A nursing résumé full of numbers, and the rule that could not count them

Scoring updated on 25 September 2026. The checker now grades achievement lines in proportion instead of giving full marks after three, weighs how many lines state a result rather than a duty, asks for a date on every career entry, and gives a career written only as projects 18 of the 30 experience points. Rule values and scores quoted below were measured under the earlier rules on the dates shown; the current rules are in how the ATS score is calculated.

Nils Farrow is invented. His résumé is not unusual: six years on acute medical wards, shift leadership, a handover template he rewrote, eleven students mentored, a falls audit. We put it through the ATS résumé checker to see what a machine would make of clinical evidence, and one result was worth a page of its own.

Zero measurable achievements, on a page of numbers

On 12 September the check read 157 words, 17 lines and four recognised headings, passed fourteen of its checks, gave completeness a full 100 with all seven of its checks passing, and published 100 × 30% + 100 × 30% + 67 × 40% = 87. The report opened its list of fixes with the reason: no achievements use measurable evidence, nought of a possible 25 points, worth 10 points of the whole score. That is a surprising line to read under a résumé that says eight staff, twenty-eight beds, eleven students, nine passes, fourteen omissions falling to three, twenty colleagues trained.

The rule was the explanation. It recognises a percentage, a currency amount, a multiplier such as 3x, the form 12+ followed by a word, and a number followed by one of a list of unit nouns. That list held thirteen entries: users, customers, clients, hours, days, weeks, months, years, engineers, reports, countries, markets, ms. A ward's nouns were not among them. Neither were a classroom's, which is why the same thing happened in a teacher's outcome lines.

The list was measuring the wrong thing

Two résumés carrying the same amount of countable evidence were getting different numbers, and the thing separating them was the industry the counts came from rather than whether they were counts. The list was rewritten on 13 September around countable outcomes: people served or led, things run, delivered, handled or fixed, the time and reach it already covered, and the scale words a number is written in. A hyphen now counts as the separator too, because 28-bed ward is the ordinary way a clinical page writes it.

Nothing in that change rewards a bigger number. It lets the rule see a number that was already on the page. On 13 September the same 157 words returned four measurable achievements and the full 25 of 25, content rose from 67 to 92, fifteen checks passed, and the published score was 100 × 30% + 100 × 30% + 92 × 40% = 97. The one improvement left that day was readable content volume at 157 words, worth 3.2 points.

On 25 September the content rules changed to grade in proportion rather than give full marks after three lines, and the same 157 words, re-measured on 26 September, publish 100 × 30% + 100 × 30% + 69 × 40% = 88. Measurable evidence keeps its full marks. What moved is depth: six achievement lines now earn 13 of the 25 depth points, because the full score asks for twelve, and 157 readable words earn 6 of the 20 volume points. Both are honest requests for more of the same evidence, not a judgement of the evidence already there.

What this is, said plainly

The 87 above is kept because it is what this page measured on the day it was written, and because the finding is the useful part. It was a limit of the measurement rather than a judgement of clinical work, and it was never what an employer's system does, because this checker is not one. The report says as much above the score: it estimates compatibility from the structure and evidence it extracted, and it is not a hiring prediction. The arithmetic is printed for the same reason, and it is taken apart in how the ATS score is calculated.

The honest fix, and the dishonest one

The dishonest one is to write a percentage you do not have. Do not, whatever a rule pays for it. The honest one is narrower: write the count you actually have, in the noun you actually use. Eight staff, a 28-bed ward, eleven student nurses and twenty colleagues trained are all real figures and all of them now read as evidence. Where a true proportion or a true duration exists as well, it is worth writing. Where nothing was measured, leave the line alone and lose the points. Quantify achievements on a résumé works through which numbers are safe to claim.

What did score full marks

On 12 and 13 September, action-led achievements scored 30 of 30, from six lines that begin with what he did, and evidence depth 25 of 25, from six achievement lines across two roles. Under today's graded rules the first is achievement quality, 30 of 35, with five of the six lines stating a result and one describing a duty; depth is the 13 of 25 above. Those two rules reward the ordinary discipline of writing a ward job down as a sequence of things you changed, and clinical résumés tend to do that well once the shifts are described as work rather than as a rota.

Building it here

The résumé builder takes an import of whatever you have now, prints what the reading found, and leaves a field empty rather than filling it with a guess. Registration details, revalidation dates and mandatory training have no dedicated field; the additional section takes a heading you choose and a list of lines under it. Every design in the gallery is free, 24 of the 37 are marked ATS-safe in the catalogue, and there is no watermark on a PDF or a DOCX.

Bank, agency and rotations

Clinical careers carry shapes the reverse-chronological format handles badly: bank shifts alongside a substantive post, agency placements across several trusts, rotations within one employer. The builder's entries take whatever shape you give them, and the clearest one is usually the employer as the entry with the rotations named in the lines beneath it. That keeps the dates continuous and gives the evidence-depth rule more lines to count, which is the same argument made for contract work in a contractor's CV.

Where bank or agency work runs in parallel with a permanent post, write it as its own entry with the span of years and the trusts named in a line. The parseability rule only asks that the date format is consistent across the page, so the overlap itself costs nothing. What costs something is nine one-line entries where three would have carried the same record with room for evidence underneath.

The letter half

The cover letter builder takes its proof paragraphs from the résumé's own sentences and traces each back to the line it came from, so nothing on the letter is a clinical claim you did not already make. A requirement in the posting your evidence cannot support is named once as something you have not done rather than asserted, which is the subject of the gaps list is the interview. Nothing in any of it uses a language model, and nothing in it predicts an outcome.