What no résumé tool can do, including this one
Every tool in this category shares the same boundaries. Most of them are quiet about it, which is how the boundaries become promises.
— the list of what we cannot do is the useful list.
Products in this category share a set of boundaries. Being quiet about them is how a boundary turns into an implied promise, so here they are, ours included.
One: no tool can see an employer's system
Applicant tracking systems are employer software, configured privately. Anything a tool says about how a named one will treat your file is inference. Ours says so beside the score and is described in what an applicant tracking system is.
Two: no tool can predict an outcome
Hiring decisions are made by people, from a pool you cannot see, under constraints nobody publishes. A number describing your document is a measurement of the document, which is the whole argument of what a score cannot tell you.
Three: no tool can supply evidence you do not have
A generator can produce a sentence that sounds like an achievement. It cannot know what you did. Ours refuses the trade entirely: the letter engine selects sentences out of your own résumé and lists requirements it cannot support as gaps, which is described in what we refuse to generate.
Four: no tool can tell you the right length, photo or layout for everywhere
Conventions differ by country and by employer, and public guidance differs with them. That is why the country pages here carry a public source per claim, and why why two pages is usually fine quotes three bodies that disagree.
Five: our own extraction is not authoritative
We read your file with our own code. Another system reads it with different code and may differ at the edges. What generalises is the principle: text with one clear order survives every reader. The rest is in what a bad extraction costs.
Six: a measurement is not a judgement
A weak fixture measured 40 while describing real work. A four-minute invented résumé measured 97. Neither number is about a person, and the checker prints the arithmetic precisely so you can see what it is about.
What is left, once those are removed
Quite a lot, and all of it checkable. Whether your document extracts. Whether the seven essentials are present as evidence. Whether the achievement lines are action-led, measurable and deep enough. Whether the letter says only what your evidence supports. Whether the portfolio page renders at both widths before anybody sees it.
How to test a claim in this category
Ask what the product would have to see in order to know. A tool claiming to predict an employer's system would need access to that system. A tool claiming your chance of an interview would need outcomes for documents like yours. A tool claiming to have written a true achievement would need to know what you did. In each case the required evidence is obviously unavailable, which settles the claim without any argument about the company's intentions. The same test applied here leaves extraction, completeness and evidence, which is a smaller set and an honest one.
What this page does not claim
That other products are dishonest. Some are careful. The point is structural: the limits above are properties of the category rather than of any company's effort, so a tool that appears to have escaped one of them has redefined a word somewhere. Reading the small print for that redefinition is a useful habit, and it is the same habit as free tools that are not free recommends about pricing.
There is one limit we could remove and have not, which is worth naming rather than leaving for somebody to discover. Our exported PDF is untagged, so a screen reader can speak it but cannot navigate it by heading. That is measured, written down and published in screen readers and résumé PDFs, and until it changes the page says so. A limit you can read about is a different thing from one you find out about.
One thing this list is not, and it matters. It is not an argument that the category is useless. Structure, measurement and selection are real work, they are tedious to do by hand, and most documents have a silent fault in them that a check finds in a minute. What the limits do is set expectations correctly at the start, so that a tool is judged on whether the document extracts cleanly rather than on an outcome nobody in this category can influence.
Use it for the part it can actually do
Extraction, essentials and evidence, measured and priced. Nothing about employers, because we cannot see them.
Open the ATS checkerWhat a score cannot tell youQuestions
- Can any tool see an employer's system
- No. No résumé product has access to an employer's applicant tracking system, and a claim to simulate a named one is a guess with a confident interface.
- Can a tool predict whether you get an interview
- No. Nothing in a document predicts a decision made by people, and nothing here measures outcomes.
- Does this product use a language model
- No. The readers, the scorer and the letter engine are deterministic code with no model call anywhere.
- Can the letter builder write about something not in my résumé
- No. It selects sentences from your own evidence and lists what it cannot support as gaps.
- So what is the product for
- Making a document that extracts cleanly, carries its essentials and evidences its claims, and turning the same material into a letter and a page.
Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.