Your overall score combines two things that answer different questions. Knowing which is which tells you what to fix.
Half one — how your resume reads on its own
Three dimensions, computed by our own rules. No job description needed, no run needed, and they update as you type.
Structure — is the document complete and well-formed? Contact details present, sections in a sensible shape, roles carrying dates and titles, nothing obviously missing.
ATS Ready — is your content cleanly readable by screening software? Standard sections, parseable dates, contact details in the body, nothing stranded where a parser wouldn't find it. This is about your content, not a verdict on your template's looks.
Bullet Quality — are your bullets evidence or job description? Action-led, specific, carrying results rather than duties.
Half two — how it matches the job
Three dimensions, AI-backed. These need a target job and a run.
Keywords — how much of the language this posting uses appears honestly in your resume.
Role fit — how well your actual experience lines up with what the role is asking for.
Must-haves — the stated requirements the posting treats as non-negotiable, and whether your resume evidences them.
How they combine
The overall number blends both halves into a single score. We don't publish the exact weights or how they're combined — publishing that turns the score into something to optimize against rather than a read on your document, and that would make it less useful to you, not more.
What we will say: your writing travels with you to every application, while a match score is true of exactly one posting. That's why the panel always shows you both halves separately, not just the blended number — so you can see which one actually needs the work, whatever the combination underneath.
What you'll see without a target job
The presentation half, live. The match half stays empty with a prompt to add a job. That's not a degraded state — it's the honest one. We can't score a match against a posting we don't have.
If your job description is thin
A very short description, or something that clearly isn't a job posting, doesn't give match scoring enough to work with. Rather than publishing numbers that don't mean anything, we degrade — sometimes to the no-target-job view. A number you can't trust is worse than no number.
Why it's built this way
The two halves map onto two real, separately documented failure modes. Harvard Business School and Accenture found 88% of employers agreed qualified candidates get screened out for not matching a posting's exact stated criteria — that's the match half. Employer research from NACE finds what they actually want on a resume is evidence of skills being used to solve problems, not claims — that's the presentation half.
More on the evidence: the research behind how we score.