ATS-friendly · Live keyword scoring

An ATS resume builder that shows you exactly what's missing.

Paste the job description. We extract every keyword, check which ones are in your resume, and grade you against the posting in real time. The ATS the recruiter actually uses is doing roughly the same thing — except by then it's too late to fix.

Score my resume against a job →

How CV Nestify's ATS score works

What makes a resume ATS-friendly

Do this

• Use standard section headings: "Experience", "Education", "Skills" — not "My Journey" or "Stuff I'm Good At"
• Keep contact info as plain text, not embedded in an image or header graphic
• Mirror the job description's exact wording for skills you have ("AWS" vs "Amazon Web Services" can both be in the JD — match whichever it uses)
• Use a single, parseable font (Inter, Open Sans, Calibri, Arial) for body text
• Save as PDF — modern ATS parses PDF perfectly. Word only if the JD explicitly requires it
• Put your name in the file name: jane-doe-resume.pdf beats document_v3_final.pdf

Avoid this

• Tables, complex multi-column layouts, or text inside text boxes — many ATS parsers read in column order and scramble the content
• Headers and footers — older ATS systems skip them entirely, losing your contact info
• Icons or graphics in place of text labels (the "📞" emoji isn't a phone number to a parser)
• Keyword stuffing in white-on-white text — modern ATS strips formatting and recruiters see it as fraud
• Photos — illegal to consider in many countries, and they take space the ATS can't read
• Fancy non-Latin fonts like ligature-heavy display serifs — parser falls back to nothing

Common questions

What ATS systems does this score work for?

Our scoring approximates how the major systems work: Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, iCIMS, Taleo, BambooHR, Ashby. All of them tokenize the resume + the JD and rank by keyword overlap, then apply formatting penalties. Our methodology mirrors that.

What's a "good" ATS score?

For competitive postings (FAANG, top consultancies), aim for 80+. For most postings, 70+ is fine — recruiters typically interview the top 10-20% by score, then read manually from there. Anything under 60 means a structural issue: missing section, weak keyword match, or formatting flag.

If I have the skill but the wording differs, does it count?

Our parser does basic stem-matching ("manage" matches "managed", "management"), but exact terminology helps. If the JD says "GraphQL" and your resume says "graph APIs", that's a miss. Use the missing-keywords panel to spot these and swap in the JD's wording where it's still accurate.

Can I tailor my resume for multiple jobs?

Yes — keep one master resume and tweak the bullets that overlap with each JD before exporting. Our auto-save means you can edit, export for Job A, edit again, export for Job B without losing your original.

Does ATS scoring matter for small companies?

Less so. Startups and small companies (under ~50 employees) usually screen resumes manually. But the same things that help an ATS — clear headings, scannable bullets, quantified achievements — also help human screeners.