- Contact details — an email address and phone number a parser can extract.
- Standard section headings — Experience, Education and Skills labels that ATS software is trained to recognize.
- Length — enough substance for a one-to-two-page resume, without padding.
- Bullet structure — achievements broken into scannable bullet points rather than dense paragraphs.
- Quantified results — bullets that carry numbers, percentages or amounts, which recruiters consistently rank higher.
- Action verbs — bullets that open with strong verbs like "led", "built" or "reduced" instead of passive phrasing.
- Weak filler phrases — clichés like "responsible for" and "team player" that add no information.
- Keyword coverage — when you paste a job description, the specific terms it uses that your resume does or doesn't contain.
What no paste-based checker can see is your visual layout — multi-column designs, tables and text boxes are the biggest parsing killers, and they're invisible once text is copied out. For those, run the checks in our manual ATS check guide, or build in the ATSVerse builder, where the layout is single-column and ATS-safe by construction.