ATS resume checker
Most campus and off-campus applications are read by software before a person sees them. This checks whether yours survives that — and tells you exactly what to change, not just a number.
Your resume never leaves your device. It is read inside this browser tab and nothing is sent to Fledgr or anywhere else — no upload, no account, no copy kept. Your name, phone number and address stay yours. Load this page, turn off your Wi-Fi, and it still works.
Or drag it here. Up to 15 MB. Nothing is uploaded.
Export from Word, Google Docs, Overleaf or Canva as PDF. A photo or a scan of a printed resume will fail the first check — which is itself the most useful thing this page can tell you.
What an ATS actually is
An applicant tracking system is the software a company uses to receive and file applications — Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse, Lever, Naukri's recruiter products, and the portals most Indian campus drives run on. When you upload a PDF, the system parses it into fields: name, email, phone, education, employment history, skills. Recruiters then search and filter on those fields.
The myth is that an ATS “rejects” you. Mostly it does not reject anything — it simply files you badly. If your degree lands in the wrong field, or your internship dates do not parse into a timeline, or your skills line was inside a graphic and never made it into the text at all, then you exist in the database as a nearly empty record. When the recruiter filters for the six things they care about, you are not in the results. Nobody rejected you. You were never retrieved.
Why student resumes get filtered out
The failures cluster into a handful of causes, and almost all of them come from the resume being designed rather than written.
It is an image, not a document. A resume photographed on a phone, run through a scanner app, or exported as a picture has no text layer. A parser opens it and finds nothing. This is the single most damaging mistake, it is completely invisible to you because the file looks perfect on screen, and it is the first thing this page checks.
It is laid out in two columns. Sidebar templates look sharp and parse terribly. A parser reads a page left to right across its full width, so a line of your sidebar gets joined to a line of your main column, and the result is “Python, Java B.Tech Computer Science”. The tool detects this from the actual x-coordinates of your text, not from guesswork.
The headings are creative. A section called “My Journey” instead of “Experience”, or “Toolbox” instead of “Skills”, gives the parser nothing to anchor on. Ordinary headings are not boring; they are the interface.
The dates are decorative. “Summer ’24” or a start date on the left with the end date pushed to the right margin may not extract as a range. A timeline that does not parse is an entry with no duration.
The contact details are icons. A tiny envelope glyph next to your email, or a LinkedIn logo with the URL hidden behind it as a link, reads to a parser as an unprintable character. This is endemic in the LaTeX and Overleaf templates students share with each other, and this page reads the PDF's link annotations specifically to catch it.
If you wrote it in Overleaf or LaTeX
Good choice for parsing, generally — LaTeX produces a clean, reliably extractable text layer, and the single-column templates in the style of Jake's Resume are among the safest formats you can send. Two things go wrong often enough to be worth naming.
The first is \href wrapped around a FontAwesome icon. If your contact line reads \href{https://linkedin.com/in/you}{\faLinkedin}, the URL exists in the file as a clickable annotation but appears nowhere in the text. Print the address as well as linking it. The second is the two-column template family — deedy-resume and its forks — which looks excellent and parses like a sidebar design, because it is one.
If you want to rule out ligature problems as well, add \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} and \input{glyphtounicode}\pdfgentounicode=1 to your preamble. That is what the ATS-friendly templates do, and it is why they copy-paste cleanly.
One page, and a number in every bullet
For a student or a recent graduate, one page is the norm and two needs justifying. The space is usually recoverable without losing anything: school percentages once you have college results, a coursework list that repeats your degree, a declaration line, hobbies, and any skill you would not want to be questioned on.
What goes in the space you free up is numbers. “Worked on a college website” and “Rebuilt the society website, cutting page load from 4s to 1.2s for around 900 monthly visitors” describe the same work. Only one of them is evidence. The checker counts how many of your bullets carry a figure and how many open with filler like “responsible for”, and tells you the exact count to fix rather than repeating the general advice.
Why this one does not upload your file
Every other free ATS checker works the same way: you upload your resume, their server parses it, you get a score. Your full name, phone number, personal email and often your home address then sit on a company's disk, attached to the fact that you are job-hunting, for however long their policy says — and resume databases are sold, leaked and scraped routinely. Several of these “free” checkers exist specifically to build a candidate list.
This page takes the file from your disk into your browser's memory, parses it there with the same PDF engine your browser uses to display PDFs, and renders the report from that. There is no upload endpoint to point at, because there is no server side to this feature. No account, no email capture, no copy retained, and no analytics event carrying anything about the file. Load the page, disconnect your Wi-Fi, and it still works. That is the check you can run yourself.
What this does not verify — plainly
This is a heuristic reading of your PDF, not an applicant tracking system. It has not been tested against Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse or any other named product, and it makes no claim about what those will do with your file. A high score here means your resume has the properties that generally survive automated parsing. It is not a guarantee, and no tool that says otherwise is being straight with you.
Specifically, it cannot see how a particular vendor maps text into fields; it cannot read words that are drawn inside an image, so it can only warn you that images are present; it judges section headings and date formats against common conventions rather than any one employer's rules; and it cannot tell you whether you are actually a good fit for the role. The keyword match compares vocabulary — it is a prompt to check your wording, not a relevance score, which is why it is reported separately and not folded into the number at the top.
Nothing here reads your resume for quality of judgement, and no checker can. Once the file parses cleanly, show it to a senior who has been through the placement season you are heading into.