What is a good ATS score? What 147 test scores show

Every resume checker gives you a number out of 100. Almost none tell you what a good one is, and the honest answer starts with an awkward fact: the employer never sees that number.

So we ran a test. We scored fictional test resumes with Resumeize's own scorer, the same code that scores every resume on the site, and looked at where the numbers land. Here is what a good score looks like on our scale, what moves it, and when it's good enough to stop editing and apply.

First: nobody at the company sees your checker score

An applicant tracking system stores your application and lets recruiters search, filter and move people through hiring. What it shows them depends on the product and on how the employer set it up.

• Greenhouse says it never uses AI to rate candidates or auto-reject applications.
• Its co-founder told Axios that candidates are generally shown in the order they applied.
• Workday HiredScore does grade candidates, but on its own scale: letters A to D by how well a resume matches the job's skills and qualifications.

That's why a checker's score is worth having anyway. With hundreds of applicants, a recruiter searches and skims. A checker estimates whether your file is read correctly and whether it clearly shows what this job asks for. It's a measure of your resume against one posting, not a grade anyone else will look up.

Checkers don't share a scale either. Jobscan, for example, recommends a match rate of at least 75% on its own measure. Ours is built differently, so a 75 here and a 75 there mean different things.

What our two scores measure

Resumeize gives two scores, both out of 100, both calculated in code from your document. AI reads the posting and finds the lines that prove each requirement; code checks every quote and does the arithmetic. The full weights are on our methodology page.

Notice the first two ATS rows: half the ATS score is about whether the file can be read at all. A clean, readable resume starts near 50 before it matches anything, and that turns out to explain most of what we saw.

Test 1: one person, written three ways

Our calibration set is one fictional data analyst, Priya, written as a weak, a typical and a strong resume, all scored against the same Data Analyst posting with six requirements. In this set the requirements were marked by hand, counting only the summary and bullet lines: a word that appears only in the skills list counts as not shown.

Three things stand out.

• The big ATS jump is the title and the requirements. Weak to typical gained 12.5 points for a title that matches the posting and about 13 for proving two more requirements. Nothing about the layout changed.
• The recruiter score is about specificity. Typical and strong prove the same number of requirements. The strong version's bullets carry figures ("14 Power BI dashboards… for 300 sales staff"), which took bullet specificity from 6.3 to the full 25.
• The strong resume still isn't 100 on ATS. It doesn't show stakeholder management anywhere, and it names statistics only in its skills list, which this calibration counts as not shown. If Priya hasn't used statistics in her work, 89 is the honest score, and it's a good one.

Test 2: 24 resumes against six postings

Next we took 24 fictional resumes from our parsing test set: nurses, engineers, accountants, designers and operations managers, written in US, UK, European, Gulf and Indian layouts. We scored every one against six postings (data analyst, Java software engineer, staff nurse, operations manager, product designer, senior accountant), 144 pairs in all.

For this run, requirements were matched by our code's word matching alone, without the AI evidence step a live analysis adds. Unlike Test 1, word matching does credit a term found only in a skills list. Without the AI step, related wording isn't recognised, so these results are a little stricter than what you'd see on the site.

The pattern is clear. A readable resume in the wrong field scores about 50, because that's what reading cleanly is worth. A resume aimed at its own field scores in the 70s and 80s. Only 5 of the 19 reached 90; two of them showed all 8 requirements. The lowest own-field score, 67, was a student's placement-year resume against the Java posting: it showed 3 of the 8 requirements, which is a fair picture of a student, not a broken resume.

The recruiter score moved less, because it mostly reads the resume itself. Against the wrong job, recruiter scores still ran 50 to 72 (median 64), because specific bullets and clear landmarks count whatever the posting.

What moves each score

To raise the ATS score:

• Show each requirement you really have in a sentence. A skills list can satisfy the match, but a sentence is what convinces the reader and lifts top-third relevance. A key requirement counts three times as much as a nice-to-have.
• Use the posting's name for your job where it honestly describes it, and its spelling of tools ("Power BI", not "PowerBI").
• Keep one column, standard headings and real text, so every role's title, employer and dates are read. Our layout test shows what goes wrong otherwise.

To raise the recruiter score:

• Put a figure or a named outcome in the first bullet of your current role. It counts double.
• Move the proof of key requirements into the top third of page one.
• Replace "Responsible for…" lines with what changed because of you. Our guide to quantifying achievements helps.

Why 100 isn't the goal

A perfect ATS score means your resume shows every requirement in one posting. If you truly have them all, great. If you don't, the last points can only come from claims you can't support, and an interviewer asks about every line on the page.

Score is also relative to the posting. The same resume scored 84 against one job and 50 against another in our test, without a word changing. Chasing 100 on one posting can make your resume worse for the next.

When is a score good enough to apply?

We won't give you a magic number, because there isn't one. Use this check instead:

1. Every role reads correctly. Title, employer and dates for each job are picked up as fields.
2. Every key requirement you have is shown in a sentence. Not just named in your skills list.
3. Your current title and headline name the role, if that's honestly the work you do.
4. The first bullet of your current job has a figure or an outcome.
5. What's still missing is something you haven't done. That gap is honest, and the application form or interview is where you discuss it.

If all five are true, apply. On our test set, resumes like that landed in the 80s on ATS, but your number depends on the posting. If you're far below where your field usually lands, don't stare at the total: open the breakdown and fix the first line it names.

If you've used other checkers, our comparison with Jobscan explains how Resumeize's scores are built.