Run this against one job listing at a time, in order. The first four fixes account for most of the movement in a score; the rest are cleanup that protects you from silly losses.
Fixes that move the score most
- Collapse to a single column. If your resume has a sidebar, move that content into the main flow. This one change frequently rescues an entire mangled parse.
- Pull text out of tables, text boxes, headers and footers. Contact details hidden in a header are the classic reason a system has no email address for you.
- Rename your sections to Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications. Creative headings are the second most common cause of missing data.
- Add the listing's repeated requirements, in its wording, wherever they are true of you — in the summary, the skills block, and inside at least one bullet.
Content fixes
- Rewrite your summary for this role in three lines: your title, years of experience, and the two skills the listing leads with.
- Mirror the job title. If they hire a "Data Analyst" and you were an "Insights Executive", put the closest accurate title alongside yours.
- Put a number in at least half your bullets. Scale counts as a number when outcomes were never tracked.
- Group your skills into two or three named categories, and drop anything you would not want to be questioned on.
Cleanup
- Make every date format identical, in Mon YYYY form, with no gaps left unexplained.
- Replace icons that carry meaning with labelled text, and remove decorative graphics entirely.
- Export to PDF from your builder rather than printing to PDF or scanning, so the text layer stays intact. Send a Word file only when the listing asks for one.
- Name the file firstname-lastname-role.pdf, then read the first three lines aloud once to catch typos where readers concentrate hardest.
Re-run your check after the first four fixes, not after every change — otherwise you spend the hour looking at the score rather than the resume. When the remaining gaps are skills you do not have, stop editing and go apply.