Create Your Perfect Résumé

What the score measures

The review reads your document the way a recruiter does on a first pass: quickly, looking for reasons to stop. It grades nine areas and returns a total out of 100, with every deduction tied to the passage that caused it so you can see the evidence rather than a bare number.

• Spelling and grammar — 20 points. The single most common reason a good candidate is passed over. Typos in a job title, a company name or your own email address cost the most.
• Structure — 20 points. Clear, conventionally named sections in a sensible order; reverse-chronological history; no orphaned headings or duplicated blocks.
• Length — 15 points. One page for early career, two for most people, three only with a long specialist record. Padding is penalised as heavily as gaps.
• Content and relevance — 15 points. Whether the experience shown answers the job you are aiming at, or reads as a generic history sent to everyone.
• Impact — 10 points. Results with numbers, scale or outcomes, instead of a list of duties copied from a job description.
• Readability — 8 points. Sentence length, bullet density, jargon, and whether a reader can scan the page in fifteen seconds.
• Machine readability — 6 points. Whether screening software can extract your text: no content trapped in images, text boxes or complex tables.
• Design consistency — 3 points. One typeface family, consistent dates, aligned margins, uniform bullet style.
• Contact details — 3 points. A professional email address, a reachable phone number, a city, and a profile link if you have one.

What a typical result looks like

Most first uploads come back between 55 and 75. The recurring deductions are predictable. A bullet reading "Responsible for managing the customer support inbox" describes a duty and earns nothing under impact; rewritten as "Cleared a 400-message support backlog and held first-reply time under two hours across a 12-person team" it earns the points, because it shows scale and outcome. A summary reading "Motivated professional seeking a challenging role" is deducted under content and relevance, because it could belong to anyone; naming your field, your years and the two things you are actually good at fixes it.

Dates are the other frequent surprise. An end date in the future, an end date before its start date, or a five-year hole with no explanation each raise a flagged issue — not because a gap is disqualifying, but because an unexplained one makes a reader guess, and readers guess unkindly. A line such as "2021–2023 — full-time caring responsibilities, part-time bookkeeping study" closes the question in one sentence.

How to use the feedback

Work top down. Fix everything under spelling and structure first — those are cheap, fast, and worth 40 of the 100 points. Then rewrite your three or four most recent bullets into results, which is the slowest task and the one that changes how you read as a candidate. Only then worry about length and layout. Re-upload afterwards: seeing the score move tells you which changes actually did work, and it is common to gain 15 to 25 points in one editing session.

Questions people ask

Is it really free?

Yes. There is no account, no sign-up, no trial and no payment. The site is funded by advertising.

Is my document stored?

No. Your file is read to produce the score and is not saved to a database or shared with advertisers. Reloading the page clears it. The privacy policy sets out exactly what happens to the text.

Which file types work?

PDF and Word documents. PDFs exported from a word processor read best; a scanned photograph of a printed page has no extractable text and will score poorly on machine readability for exactly the reason a real screening system would reject it.

Does a high score guarantee an interview?

No, and nothing can. The score measures whether your document presents your experience clearly and survives a first screen. Whether you are invited also depends on the shortlist you are competing against and how well your experience matches the role.

What if I disagree with a suggestion?

Ignore it. Some fields have conventions that override general advice — academic and medical records run long by design, and design portfolios are judged visually. The score is a check on clarity, not a rule book. If a piece of advice looks plainly wrong for your field, tell us through the contact form and we will look at the rubric.

For the reasoning behind these criteria in more depth, read how to write a résumé and making a résumé machine-readable.