What ATS Score Ranges Mean
Step-by-Step: How to Improve Your ATS Score
Run a Baseline Scan First
Before making any changes, get a current ATS score so you know exactly what you're working with. Upload your resume and the job description into an ATS checker and note your score and the specific missing keywords it identifies.
This gives you a target and a prioritized list. Fixing the highest-impact missing keywords first — usually hard skills, job titles, and required certifications — will move your score the most with the least effort.
Add Missing Keywords From the Job Description
The single highest-impact action you can take is adding the keywords your ATS scan flagged as missing. Go through each missing term and find a natural place to include it in your resume — your summary, skills section, or an experience bullet.
Use the exact phrasing from the job description. If the posting says "cross-functional project management" and your resume says "worked across teams," the ATS may not give you credit. Exact phrase match always beats paraphrase.
Fix Your Skills Section
A clearly labeled skills section is one of the most reliable ways to improve ATS score quickly. ATS parsers are designed to look for skills sections and weight them heavily. If yours is buried, poorly labeled, or missing entirely, that's suppressing your score.
Label it clearly — "Skills," "Technical Skills," or "Core Competencies" — and list hard skills as individual items. Group by category if you have many. This section should directly mirror the hard skills mentioned in the job description.
Fix Your Professional Summary
Your professional summary is parsed early and weighted heavily. If it uses vague language ("results-driven professional") instead of specific keywords ("Senior Data Engineer with 6 years of experience in Spark, Kafka, and AWS"), you're wasting prime ATS real estate.
Rewrite your summary to include your target job title, your years of experience, and 2–3 of the most important hard skills from the job description. This alone can lift your score by 10–15 points on a well-matched role.
Skills section + professional summary + top 5 missing keywords accounts for the majority of ATS score improvement on most resumes. Fix these three things before touching anything else.
Fix Any Formatting Issues
Formatting problems silently destroy ATS scores by preventing the parser from reading your content correctly. Common culprits: multi-column layouts, text inside tables, headers and footers, text boxes, graphics, and creative templates exported from design tools.
If your resume uses any of these, convert to a clean single-column format. All your hard-earned keywords need to be in parseable text — not locked inside a table cell the ATS can't read.
Use Standard Section Headings
ATS parsers look for standard headings to identify sections: "Experience," "Education," "Skills," "Summary." Creative headings like "My Journey," "What I Bring," or "Where I've Been" confuse parsers and cause content to be miscategorized or missed entirely.
Stick to conventional headings throughout. This is one of the easiest fixes and costs nothing in terms of your resume's readability to humans.
Tailor for Every Application — Not Just Once
An ATS score is specific to a job description. A resume that scores 80% on one role might score 45% on a different role with different requirements. Your score only stays high if you actively tailor your resume to each posting.
This doesn't mean rewriting from scratch every time. It means updating your summary, adjusting your skills section to front-load the most relevant skills, and swapping in job-specific language in 2–3 key bullets. It takes 10–15 minutes per application and makes a significant difference in how you rank.
Don't Keyword Stuff
There's a ceiling to keyword optimization. Repeating keywords excessively, listing skills you don't have, or padding your resume with terms just to score higher will hurt you when you reach a human reviewer — and some modern ATS systems flag obvious stuffing.
The target is a resume that scores well because it genuinely matches the role — not one that game the score by unnatural repetition. Aim for each important keyword to appear once or twice in context.
Get Resumatch scores your resume against any job description instantly — and automatically rewrites it to close the keyword gaps it finds. Run a free ATS check →
Want to understand what a good ATS score actually looks like? What is a good ATS score? →
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