← Help center
For job seekers

Scores explained

Past the Bots reports two main numbers. Here's what each one measures and how to move it — honestly.

The two scores

Parse health / completeness

How cleanly a machine can read your résumé and whether the essentials are present and detectable — name, contact info, clear Experience / Education / Skills sections. Low scores almost always come from layout the parser can't follow (columns, text boxes, graphics) or missing sections.

JD match

How well your résumé lines up with one specific job description — driven by the skills and terms the role emphasizes. It's weighted toward the important, role-defining keywords rather than every word in the posting.

Reading missing keywords

The missing-keywords list is the gap between what the job asks for and what your résumé currently says. Treat it as a checklist of things to consider— for each term, ask “is this genuinely true of my experience?” If yes, work it in naturally where you actually did it. If no, leave it out: a missing keyword is better than a claim you can't defend in an interview.

Honesty, by design

Every tool here — scoring, the ATS-safe rebuild, and the AI rewrites — is built to represent your real experience accurately. The point isn't to game a number; it's to make sure a strong, truthful résumé isn't filtered out for fixable formatting before a human ever reads it.

Common questions

Why did my score change when I barely edited anything?+
Small wording changes can add or remove a keyword the job expects, move text into or out of a section the parser recognizes, or fix a structural issue — any of which nudges the score. The live editor recomputes on every change so you can see exactly what moved it.
What's a “good” score?+
Aim for parse health in the 80s+ (the structure is clean and machine-readable) and the highest JD match you can reach honestly. Match is relative to one specific job — 70–85 on a well-targeted role is strong. A high match on a job you're not actually qualified for isn't the goal.
Should I just stuff in every missing keyword?+
No. Keyword stuffing reads as spam to humans and many modern systems, and it sets up interviews you can't back up. Add a missing term only where it's genuinely true of your experience — then describe the real work behind it.
The bot didn't detect my name / a job. Why?+
That's the most useful finding on the page. It usually means the information is trapped in a header, text box, image, or multi-column layout the parser can't read. Switch to a single-column, plain-text structure (the ATS-safe rebuild does this for you) and it'll be detected.

Ready to try it? Check a résumé or open the live editor.

Still stuck?

Email us and a human will help.

Contact support