SureShortlist scores a resume the way an applicant tracking system reads it, points at the lines costing you interviews, and rewrites them against the job description you are actually applying to. This page covers what the product does, how the score is calculated, and where every number published on this site comes from.

What does SureShortlist actually do?

It does three things to one document. You upload an existing resume as PDF, Word (DOCX) or plain text up to 5MB, or start from one of the templates. SureShortlist scores it against ATS parsing behaviour and returns a prioritised list of what is holding it back. Then you paste a job description and it rewrites the gaps: bullet points get re-led with the outcome, skills the posting asks for get worked into experience you actually have, and you see a match score before and after with the changed lines marked.

The same two inputs drive the cover letter generator. Everything exports to PDF, Word (DOCX) or plain text. Your base resume is never overwritten, so one document can produce a separate tailored version for every role you apply to. It is free to start and no card is required to score a resume.

How is the ATS score calculated?

The scanner benchmarks your document against the parsing behaviour of Workday, Taleo and Greenhouse, and scores five specific things rather than returning one opaque number:

Contact information parseability. Whether your name, email and phone number can be extracted from the body of the document rather than a header, a footer or a text box.
Section header recognition. Whether your headings map to the ones a parser expects (Experience, Education, Skills) rather than invented alternatives.
Keyword density against the job description. Which of the skills, tools and responsibilities in the posting appear in your resume, and which are missing.
Action-verb percentage. The share of bullet points that open with a verb and describe a result rather than a duty.
Formatting structure. Multi-column layouts, tables, graphics standing in for text, and anything else that changes meaning when read by a machine.

A low score is not a prediction that software will reject you. Greenhouse's own documentation says a failed parse leaves a recruiter to key your details in by hand. The cost is quieter than that: fields arrive empty or misfiled, so you never appear in the recruiter's search results for roles you would have matched. The score exists to show which of those fields your file is losing.

What are the templates checked against?

Every base design is run through a parser and benchmarked against Workday, Taleo and Greenhouse before it ships. They default to a single column, use standard section titles, use readable system fonts, and use real text rather than icons or images standing in for words. Nothing a parser needs lives in a header or a footer. Single column is the default for a measurable reason: Textkernel reports its parser renders 90% of column resumes cleanly, up from 62% before it added column detection, which still leaves roughly one in ten scrambled, and you do not get to pick which parser an employer runs.

Where do the numbers on this site come from?

Every statistic published here names its source in the sentence that uses it. The ones currently in use:

ATS adoption among large employers comes from Jobscan's 2026 ATS Usage Report, which detected an ATS at 487 of the Fortune 500, or 97.4%.
Parse-failure behaviour comes from Greenhouse's own support documentation and Workday's admin guide.
Column-layout parse rates come from Textkernel's published research on its own parser.
Application volume comes from Greenhouse's hiring benchmarks: 244 applications per corporate posting in 2025, up from 116 in 2022.

What is no longer here matters as much. The “75% of resumes never pass an ATS” figure that this page used to carry has been removed. It traces back to a 2012 sales pitch by a vendor that closed in 2013, with no published methodology behind it, and a claim we cannot source is a claim we will not print. The same goes for counts of ATS platforms tested: the three named above are the three the scanner is benchmarked against.

SureShortlist in use

A clip from our YouTube channel, where users talk about what changed after they rewrote their resume against the job description.

How do I get in touch?

Email the founders directly. Corrections to anything on this page, including a source you think we have got wrong, go to the same address and we will fix it.

Email: [email protected]