How to check if your resume is ATS-friendly

Open your resume, select all, copy, and paste it into a plain text editor with no formatting. What appears is close to what a parser extracts. Read it top to bottom.

Look for three failures: text that arrives out of order (a sign of columns or text boxes), sections that are missing entirely (usually content trapped in a header, footer, or graphic), and contact details that vanished.

If nothing pastes at all, your resume is an image. Rebuild it as a text document before you send another application — an image resume contributes zero searchable content.

Parsers reconstruct a profile: name, email, phone, then each job as title + employer + dates. Go through your text-only version and confirm each role has all three, in a consistent format, on adjacent lines.

Watch stacked promotions. "Senior Analyst → Analyst, 2021–2025" often lands as one garbled title. Split it into two entries with their own date ranges.

Confirm your education and certifications sit under headings named "Education" and "Certifications". Creative headings frequently end up filed as generic body text.

Parsing correctly is not the same as ranking well. Put a real job description beside your resume and highlight the posting's terms that appear in your document — title, tools, certifications, named responsibilities.

If the load-bearing terms are missing, you will parse perfectly and still never surface in the recruiter's search. Fix the top five and re-check.

Submit the format the posting asks for. When it is unspecified, a text-based PDF is the safe default; when the form only accepts .docx, export a clean copy rather than trusting a converter.

Fill the application form fields even when you have attached a resume. Many systems weight the typed fields over the attachment, and a half-filled form is a common silent rejection.

Name the file with your name and the word Resume, and keep one canonical version so you never attach last year's draft.

Manual checks catch layout problems. A scored check catches the rest. Villioo's ATS Genome™ returns a compatibility score, the specific formatting issues breaking your parse, and the keyword gaps against the exact job description you paste in.

Run it once to fix structural issues for good, then once per application for wording. Ten minutes of checking regularly recovers applications that were being lost for reasons that had nothing to do with your qualifications.