ATS Score vs. Job Description Match: These Are Two Different Checks

Open the editor here and you'll see two things that both get called "ATS": a small score badge next to every bullet point and summary, and a "Match against a job description" panel lower in the sidebar. They look related, and they're both about getting past automated screening, but they're checking two different things. Mixing them up is the easiest way to think your resume is "done" when it's only half-checked.

The free check: always on, no job description needed

The badge next to each bullet and your summary is a plain scoring pass — no AI call, no account tier, no quota. It checks the things that make a bullet weak regardless of which job you're applying to: does it start with an action verb, does it contain a number, is it the right length, did a stray "I" or passive voice slip in. Hover the badge and you get up to three specific tips. There's also a running "ATS" badge for the whole resume, averaging every bullet and your summary. None of this knows anything about a specific employer — it's checking whether the sentence itself is well-formed.

The Premium check: how you match one specific posting

The job-description panel is a different tool entirely. Paste in a real posting and it compares your resume against that text specifically, using the built-in AI assistant — a match percentage, the keywords from the posting it found in your resume, and the important ones it didn't. This is the check that answers "should I tailor this resume before I apply here," and it's Premium-gated because it's a real AI call, counted against the same 50-message monthly quota as the writing assistant. A perfect per-bullet score from the free check won't show up here if your resume simply doesn't mention a skill the posting is asking for.

Use them in that order

The free score is the one to clear first, since every fix it suggests makes the resume better for any application, not just one. Once your bullets are quantified and active-voice, pull up the posting you actually care about and run the job-description match — that's the point to add a missing keyword that's genuinely true of your experience, or decide a gap is real and not worth faking. Running the job-match check on a resume that's still full of weak bullets just wastes a quota message on a problem the free check would have caught for nothing.