To improve your ATS score, fix what the checker flags in order of damage: first make sure the PDF has real text and your contact details sit outside the header, then date every role, add numbers to your bullets, swap weak openers for verbs, and list role-relevant skills as plain text. Re-run after each fix. Most resumes cross 80 in under an hour.
If you want to know what your number means, what is a good ATS score has the lookup table for every common score. If you are writing a resume from scratch, how to make your resume ATS-friendly is the checklist. This post is for the person who already has a score, does not like it, and wants to know what to do in the next hour.
The fix order matters more than the fixes
Every checker grades a handful of signals. Ours grades six: contact details, summary length, dated roles, quantified bullet points, action verbs, and relevant skills. The ATS score explainer covers how they add up to 100.
Here is the part most fix lists miss: these checks are not independent. If the file has no extractable text, every check fails at once, because there is nothing to check. Rewriting your bullets on a scanned resume is polishing a photo of a car. So the order is: the file, then the structure, then the words.
Your failing check tells you the fix
Find the check that failed, do the fix, and note the time it takes. This is the whole post in one table.
| Failing check | What is usually wrong | The fix | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Score below 40, almost everything fails | Image PDF, scan, or flattened design export | Re-export as a text PDF from Word, Google Docs or a builder | 10 min |
| Contact details | Name, email or phone sit in the page header or a sidebar | Move them into the body, top of page, plain text | 5 min |
| Dated roles | A job, internship or project has no dates, or only a year | Add start and end month and year to every entry | 10 min |
| Quantified bullets | Bullets describe duties with no numbers | Add a count, %, amount or time saved to the top two bullets per role | 20 min |
| Action verbs | Lines open with “responsible for”, “worked on” | Lead with built, led, cut, shipped, analysed | 10 min |
| Relevant skills | Skills sit in icons, bars or a graphic, or there are fewer than three | Plain comma-separated list of role skills | 10 min |
| Summary length | A paragraph of six lines, or none at all | One to three sentences: role, years, one strength | 5 min |
That is roughly 70 minutes if everything fails, and most resumes only fail two or three rows.
The seven steps, with the detail
1. Get a baseline and list the failing checks
Upload the PDF you actually send to recruiters. Write down each check marked to fix. Then ignore the number. Scores are not portable between tools, so an 82 here and a 74 somewhere else can describe the same file. The checks are what you act on.
2. Fix the file before the words
Open your PDF and try to select your name with the cursor. If it highlights as text, good. If nothing selects, the file is an image and no parser can read it. Re-export from the source document. If you built it in a design tool, the details are in can ATS read a PDF, including the one export setting that turns text into pixels.
While you are here, move to a single column and take your contact details out of the page header. Parsers read top to bottom and many skip headers and footers entirely.
3. Date every role
Every job, internship and project gets a start and end, month and year: “Jun 2023 - Present”. Pick one format and use it everywhere. Gaps are fine. Missing dates read as concealment even when nothing is concealed.
4. Put numbers in your top bullets
You do not need numbers in every line. You need them in the top two bullets per role, because that is where a recruiter’s eye stops. Counts, percentages, amounts, team sizes, hours saved. “Handled customer queries” becomes “Resolved 40+ customer tickets a day at 92% first-contact resolution”. If you do not have exact figures, a defensible estimate you could explain is fine.
5. Swap weak openers for strong verbs
Search your resume for “responsible for”, “worked on” and “helped with”. Replace each with the verb that describes what you did: built, led, cut, migrated, analysed, shipped. It takes ten minutes and it reads better to humans too. Action verbs for your resume lists more of them by role, with the weak openers to drop.
6. Fix the skills section
At least three skills the role actually asks for, as plain text. Skill bars and star ratings parse as nothing, and nobody believes a four-out-of-five in Python anyway. For which terms belong there, the ATS keywords list by role has the pool per job family.
7. Trim the summary and re-run
One to three sentences. Role, years of experience, one specific strength. Then re-upload and confirm the score moved. If it did not, re-read the failing check, not the advice.
After 80, a different number matters
Once the ATS score is clean, it stays the same for every application. The number that changes per job is the match percentage against a specific posting. That is a separate fix with a separate method: how to tailor your resume to a job description walks through it with a worked example.
When not to bother chasing the score
Here is the honest version. If your resume is weak on substance, fix that first, and no checker will tell you that for you. The score measures whether the document is readable and complete. It cannot see that your experience is thin for the roles you are targeting. More applications of a weak profile is just faster rejection.
Rule of thumb:
- Below 60: stop applying until it is fixed. You are losing applications to mechanical failures.
- 60-79: fix the flagged checks tonight, then apply tomorrow.
- 80 and up: stop editing. Nobody has been rejected for an 83 instead of a 91.
And for your handful of dream roles, the score matters least of all. Get a referral and let a human carry the resume past the software.
One thing to do in the next ten minutes
Copy all the text from your resume PDF and paste it into a plain notepad. Read it top to bottom. Is your name first? Are your dates next to the right jobs? Are your skills there as words? Whatever is missing or out of order there is what the parser sees too. Fix that, then run the ATS resume checker once to confirm.