A "good" resume isn’t good in the abstract — it’s good for a specific job. The real test is whether it’s clearly relevant to the role you’re applying to, easy for software and recruiters to read, and backed by numbers. Here’s how to judge yours honestly.
Check your resume’s ATS score — free →Put your resume next to the posting. Do the skills, tools, and phrases the job emphasizes — the ones you genuinely have — actually appear in your resume, in similar words? If not, it’ll score low on the automated screen and get skimmed past, no matter how impressive it is in isolation. A resume that’s "good" for every job is rarely good for any one of them.
This is why tailoring matters: the same resume can be weak for one posting and strong for another. Align Resume scores your match against a specific job and rewrites your real experience to fit.
Read your bullets. Are they duties ("responsible for reporting") or results ("built reporting that cut close time 30%")? Recruiters skim for numbers. If most bullets have no metric, that’s the biggest quick win available to you.
Single column, standard headings, no tables or text boxes, contact info in the body. If your resume is a two-column design with graphics, screening software may scramble it — which makes a "beautiful" resume functionally bad.
How do I know if my resume is good enough?
Judge it against a specific job: relevance to that posting, quantified results, and clean formatting. A resume that isn’t tailored to the role you’re applying to will underperform even if it looks polished.
Should I pay for a resume review?
You can, but most of the lift comes from tailoring to each job and quantifying your results — things you can do yourself or automate. Fix relevance and metrics first before paying for a rewrite.