-31 points out of 100. That's the exact, computed penalty for a resume missing a phone number and location and website, with a summary under 20 words, a first job entry with fewer than 2 bullets, no metric in those bullets, no action verb, fewer than 5 skills listed, and no Projects or Certifications section — 10 common, easy-to-miss gaps, scored by the same formula SolveBar's Resume Builder runs on every resume before a recruiter ever opens the file. A friend's resume got auto-rejected once for a completely different reason — her DOCX file reflowed her contact info into the wrong column on the recruiter's machine — which is the other half of this post: format and content both get scored, one by an ATS parser, one by this exact arithmetic.
How the -23 is actually derived
Formula: score starts at 100, then subtracts a fixed penalty per gap found — no weighting, no curve, just subtraction, run live as you type:
100 − 5 (missing phone) − 3 (missing location) − 2 (missing website) − 5 (summary under 20 words) − 3 (fewer than 2 bullets) − 3 (no metric in bullets) − 2 (no action verb) − 5 (fewer than 5 skills) = 72, then − 2 (no Projects section) − 1 (no Certifications section) if those are also empty = 69.
Every one of those numbers comes directly from the scoring function's source, not an estimate of what a formula might look like. A missing name or email costs the most — 10 points each — because those 2 fields are the ones a rejection is guaranteed on if absent.
Every deduction, in one table
| Gap | Points lost |
|---|---|
| Missing name | −10 |
| Missing email | −10 |
| Zero experience entries | −15 |
| Missing phone | −5 |
| Summary under 20 words | −5 |
| Fewer than 5 skills listed | −5 |
| An experience entry with fewer than 2 bullets | −3 (per entry) |
| An experience entry with no metric in its bullets | −3 (per entry) |
| Missing location | −3 |
| Summary over 120 words | −3 |
| An experience entry with no action verb | −2 (per entry) |
| Missing website/LinkedIn | −2 |
| No Projects section | −2 |
| More than 25 skills listed | −2 |
| No Certifications section | −1 |
What if scenarios
- What if the name or email field is left as placeholder text? Both count as missing — 10 points each, the single largest deduction on the whole table. Just those 2 fields: 100 − 10 − 10 = 80, before any other gap is even counted.
- What if it's mostly solid, just missing 2 fields? Phone and website blank, everything else complete: 100 − 5 − 2 = 93.
- What if there are 3 experience entries and none of them include a metric? −3 per entry × 3 = 91, even with every other field filled in — the scoring formula counts per-entry, not once for the whole resume.
- What if the score is 100 but the PDF isn't actually parseable? This is the gap the point formula can't catch: an image-based PDF (a screenshot pasted into a document, or a scan) can score 100 on content while an ATS parser sees a blank page, because there's no selectable text underneath. SolveBar's builder exports through
@react-pdf/renderer, which draws real text objects rather than rendering a screenshot into the file — the same check anyone can run manually by opening any PDF and trying to drag-select a paragraph. - What if the layout is 2 columns? Some ATS parsers still read text in raw left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, which can interleave a job title with an unrelated line from a sidebar — a single-column layout avoids that failure mode entirely, independent of the point score.
None of this requires a $20/month subscription to check. All 5 templates, the live score checker, and PDF export are free with no signup on SolveBar's Resume Builder — everything autosaves to your browser's local storage, and nothing is transmitted anywhere to compute that score.