Most resume checkers give you a number and a vague nudge. We would rather show the whole rubric, because a score you cannot interrogate is not much use.
Here is exactly how the 100 points break down, and why each category carries the weight it does.
Quantified impact — 25 points
The heaviest single category, and deliberately so.
We count what proportion of your achievement bullets contain a figure: a percentage, a rupee value, a team size, a volume, a time saved. Full marks arrive at 70%.
Why so much weight? Because it is the clearest signal of whether you are describing duties or results. "Managed the onboarding process" and "Cut median onboarding from 21 minutes to 9" describe the same job. Only one of them tells a hiring manager what you are worth.
If you do not have exact figures, a defensible estimate you can explain in an interview beats no number at all.
Keyword match — 25 points
Coverage against the job description you paste in. Full marks at 60% of the extracted terms.
Sixty percent, not a hundred. Near-total overlap is actually penalised, because a resume that mirrors a posting word-for-word reads as copy-paste to a human and increasingly to the software as well.
The engine pulls both single words and two-word phrases, ranked separately so that single-word skills — roadmap, sql, backlog — do not get pushed off the list by longer phrases.
Section structure — 20 points
Whether a parser can find a summary, experience, education and skills section, plus whether your employment dates form a readable timeline.
Twelve points for standard headings, five for parseable dates, three for a dedicated skills block. A system that cannot construct a timeline frequently reads your resume as having no experience at all.
Contact details — 10 points
Email, phone, and a profile URL the system can actually extract from the body of the document.
Low weight because it is easy to get right, but a zero here is fatal in a way nothing else is. A candidate the recruiter cannot contact is not a candidate.
Action verbs — 10 points
Seven points for how many bullets open with a strong past-tense verb. Three points lost progressively for filler: "responsible for", "worked on", "helped with", "team player", "detail oriented".
Bullet length — 10 points
Twelve to forty-two words is the readable band. Under twelve, a bullet has no room for both a result and its context. Over forty-two, it stops being read.
Then the deductions
Format and hygiene violations come off the top, capped at 20 points in total:
- Multi-column or table layout — minus 5. The single most common reason a strong resume parses into nonsense.
- Image-only or graphics-heavy file — minus 5. An immaculate page containing no text.
- Date of birth, marital status, declaration blocks — up to minus 5. Extremely common on Indian resume templates. They occupy prime space, invite unconscious bias, and no ATS field maps to them.
- First-person pronouns — minus 2. Resume convention is implied first person.
- Long blocks of capitals — minus 2.
One thing worth knowing about the number
Different ATS platforms parse differently, so no tool can honestly claim to replicate a specific system exactly. What this rubric tests are the fundamentals every one of them depends on: readable text, linear reading order, standard headings, parseable dates and contact details, and vocabulary coverage.
Fix those and you clear the overwhelming majority of filters.
We use this same engine to score every resume we rewrite before it leaves — nothing ships below 80. Run it against yours and see where you land.