, experience on the right
Warning: Two or more columns on page 1. In “Line by line”, sidebar items and job titles share a line, e.g. “SQL Senior Data Analyst at Acme Retail”.
resume-scan.pdf — a photo of a printed resume saved as PDF
Problem: No readable text in the file. The pages are pictures with no text layer; a parser sees an empty document.
A data-analyst advert for a retail analytics team that asks for SQL, Python, Power BI, A/B tests, PostgreSQL, Tableau and Machine Learning — and a resume listing SQL, Python, Power BI and A/B testing
5 of 9 keywords found · Missing: Retail Analytics, PostgreSQL, Machine Learning, Tableau
Each keyword shows how often it appears in the advert and in your resume. Only add keywords that are true for you.
Common uses
- Checking a resume made with a design template (two columns, icons, skill bars) before applying online.
- Making sure your e-mail address and phone number can be read, not just seen.
- Tailoring a resume to a job advert by finding the skills and tools it asks for that your resume doesn’t mention.
- Placement cells and career coaches reviewing students’ resumes for parsing problems.
What the checks look for
- Text layer: pages that are images (scans, photos, exported pictures) or text converted to outlines have nothing to extract.
- Characters with no meaning: glyphs with no Unicode character, private-use symbols from icon fonts, and text that comes out as strings of consonants because a font’s Unicode map is wrong or missing.
- Ligatures: “fi” and “fl” stored as single characters (fi, fl).
- Columns and order: side-by-side columns or a sidebar, and text stored in a different order from the one you read it in.
- Headers and footers: text a tagged PDF marks as running header or footer, especially your contact details.
- Tables, rotated text and images: table cells, sideways text and anything said only by pictures (logos, icons, skill bars).
- Contact details: an e-mail address and a phone number in the text, and addresses that exist only as links behind icons.
- Headings and dates: usual section headings (Experience, Education, Skills…), headings typed with spaces between letters, and date ranges for your jobs.
The three text views
Reading order is the text rebuilt from its positions on the page, with columns and sidebars read one after the other — what a careful parser produces.
Line by line reads straight across the page, one visual line at a time, the way a parser that ignores columns does: if your sidebar and your experience sit side by side, they are mixed together here.
Order in the file is the order the PDF stores the text in — what a simple parser that reads the file front to back gets. Word processors usually store text in reading order; design tools often don’t.
How keyword matching works
Keywords are taken from the job description as plain text: words and two- or three-word phrases that repeat, look like tools or skills (SQL, C++, PostgreSQL, A/B) or are written as names (Machine Learning, Google Analytics). Common words and job-advert boilerplate (“strong”, “experience”, “ability”) are left out. Each keyword is then looked up in the text extracted from your resume, ignoring capitals and simple plurals (“databases” matches “database”).
There are no synonyms: “JS” and “JavaScript”, or “React” and “React.js”, count as different words. A missing keyword is a prompt to check your wording, not an instruction to stuff words into your resume.
Limitations
- Every applicant-tracking system uses its own parser, and they change. This shows what is in your PDF and the problems that commonly break parsing; it can’t promise how a particular employer’s system will read it.
- PDF files only. To check a Word resume, export it to PDF first — ideally the same way you will submit it.
- Scanned resumes are not read with OCR: the check tells you there is no text layer. OCR PDF can add one, but recognition errors would end up in your application, so exporting a text PDF is better.
- Section headings are recognised in English wordings, and the keyword comparison works best for English job descriptions.
- Text colour and size are not checked, so white or tiny text is extracted like any other text.
- Up to 30 pages are read; longer files are checked on their first 30 pages.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.
Frequently asked questions
Is my resume uploaded anywhere?
No. The PDF is opened and read by your browser on your device, and the job description is compared there too. Nothing is sent to MySmartCoPilot or anyone else.
Do I get an ATS score?
No. A score would suggest knowledge of how a particular employer’s system ranks applicants, which no outside tool has. Instead you get the extracted text and a list of measurable problems, each with a fix, plus a plain count of the job-description keywords your resume contains.
Why is my two-column resume flagged?
A parser that reads straight across the page joins the left and right columns line by line, so a skill from your sidebar can end up in the middle of a job title. Look at Line by line to see the effect on your file. A single column is the safest; if you keep a sidebar, use it only for short, self-contained items.
What are “characters with no text meaning”?
Symbols that look fine on screen but carry no usable character code: icons from icon fonts (phone, envelope, map pin), and glyphs from fonts embedded without a Unicode map. A parser reads them as unknown symbols, and in bad cases whole words come out wrong. Replace icons with words such as “Phone:” and use common fonts.
Why does it matter if my contact details are in the header?
In a PDF the header is ordinary page text, so most parsers do read it. But tagged PDFs mark headers and footers as page decoration, and parsers that follow those marks — or that drop lines repeated at the top and bottom of pages — can leave them out. Putting your name, e-mail and phone number in the body of the first page avoids the risk.
Should I send a Word file or a PDF?
Send what the job posting asks for. A PDF exported from a word processor normally has a clean text layer in reading order; this checker shows whether yours does.