Free Resume Review and Critique

What a Human Reviewer Is Actually Looking For

A recruiter's first pass over a resume is short and it is not a careful read. What they are doing in that pass is looking for evidence: something concrete enough to justify spending real time on the document. Most resumes never give them one, because most resumes describe a job rather than a person's record in it.

The difference is easy to see once you look for it. "Responsible for managing the daily operations of the store" tells you the job title, which the reader already had. "Cut stock write-offs from 4.1% to 1.3% in eleven months by rebuilding the ordering cycle" tells you what happened when this particular person held that job. Both describe the same work. Only one of them is a reason to call.

That is the gap this tool measures. It is not checking whether software can parse your file — our free ATS resume checker does that, and the two checks are worth running together. This one reads the writing.

The eight criteria, and what each one means

• Achievement focus (20 points) — At least 60% of your bullets state a result, not a duty.
• Quantified evidence (18 points) — At least half your bullets carry a real figure.
• Language strength (16 points) — No filler, cliche, passive voice, first-person pronouns or weak verbs anywhere in the document.
• Bullet craft (12 points) — Bullets are 8-30 words, consistently capitalised and punctuated, and in one tense per role.
• Structure and order (12 points) — Experience, Education and Skills are all present and in a sensible order.
• Summary quality (10 points) — A 25-90 word summary that names your role and at least one concrete figure.
• Contact details (8 points) — Email, phone, location and LinkedIn all present in the body text.
• Consistency and correctness (4 points) — One date format throughout and no misspellings.

The weights are a judgement, not a law of nature, and they are stated openly for that reason. They are ordered by how much each one changes a reviewer's decision: whether your bullets carry results, and whether those results are measured, decide more than whether your dates are formatted consistently. A tool that hid its weights behind a single number would be asking you to take its word for something you can check yourself.

Why quantification matters more than any other single edit

An unquantified claim cannot be compared. If two candidates both say they improved customer satisfaction, the reader has no way to rank them, and the tie is broken on something else entirely. A number ends that problem: it makes your claim checkable, it implies you were measuring your own work, and it gives the interviewer an obvious question to open with — which means you get to tell the story behind your best result.

You do not need perfect data. An honest approximation you can defend — "roughly 30 tickets a day", "a team of about 12", "cut it from three days to one" — is far stronger than nothing, and infinitely stronger than a figure you invented. This tool will never fill a number in for you; it marks the place and leaves it to you.

The parts of a resume that fail quietly

The summary. More weak writing hides here than anywhere else. "Hardworking, results-driven professional with a proven track record" is four claims, none of them checkable, none of them distinguishing. The fix is not to delete the summary but to make it specific: what you do, at what scale, and the one result you would most want remembered.

Tense and consistency. Present tense for the job you are in now, past tense for everything you have left, and never both inside one role. Mixed tenses and mixed date formats do not cost you an interview on their own, but they read as an unfinished edit, and they sit right next to the parts of the document you most want trusted.

Section order. Education leads only while it is your strongest card — as a student, or in the first year or two afterwards. After that, experience comes first. If a reader has to scroll past a degree from a decade ago to reach what you have been doing since, the document is working against you.

Contact details. Keep them in the body of the document rather than inside a header or footer, which is regularly dropped when a file is parsed, and include your city and region: location decides which roles you are eligible for before anything else is considered. A full street address is not needed and is worth leaving out.

On honesty, and on what this tool cannot tell you

No automated review can judge whether your experience fits a particular role, whether your career story makes sense, or whether the achievement you are proudest of is the one worth leading with. Those are judgement calls that need a person who understands your field. What a tool can do reliably is catch the mechanical failures — unquantified claims, duty framing, cliche, passive voice, inconsistency — and those account for a large share of what makes an otherwise strong resume read as weak. Fix them here, then ask someone in your industry to read the result.

If you are applying in the United States, it is also worth knowing what employers are not permitted to ask you: the EEOC's guidance on prohibited employment practices is the authoritative source, and it is a good reason to leave date of birth, marital status and a photograph off a US resume. In the UK, the National Careers Service guidance on CV sections sets out the conventions there, which differ. US federal applications are stricter again and are documented in the USAJOBS resume requirements. For the writing itself, the Purdue OWL resume writing guide is a solid, non-commercial reference.