What is a good ATS score?

Short answer: there is no such thing as one ATS score, so there is no single number that counts as good. If a tool has just handed you 78 out of 100 and you are trying to work out whether that is good, the honest answer is that the number was invented by the tool, not by the system that will actually read your resume.

That is not a reason to ignore ATS checks. It is a reason to read them properly.

What an ATS actually does

An applicant tracking system is the software an employer uses to receive, store and filter applications. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo, iCIMS and a few dozen others. When you upload a PDF to a careers page, an ATS is what receives it.

Two things happen. The system parses your resume into structured fields: name, contact details, work history, dates, titles, education, skills. Then a recruiter searches or filters that structured data.

Both steps matter, and most advice only covers the second one.

Why the number is made up

Here is the part the scoring tools do not tell you.

Every ATS parses differently. The same resume that produces clean, correctly separated work history in one system produces a mangled date range in another. A two column layout that one parser handles will collapse into interleaved nonsense in the next. There is no shared standard and no shared scoring model.

So when a tool gives you 78 out of 100, that number is the tool's own opinion about your resume, dressed up as a measurement. It is not a reading from any real system, because there is no single system to read from. Change tools and the number changes with it.

The precision is the problem. A number to two significant figures implies the tool measured something specific. It did not.

What is worth measuring instead

A band. Roughly where your resume sits, and what is holding it back.

That is deliberately how SkillDrift reports it. Your resume comes back rated on four levels, Needs work, Good, Very good or Excellent, with a plain line telling you how it performs against most ATS systems. No invented number.

A band is honest about its own precision. It tells you whether you have a problem, which is the decision you actually need to make, without pretending to an accuracy that no ATS tool has.

If you want to see yours, you can upload a resume at the free ATS resume checker without creating an account.

The things that genuinely move it

Whatever tool you use, the same handful of issues account for most parsing failures. In rough order of how often they bite:

1. Layout. Multiple columns, text inside images, text inside headers and footers, and tables used for structure. Parsers read in a single flow. Anything that assumes a human eye jumping around the page is a risk.
2. File format. A text based PDF is safest. A PDF exported as an image, which is what happens if you scan or screenshot a resume, contains no readable text at all to a parser.
3. Section headings that are not standard. Call it Experience or Work Experience. My Journey is a nice touch that a parser will not recognise as a work history block.
4. Dates written inconsistently. Pick one format and use it everywhere. Ranges written three different ways in the same document give a parser three patterns to guess at.
5. Missing the words in the job description. This is the recruiter filter rather than the parse. If a posting asks for cohort analysis and your resume says user retention work, a keyword search will not find you, however good the work was.
6. Contact details in the header. Some parsers skip headers entirely, which means the system has your resume and no way to reach you.

None of these are tricks. They are all just making the document readable by software that reads in one direction.

What a good result actually looks like

Forget the number and ask three questions.

Did the tool read my work history correctly? If it shows your last three roles with the right titles and the right dates, the parse worked. If it merged two jobs or lost a year, fix the layout before you touch anything else.

Does it name what is wrong, specifically? Advice like improve your formatting is not actionable. Your dates are in three different formats is.

Does it tell me what I am missing for the role I want, not just for resumes in general? An ATS check tells you whether the document is readable. It does not tell you whether you are a plausible candidate. Those are different questions, and the second one matters more.

SkillDrift answers the second one alongside the first. The same free upload names the specific skills between you and the role you are targeting, and scores real jobs and internships out of 100 against what you actually have. The resume check is the entry point, not the product.

So, is 78 good?

It is a number a tool made up. Whether your resume is good is a different question, and you can answer it without any number at all.

Take your resume and ask whether a piece of software reading top to bottom in a single column would come away with your name, your contact details, your last three roles with correct dates, and the words that appear in the job you want. If yes, the ATS is not your problem, and you should spend your time on the gap between your skills and the role instead.

If no, fix the layout first. Everything else is downstream of the parse.

You can check both in one upload at the free ATS resume checker. Free, no account, and it names what is holding the resume back rather than handing you a score to worry about.