How to check a résumé somebody else wrote

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.

People ask other people to look at their résumé. A friend changing career, a colleague being made redundant, a student in a mentoring scheme, a partner who has not applied for anything in nine years. The awkward part is that most feedback on a résumé is taste, and taste is hard to act on.

The ATS checker gives you something else to talk about: what a machine reading of the document actually recovers, and what each remaining problem costs.

Reading a file that is not yours

The first screen offers two ways in: upload a file, or paste the text. Upload their file. Accepted formats are PDF, DOCX, plain text, Markdown, RTF and images, so whatever they emailed you will do, including a photograph of a printed page. Checking it saves the report on this device; it does not put their résumé into your own résumé builder.

The file is read in your browser first. Only where your browser cannot read it is the file itself sent on. Then the text is scored, and the route that scores it writes nothing to disk or to a database.

Nothing is kept

This was measured rather than assumed. After uploading a PDF, running the check and reading the report, the browser's stored state held zero saved résumés. Their document did not become an entry in your folio, and you do not have to remember to clear anything afterwards.

If you do want to work on it with them, the import into the résumé builder is a separate, deliberate action, and the fixes chapter offers it explicitly rather than doing it quietly.

The number, and why it is useful in a review

The report prints the multiplication. On the run photographed here, measured on 26 September 2026, the arithmetic read 100 times 30 per cent plus 100 times 30 per cent plus 71 times 40 per cent, published as 88, on a document that extracted to 162 words on 23 lines. The candidate is invented for these captures and is named as invented wherever she appears.

In a review, the counts matter more than the score. If the document is two dense pages and the checker reports 60 words, the layout is destroying it, and that is a concrete, fixable finding rather than an opinion. What the checker read explains why that line is the first thing to look at.

Giving feedback from the fixes list

The fixes chapter orders findings by the points each one costs, with the change spelled out. That ordering is the single most useful thing to hand somebody, because the usual failure of résumé advice is a list of eleven equally weighted suggestions. Here two of them are worth sixteen points and the rest are worth one.

The list of checks marked Passed is worth reading aloud as well. Most people being helped with a résumé are braced for criticism, and the list of what already passed is honest, specific praise. Why an ATS score is low is a good companion piece for the conversation.

What you must not say

Do not tell them this predicts whether they will be filtered out. It does not. It is not an employer's applicant tracking system, it has no access to one, and it never sees a job description. It measures whether a machine reading of their document recovers their work, and how much evidence the words carry.

It says nothing about the person. A low score on a thin résumé usually means the writing is under-selling real work, not that the work is thin, which is exactly the thing a reviewer is there to notice.

Their privacy, and yours

A résumé is personal data about somebody else: a home town, an email address, a phone number, an employment history. Ask before you upload it, delete the file from your downloads afterwards, and do not paste it into anything that keeps it. The measurement above is the reason this tool is a reasonable place to put it, and it is not a reason to be casual with the file elsewhere.

If they would rather run it themselves, send them the no-account walkthrough. It takes about a minute and needs no email address, so there is nothing to set up before they can see the same report.

What to do with the report afterwards

Send them the address rather than the screenshot. The check is free, takes about a minute and needs no account, so the person whose résumé it is can run it themselves and keep the report in their own browser, where Previous checks will remember it and show what a fix was worth.

That also avoids the reviewer trap, which is becoming the person who holds the good copy. A friend who has run the check once will run it again after each change, and the second run is where the value is. The one-minute version is checking a résumé without an account, and if their file is a scan or a photograph, checking a scanned résumé explains what that costs before they wonder why the score is low.