Frequently asked questions

No. We do not build models, we do not train anything on your résumé, and we do not contribute it to another company’s training set.

To score and rewrite a résumé we do send its text to third-party AI providers — OpenRouter, Groq and Google’s Gemini API. We use paid API tiers whose terms exclude training on submitted content. Free consumer tiers of some AI services do let the provider learn from what you send; we do not put your data through those. All three are named in the Privacy Policy.

Yes — otherwise your scans and saved versions would be gone every time you closed the tab. We keep the file you uploaded, the text extracted from it, and the results produced from it.

It is kept until you delete it. Deleting your account from Settings removes your profile, résumés, scans, optimisations and cover letters, and deletes the stored PDF files. It is immediate and cannot be undone.

No. FolioATS is not a job board and not a recruitment agency. We never share your résumé with employers, recruiters, job boards or advertisers, and we never submit an application on your behalf. Pasting a company’s job description here does not tell that company anything — they are not involved, and they never see it.

No, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising either, as those terms are defined under California law. There are no advertising cookies and no tracking pixels on this site. The only cookie we set is the one that keeps you signed in.

It is our assessment, not a real employer’s. No ATS vendor offers an interface that would let us run your résumé through their live system, so anyone claiming to show you “your actual ATS score” is describing their own model too. We would rather say so than imply otherwise.

What the score measures well is concrete and checkable: whether your document parses cleanly, whether your dates and job titles survive extraction, and how your content lines up against the job description you gave us. A 85 does not guarantee an interview, and a low score does not mean rejection — employers configure their systems differently and many read résumés by hand first.

It is built specifically not to. Suggestions rephrase and tighten what is already in your résumé — they lead with results you have written rather than inventing metrics. Where a genuine gap exists against the job description, the product tells you it is a gap instead of papering over it.

Language models still make mistakes, which is why every change is shown before and after and applied only when you approve it. Read them. The finished document is what you send to an employer, and it needs to be true.

Right now, yes — FolioATS is in beta and free to use, with no card required. Being straight with you: every AI request costs us real money, so paid plans are likely at some point. If that happens we will say so clearly in advance, and we will not begin charging for something you are already using without telling you first.

PDF is the safest choice — it is what most employers ask for and what parsers handle best. Before scoring, FolioATS checks that the file actually looks like a résumé and tells you if it does not, so a cover letter or a scanned image uploaded by mistake produces a clear warning rather than a meaningless score.

Usually because the things that make a résumé look designed are the things that break parsing. The common causes:

• Multi-column layouts — read left to right across both columns, interleaving unrelated lines.
• Tables and text boxes — content inside them is often dropped entirely.
• Headers and footers — frequently ignored, so a phone number placed there disappears.
• Icons instead of labels — an envelope glyph is not the word “Email”.
• Text inside an image — invisible to a parser; the résumé reads as blank.

The scanner names which of these it found rather than only lowering the number. The ATS guide covers each in detail.

Yes, and without emailing anyone or waiting on us. Settings has both a full export — everything we hold, as one JSON file — and account deletion, which removes your data and the stored PDF files outright. Export first if you want a copy; deletion cannot be undone.