ATS and Resume Statistics 2026: What 1,711 Real Resumes and 727 Job Ads Show

One resume in three contains no percentage or money figure at all, and quantified results are where resumes lose the most points. We analysed 1.711 resumes run through the free ApplyMate ATS checker between 28 August and 20 October 2026, 1.269 resumes parsed by our resume builder, and 727 real job ads. Formatting, the thing most ATS advice worries about, turned out to matter least: when we measured machine readability directly from the file, resumes earned 99% of the points.

Most ATS statistics online are recycled survey numbers, and the most famous one, that 75% of resumes are rejected by software before a human sees them, has no study behind it. This page is measured from real documents. Every chart says what it counts and how many documents it is built from, the method and limits are written down, and the numbers are free to reuse with a link.

Key findings

From 1.711 checked resumes, 1.269 parsed resumes and 727 job ads

1. 33%

   of resumes contain no percentage or currency figure. 28% contain no quantified result of any kind we could detect, and only 10% mention a money amount.

2. 63%

   of the points for quantified results, the weakest of eight areas. Scored by ApplyMate's checker across its 68 most recent checks. Contact details, sections and length all earned 87% or more.

3. 99%

   of the points for machine readability, measured from the file in the 68 most recent checks. Only 4.9% of PDFs had too little text to read without OCR, so the file format is rarely the problem.

4. 56%

   of a job ad's keywords appear in the median resume. Domain-knowledge keywords were missing 61% of the time, against 42% for tools.

5. 531

   words in the median resume. Across all 1.711 checks, resumes under 300 words averaged 67.5 on the checker, against 83 to 85 for every longer band.

6. 50%

   of builder resumes include a LinkedIn link. 19% have a projects section.

7. 8.5%

   of job ads mention a salary or pay figure. 36% mention years of experience and 24% mention AI or machine learning.

8. 82

   out of 100 is the median score on ApplyMate's checker, across its 68 most recent checks. This is our tool's score, not one produced by any applicant tracking system.

Where does your resume land?

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• Eight scored areas, from machine readability to quantified results
• The keywords your target role asks for that your resume does not mention
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One resume in three has no percentage or money figure

We counted every percentage and currency amount in each resume ("35%", "$2M", "500 USD"). A third of resumes contain none at all, and another 28% contain only one or two. Counting simpler results too, such as "50 clients" or "12 engineers", still leaves 28% of resumes with no number attached to any achievement. A money figure appears on 10%.

None 33.3%

1-2 28.3%

3-5 19.5%

6 or more 18.9%

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, 1.711 resumes. Measured directly from the text, not judged by the checker. Counts figures like "35%", "$2M" and "500 USD"; plain counts ("50 clients") are not included here.

Does it matter outside a scoring tool? The outside evidence is observational. Among Huntr users with at least 10 logged applications, resumes with a dollar figure in the summary were linked to a 7.24% interview rate, against 4.13% for summaries with no digits (Huntr, Q2 2026). That is a correlation, not proof that adding a number causes interviews, but a number is the quickest way to show a recruiter what changed because of you. Our guide to resume bullet point examples shows how to find numbers in work you already did.

Where resumes lose points on an ATS check

ApplyMate's checker scores eight areas. Machine readability and length are measured from the file itself; the other six are judged against written bands. Quantified results come last, and the structural basics (contact details, sections, length) sit near the top.

Quantified results 63.0%

Job titles and dates 69.7%

Layout and formatting 73.7%

Keyword coverage 74.5%

Standard sections 87.3%

Length and density 90.1%

Contact block 94.5%

Machine readability 99.1%

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, the 68 most recent checks. Average points earned as a share of each area's maximum (quantified results 15, keywords 20, machine readability 15, layout 12, sections 12, titles and dates 10, contact 8, length 8). Machine readability and length are measured from the file; the other six are judged by ApplyMate's checker.

Quantified results have the most room to grow. The checker gives that area full marks only when most roles carry several measured outcomes, and as the previous section shows, a third of resumes carry none. Machine readability is the opposite: measured from the file, nearly every resume turned out to be readable.

What a typical resume contains

For the resumes uploaded to our builder, the extraction model filled in a structured record: contact details, roles, education, skills and optional sections. Almost every resume has the basics. The gaps are in what lets a recruiter verify you quickly: only half include a LinkedIn link, and about one in five has a projects section.

Education 98.9%

Email address 98.0%

Skills list 98.0%

Phone number 92.1%

Summary or profile 88.7%

LinkedIn link 49.7%

Certifications 34.3%

Projects section 19.4%

Awards 15.1%

Volunteering 9.5%

Publications 3.5%

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, 1.269 resumes uploaded to the ApplyMate builder (March 2025 to October 2026), as parsed into fields by the extraction model. A LinkedIn link hidden behind the word "LinkedIn" cannot be read from the text, so that share is a floor.

In the checker's resume text, 54.5% show a visible linkedin.com address and 14.6% a GitHub address. Some habits resume guides have long warned against are rare in this sample: a section headed "Objective" appears on 2.5% of resumes and "References available on request" on 1.3%. Date of birth, nationality or marital status, still standard in some countries' CV traditions, appear on 4.2%. Stock phrases such as "results-driven", "detail-oriented" or "team player" appear on 10.9%. 47% of builder resumes list a role that runs to the present.

How long a resume is, and how many roles it lists

The median resume is 531 words, and the middle half runs from 426 to 711 words, roughly one full page to a page and a half. On the checker, length only made a difference at the short end: resumes under 300 words averaged 67.5, while the bands from 300 to 1,500 words all averaged between 83 and 85.

67.5 Under 300

83.2 300-499

84.8 500-699

85.3 700-999

85.1 1,000-1,499

Resume length in words

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, average score across all 1.711 checks. Resumes per band: Under 300 111, 300-499 618, 500-699 532, 700-999 325, 1,000-1,499 124; one resume over 1,500 words is left out. The checker scores length and density, and a very short text is sometimes a file that was only partly read, so the short-resume gap is partly by design.

Builder resumes list a median of 4 roles and 17 skills (the middle 80% list between 6 and 41 skills). As stored in the builder, 7% have at least one role with no dates and 5% have a role with no description, which leaves a recruiter guessing what the job involved.

152 1

217 2

262 3

231 4

144 5

116 6

58 7

39 8

17 9

33 10+

Roles listed

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, 1.269 builder resumes. Median 4 roles.

PDF vs Word: format barely matters if the file has real text

Most people send PDFs: 78% of the 2.354 files uploaded during the study were PDFs and 22% Word files. Either works as long as the file holds real text: measured from the file itself, resumes earned 99% of the machine-readability points on ApplyMate's checker.

ATS vendors document the same thing. Every major system accepts both formats, and what breaks parsing is the content of the file, not its extension: Greenhouse lists resumes uploaded as images, tables, headers and footers, columns and text boxes among the causes of a failed parse (Greenhouse support), and Workday notes that "resume parsing results can vary based on resume format and order of words" (Workday admin guide).

The failure case is narrow. Of the 448 PDFs where we recorded how the text was read, 22 (4.9%) had empty or too little text and could only be read with OCR, the kind of file that comes from scanning a printout or exporting a design as a picture. File size is rarely the problem: the median upload was 114 KB and 99% were under 2.18 MB, below Greenhouse's 2.5 MB parsing limit. More on choosing a format in PDF or Word: what each ATS does with your resume.

The ATS keywords resumes most often miss

For each resume, the checker suggests keywords that the resume's target role usually asks for. We kept only suggestions the resume really does not mention (4.1% of suggestions were already in the text and are excluded). The median resume was missing 7. The most frequent are methods and platforms from software and data roles, the largest group in this sample.

Agile 14.7%

Kubernetes 12.8%

CI/CD 12.5%

SQL 11.5%

Tableau 11.4%

AWS 11.0%

Unit testing 11.0%

Python 10.2%

Docker 9.7%

Scrum 8.8%

A/B testing 7.0%

Project management 6.8%

CRM 6.7%

SAP 6.7%

Salesforce 6.5%

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, share of 1.711 resumes. The target role is inferred and the suggestions are generated by ApplyMate's checker; each term was then confirmed absent from the resume text.

When people compared a resume with one specific job ad in our job description keyword finder, the median resume matched 56% of the ad's keywords: on average 7.5 matched and 6.7 missing. The spread is wide: nearly a third of pairs matched under 40%.

12 0-9

12 10-19

19 20-29

14 30-39

19 40-49

31 50-59

24 60-69

20 70-79

21 80-89

11 90-100

Share of the job ad's keywords found in the resume (%)

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, 183 resume and job ad pairs in the keyword finder. Median 56%.

The keywords most likely to be missing describe the subject of the job rather than its tools. Of all domain-knowledge keywords the finder pulled from job ads (the subject matter of the work), 61% were absent from the resume, against 42% of tools and technology and 39% of methods and frameworks. People tend to list their tools and leave out the field they did the work in.

Domain knowledge 61.0%

Skills 46.3%

Tools and technology 42.0%

Methods, frameworks and standards 39.4%

Certifications 33.8%

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, 183 resume and job ad pairs. Share of each kind of keyword (as classified by the keyword finder) that the resume did not contain. Keywords per kind: domain knowledge 569, skills 136, tools and technology 555, methods, frameworks and standards 899, certifications 80.

More is not automatically better. In Huntr's Q2 2026 analysis of 12,120 resumes, interview rates were highest at 20-59% keyword coverage and lower above 60% (Huntr, Q2 2026). Huntr measures coverage its own way, so its bands and our match rate are not directly comparable, but the direction is a useful warning against pasting in every term from the ad.

5.38% Under 20%

6.22% 20-39%

6.30% 40-59%

4.40% 60-79%

4.95% 80%+

Share of the posting's keywords on the resume

Source: Huntr Job Search Trends Q2 2026, 12,120 resumes. Observational and self-reported by Huntr users; shown for comparison, not ApplyMate data.

Missing a few keywords is normal

Tailor your resume to the job ad in one pass

ApplyMate reads the job ad, finds what it asks for that your resume does not say, and rewrites your bullets in the ad's words wherever your experience backs them - without inventing anything.

• Requirement-by-requirement gaps against the real posting
• Your own numbers kept, never replaced with placeholders
• Single-column, parser-safe output in PDF

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What job ads mention

We also looked at the other side of the match: 727 unique job ads that people pasted in to tailor a resume. Years of experience and a degree are the most commonly mentioned requirements. Of the ads that mention a degree, 21% also accept equivalent or related experience, and fewer than one ad in ten mentions pay.

Years of experience 35.6%

A degree 29.3%

Benefits 16.5%

Diversity or equal opportunity 15.8%

Remote work 10.0%

A salary or pay figure 8.5%

Hybrid work 7.7%

Visa or work authorisation 1.5%

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, 727 unique job ads (median 316 words). Whole-word pattern matches, mostly on English wording; ads in other languages and ads pasted in part are undercounted, so treat these as directional.

Among the 251 ads that give a number of years, the most common asks are 3-4 years (29%) and 5-6 years (27%). One in four asks for 7 or more.

19.1% 0-2

29.1% 3-4

27.1% 5-6

12.0% 7-9

12.7% 10+

Years mentioned (first figure in the ad)

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, 251 job ads that give a number of years.

Of the 40 skills and terms we tracked, communication appears most often (40% of ads), ahead of any tool. AI or machine learning is mentioned in 24% of ads, more than Python, Excel or SQL.

Communication 40.3%

AI or machine learning 23.7%

Customer 22.7%

English 21.3%

Compliance 18.8%

Analytical 18.3%

Leadership 15.1%

Problem-solving 15.0%

Python 14.2%

Excel 11.6%

Sales 11.6%

SQL 9.6%

Source: ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026, share of 727 unique job ads mentioning each term (whole-word match). "AI or machine learning" also counts generative AI and LLMs.

How resumes score on ApplyMate's ATS checker

A note before the numbers: applicant tracking systems such as Workday or Greenhouse do not give resumes a universal score. The scores below are ApplyMate's own checker, and other checkers use different rubrics, so a score is only comparable within the same tool. Across the 68 most recent checks, the median resume scored 82 out of 100, the middle half scored between 76 and 86, 13% scored under 70 and 7% scored 90 or more.

ATS statistics from outside research, checked

Our data shows what is on resumes and in ads. It cannot show what an employer's system does with them, so here is the outside evidence that holds up, with our verdict on each source. We applied one test to every figure: can you find the original study, its sample and its method?

Nearly every large employer uses an ATS

Jobscan found an applicant tracking system at 97.4% of Fortune 500 companies in 2026 (487 of 500), with Workday at over 40% of them and SAP SuccessFactors at 12% (Jobscan, August 2026). The figure has sat between 97% and 99% since 2018. Among postings saved by Huntr's users, the mix is different: Greenhouse 30.6%, Workday 19.6% and Ashby 10.7% in December 2025, across 1.67 million saved postings that lean towards tech (Huntr). One counts employers, the other counts jobs. Our ATS resume checker has a page for each of the major systems, including Workday and Greenhouse.

Applications per job have doubled since 2022

Greenhouse customers received an average of 244 applications per job in 2025, up from 116 in 2022, and applications per recruiter roughly tripled over the same period (Greenhouse, The Hire Standard, March 2026; 6,000+ companies). With that much volume, a resume that is not obviously relevant on the first read is easy to pass over.

116 2022

189 2023

223 2024

244 2025

Year

Source: Greenhouse, The Hire Standard (March 2026), 6,000+ companies and 640M+ applications. Vendor data; Greenhouse does not publish its metric definitions.

The 75% rejection statistic has no known source

The claim that 75% of resumes are rejected by an ATS before a human sees them has circulated since at least 2014. It is usually attributed to Preptel, a resume-optimisation company that shut down in 2013, but no Preptel document, sample or method containing the figure has been found (HR Tact's source trace, 2020). Screening software does filter some candidates. In Harvard Business School and Accenture's "Hidden Workers" survey of 2,275 executives, 88% of employers agreed their systems vet out qualified high-skills candidates who miss exact job criteria, and almost half reported automatically screening out resumes with a work gap of more than six months (HBS and Accenture, 2021). That measures what employers believe and configure, not a rejection rate.

AI screening: widely believed, unevenly used

Job seekers assume AI is screening them: 81% of 1,049 respondents in Huntr's 2025 survey believe it (Huntr, 2025). Employer-side numbers are lower and measure different things: 19% of 600 US hiring managers said they use AI resume screening (TopResume, May 2025), and 37% of organisations in LinkedIn's survey of 1,271 recruiting professionals were integrating or experimenting with generative AI in recruiting generally, not specifically for screening (LinkedIn Future of Recruiting 2025). On the candidate side, about four in ten used AI somewhere in their applications in Gartner's late-2024 survey (reported by HR Dive).

What the data means for your resume

Put our numbers next to the outside evidence and the advice gets short. If your file contains real, selectable text in a single column, its format is almost certainly fine. Spend your time where resumes actually lose points.

1. Add numbers to your best bullets. A third of resumes have no percentage or money figure. Revenue, time saved, volume handled, team size: one figure per role moves you out of the weakest group.
2. Name your field, not just your tools. Domain-knowledge keywords go missing more often than tools. If you did demand planning or regulatory reporting, use those words.
3. Tailor to the ad, but not to 100%. The median resume covers about half of an ad's keywords. Close the gaps where you genuinely did the work, using the ad's own words, and stop before it reads like a copy.
4. Give every role dates and at least one line. 7% of builder resumes have an undated role and 5% have a role with no description.
5. Add a LinkedIn link as visible text. Half of resumes leave it off, and a link hidden behind a word can disappear when a parser reads the file.

You can see where your own resume stands with the free ATS resume checker, compare it with a specific posting in the keyword finder, or follow our step-by-step guide to tailoring your resume to a job description.

Frequently asked questions

What share of resumes include quantified results?

In ApplyMate's 2026 study of 1.711 resumes, 33% contained no percentage or currency figure anywhere, and 28% had no such figure and no counted result like "50 clients" either. Quantified results were also the area where resumes lost the most points on ApplyMate's checker.

Do ATS systems give resumes a score?

Not in a standard way. The scores in this study come from ApplyMate's own checker, not from Workday, Greenhouse or any other applicant tracking system. Across the checker's 68 most recent checks, the median resume scored 82 out of 100. Compare scores only within the same tool.

How many resumes are rejected by an ATS?

No public study has measured it. The popular claim that 75% of resumes are rejected before a human sees them is usually attributed to Preptel, a resume company that shut down in 2013, but no document or data behind the figure has been found. Criteria-based screen-outs do exist: in Resume Genius's 2026 survey of 1,000 US hiring managers, 37% let the ATS screen out applications on rules they set.

Should I send my resume as a PDF or a Word file?

Either, as long as the file contains real, selectable text. Every major ATS documents support for both. When ApplyMate's checker measured readability directly from the file, resumes earned 99% of the readability points. The real failure is a scanned or image-only PDF: 4.9% of PDFs in the study had too little text to read without OCR.

Which keywords are resumes missing most often?

For the resume's target role, ApplyMate's checker most often suggested Agile (14.7% of resumes), Kubernetes, CI/CD, SQL and Tableau, reflecting a user base heavy in software and data roles. Against a specific job ad, the median resume matched 56% of the ad's keywords, and domain-knowledge terms were missing 61% of the time, against 42% for tools.

How long is the average resume?

The median resume in the study was 531 words; the middle half ran from 426 to 711 words. Resumes under 300 words averaged 67.5 on ApplyMate's checker, against roughly 83 to 85 for every longer band, so length only mattered at the short end. Builder resumes listed a median of 4 roles and 17 skills.

What do job ads mention most often?

Across 727 job ads pasted into ApplyMate, 36% mention a number of years of experience and 29% mention a degree, but only 8.5% mention a salary or pay figure. Communication was the most common of the 40 skills and terms we tracked (40% of ads), followed by AI or machine learning (24%).

Do recruiters only spend 6 seconds on a resume?

The 6-second figure comes from a 2012 TheLadders eye-tracking study of 30 recruiters; the 2018 update reporting 7.4 seconds did not disclose its sample. Newer figures are all vendor-run. What holds up is that the first pass is fast, so job titles, employers and dates have to be readable at a glance.

Methodology and limitations

Snapshot. All figures are read-only aggregate queries over ApplyMate's production database, frozen at 2026-10-20 19:00 UTC so they can be reproduced. No resume, job ad or personal detail left the database, and no published figure describes fewer than 10 documents. The page was first published on 29 July 2026; this data study replaced its contents on 20 October 2026.

Checker resumes (1.711). Every finished check in the free ApplyMate ATS checker from 2026-08-28 whose extracted text we still held. The checker has run 2.095 finished checks since August 2025; earlier ones are excluded because they did not keep the text or score the same eight areas. Each distinct document text counts once: a resume re-checked unchanged counts once, but an edited re-check counts again, which slightly favours improved resumes. Text is capped at 10,000 characters (31 resumes hit the cap). Our own team's accounts are excluded.

Scores. Scores are ApplyMate's own rubric, not produced by any applicant tracking system. Machine readability and length are computed from the file, and the other six areas are judged by a language model against written bands. Area scores and the score summary come from the 68 most recent checks; the average scores by resume length cover all 1.711. The quantified-results area carries 15 of 100 points, and the rubric gives its top band (13-15) only when most roles carry several measured outcomes, so it ranks lowest partly by design; the share of resumes with no figure at all is measured independently from the text.

Text measures. Percentages, currency amounts, contact links and stock phrases are pattern matches on the extracted text. They can miss unusual wording, and a LinkedIn link hidden behind a word is invisible to them. Language was detected from section headings: 91% English, 3% French, the rest spread across other languages. Our checker scored French resumes lower on average (76.8 against 84.0 for English), which we treat as a likely bias in the model, not a fact about those resumes.

Builder resumes (1.269). Resumes uploaded to the ApplyMate builder between March 2025 and the cutoff, one per file, as parsed into fields by the extraction model and stored in the builder (people can edit their roles before generating). Resumes with no roles are excluded.

Keywords. Checker keyword suggestions are generated by the model for an inferred target role; we kept only terms absent from the resume text. Keyword finder pairs (183) compare a resume with a job ad the person pasted, and the finder classifies each keyword; the finder needs no account, so internal test use could not be excluded there.

Job ads (727). Job descriptions pasted into the builder, deduplicated by full text, any language, sometimes only part of the ad. Shares are whole-word pattern matches, mostly on English wording, so treat them as directional.

Who is in it. People who chose to check or tailor a resume with ApplyMate. Software roles made up 29% of builder users; a breakdown by country is available on request. ApplyMate sells resume tailoring and built the checker, which is a conflict of interest we disclose here and at the top of the page.

Use this data. The numbers are free to quote and republish under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. Every chart's numbers are in one file: download the data (CSV). Each chart has a direct link, for example #fig-metrics.

Sources

• ApplyMate ATS and Resume Study 2026 - 1.711 checked resumes, 1.269 builder resumes, 727 job ads, 183 keyword comparisons; snapshot 2026-10-20 19:00 UTC (data).
• Jobscan, Fortune 500 ATS usage report - 6th edition, August 2026; career-page census of the Fortune 500.
• Huntr, Job Search Trends Q2 2026 - 1,994,555 applications; tailoring, keyword coverage and summary figures.
• Huntr, ATS share of saved postings - 1.67M postings saved by Huntr users, December 2025.
• Greenhouse, The Hire Standard - March 2026; 6,000+ companies, 640M+ applications.
• Greenhouse support, Unsuccessful resume parse - documented parse failure causes and the 2.5 MB limit.
• Workday administrator guide, resume parsing.
• Harvard Business School and Accenture, Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent - 2021; 2,275 executives and 8,720 workers.
• Resume Genius, Hiring Insights Report 2026 - 1,000 US hiring managers, online panel.
• Enhancv, "Does the ATS reject your resume?" - 25 US recruiters, September-October 2025.
• HR Tact, tracing the 75% claim - October 2020.
• TheLadders eye-tracking study - 30 recruiters.
• TopResume, AI in hiring survey - May 2025, 600 US hiring managers.
• LinkedIn, Future of Recruiting 2025 - 1,271 recruiting professionals.

Related reading

• How many jobs should you apply to per day? - the companion data piece on application volume.
• The 10 best ATS resume checkers in 2026 - which scanner to trust, compared side by side.
• How to optimize your resume for an ATS - the practical version of this page.
• ATS keywords: how to build the list for one job ad - the method behind closing a keyword gap.