An illustration with sample files; your own files show their own results.
BeforeResumes the parser misreads
Two columns read straight across
Contact lost in the header
Skill bars and icons
AfterRebuilt so every parser reads it
One clean column
Contact moved into the body
Plain text, nothing lost
Lever Resume Checker: Fix Odd Characters and Encoding Noise
Lever's parser is commonly reported to be sensitive to unusual characters. Fancy bullets, ligatures, icon fonts and decorative symbols can turn into question marks or stray boxes in the parsed fields, and a name or email with a broken character is a problem for the person trying to contact you.
The tool above repairs broken character mappings, folds decorative characters to plain, safe equivalents, keeps the contact block extractable, and rebuilds the resume as a clean, searchable PDF, DOCX or Markdown file. The audit scores the result against five ATS pipelines, Lever included. It is a local simulation, not a connection to Lever.
ATS Resume Fixer: Check and Fix How ATS Reads Your Resume
Applicant Tracking Systems read a resume (or CV) as one linear text stream, and they fail in predictable ways: columns interleave, ligatures and broken fonts turn into garbage, content in form fields or images is dropped, and headers get truncated. The ATS Resume Fixer rebuilds your resume or CV as a single-column, machine-readable document, entirely in your browser. Your file never leaves your device.
What it does
Spatial linearization: an XY-cut engine finds column gutters and block gaps and flattens columns, sidebars and visual tables into one reading order.
Glyph & CMap repair: expands ligatures (fi, fl, ffi…), neutralises Private-Use-Area characters from broken CMaps, and folds exotic bullets, dashes and quotes to plain equivalents.
Artifact stripping: the output is rebuilt from text only, so images, skill bars, decorative vectors, form fields and annotations are gone by construction.
Semantic restructuring: content is sorted into canonical sections (Contact, Summary, Experience, Skills, Education, Certifications…).
Dual-target output: a searchable text PDF plus an unstyled DOCX and Markdown, ready for any parser.
Headless ATS audit: a built-in mock parser scores machine readability and projects it onto five pipelines: Workday, Taleo, Greenhouse, Lever and iCIMS.
A note on PDF/A
The PDF is a clean, searchable text PDF with ISO core fonts and a classic cross-reference table, which covers everything an ATS relies on. It is deliberately not stamped as PDF/A-1b/2b: true conformance needs colour profiles, XMP metadata and a validating toolchain that a client-side tool cannot guarantee. You get a document that parses correctly, not a badge it cannot verify.
Frequently asked questions
Why do bullets and icons turn into strange characters in a parsed resume?
A PDF can draw a bullet from a symbol font or an icon font whose characters map to nothing standard when the text is extracted, so the parser sees a box or a question mark. The ATS Resume Fixer repairs those mappings and replaces decorative glyphs with plain equivalents.
Can encoding problems break my email address or phone number?
Yes, when the contact line uses a special character, a ligature or an icon in place of a label. The audit checks whether the contact block is extractable as plain text and flags it when it is not.
Does the cleaned resume keep my wording?
Yes. The text is preserved and only characters and layout are normalised. The audit also flags text loss if anything could not be carried over, so you can check before you download.
Is my resume uploaded anywhere to be checked?
No. The whole check runs in your browser and the file is never uploaded. Previewing and checking need no account; an account is needed only to spend tokens when you download the result.
