Most resume tools show you a big percentage — “87% match!” — and call it your ATS score.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: that number is mostly made up. Real applicant tracking systems (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS — the ones actually used at scale) don’t assign a 0–100 match score. They parse your resume into fields and let a recruiter filter and search on it. The “ATS score” you see in most tools is an invented metric, dressed up to look like something official.

We built this differently, because the person you actually need to get past isn’t an algorithm — it’s a recruiter, skimming a stack of resumes with a specific set of boolean searches in their head. That’s not a guess on our part. It’s a decade of actually being that recruiter.

So instead of a single fake score, we sort every requirement in the job posting into one of four honest buckets:

  1. Have it, wrong word — you have the underlying skill, but the job posting uses different vocabulary than your resume does. This is the easiest fix: say the concept in the job’s language and point to the real thing you did.
  2. Adjacent — genuinely close, but not exact. Worth being honest about, and often worth applying anyway.
  3. Closeable fast — a real gap, but one you could plausibly close before an interview happens.
  4. Hard gap — a real requirement you don’t meet, with no fast honest way to bridge it.

Sometimes bucket four is most of the list, and the honest answer is: this job isn’t worth your time. We’d rather tell you that upfront than help you dress up a resume for a rejection you were always going to get. A tool that never tells you to skip a job isn’t actually on your side — it’s just optimizing for how many times you click apply.

Every “yes” you get from us means more, because the “no”s are real too.