What to check after your resume is read in

Your resume is now split into structured sections you can edit individually. This is a 2 minute pass to confirm each one landed the way you want, and it is worth doing once on every resume you upload.

It is quick because you are reading rather than typing. Your content is already in place, so all this takes is an eye over it before you start scanning against real jobs.

Image coming soon

Start with the section list

Open the Details tab, where every section you have is listed down the left. Click through them and check each one has content in it.

If a section looks thinner than you expected, it is almost always the formatting of the original file rather than the content. Why some resumes don't read in cleanly covers the handful of things that cause it, and they are the same things that trip up an applicant tracking system. Fixing them here fixes them everywhere.

1. Work experience

Work experience is the heaviest weighted part of your score, and the part with the most fields to get wrong.

For each role, check the company, job title, and location landed on the right entry and that the dates are correct. A current role should have Current Position switched on rather than an end date.

Then check the bullets. Each role wants at least 3, and the parser can merge or drop them when the original file used unusual bullet characters or ran the text into a single paragraph.

2. Education

Check the institution, then check the two degree fields did not land the wrong way round. Degree is the level (Bachelor of Science) and Area of Study is the field (Mechanical Engineering).

Each entry needs at least one date, a start or an end, and either one on its own is enough.

3. Skills

Skills are stored as named groups with keywords inside them, and a group that came through with a name but no keywords still appears in the list while scoring half credit rather than full.

Open each group and check the keywords came across with the name.

4. Summary

Check your professional summary is present and is your summary, not the first paragraph of your first job.

5. Contact details

Name, email, phone, location, and your headline are 5 separate checks in your score, and they are the fastest points on the page to recover.

Email is the only one validated for format. A phone number is accepted in whatever shape you write it.

Repairs we make on the way in

Three things are corrected during the read, because they are almost always artifacts of how the file stored your dates rather than something you wrote:

• An end date equal to today is cleared, because it usually means a current role was written as ending now.
• An end date earlier than its start date is cleared.
• A role with no end date can be treated as current.

All three are worth a glance on your most recent role.

About undo

The undo and redo buttons sit under the preview and hold up to 50 steps. Consecutive edits to the same field within 1.5 seconds count as one step.

That stack lives in the browser tab, so reloading or closing the tab clears it. Undo is there for the edit you made a moment ago rather than as a version history, which is why it pays to fix things while you are looking at them.

Saving and rescoring

On a paid plan, your score updates by itself shortly after each edit.

On the free plan you refresh it yourself. A notice appears over the preview reading Your score and checks need a refresh, and your score stays as it was until you press Save resume (or Save & rescore on a job-tailored copy).

If you see Not saved and want to know whether your work is safe, see Why does my resume say 'Not saved', and did I lose my work?.