What does "met" mean in a resume checker?
Jobscan, Teal, ResumeAtlas, Marovi and MPE compared on how each one decides a requirement is met, using each company's own published description of how it works.
The short answer
Most resume checkers count a requirement as met when the job description's words show up on your resume. ResumeAtlas goes a step further and checks whether the word sits in a work bullet or only in your skills list. Marovi, which sells to corporate and private equity talent teams, weighs experience on quality, frequency, relevancy and recency through a model it keeps proprietary. MPE asks a question the others don't describe answering - at what level does your resume show you doing the work, against the level the job asks for.
Why does it matter what "met" means?
Two tools can look at the same resume and the same job and both call it a match when neither one looked at whether the person can do the work. A senior role isn't asking whether you've touched something, it's asking whether you've carried it and lived with the calls you made along the way. A checker that counts words can't tell those apart, and neither can one that only looks at where the word sits on the page.
So before you trust a match score, or a shortlist built on one, it's worth knowing what the tool behind it was actually counting.
One resume line, read four ways
Take one requirement from a job description and the one line on a candidate's resume that answers it. Every tool below gets the same two pieces of text.
Lead executive stakeholders and the steering committee through an enterprise-wide ERP rollout.
Managed stakeholder communications for the ERP rollout.
The ask wants someone who leads the executives through the rollout. The resume response says the candidate handled communications on one, and each tool decides differently whether that meets the ask.
Jobscan and Teal
"Stakeholder" and "ERP" appear in both the ask and the resume response, so the score goes up. If the ask had said "stakeholder engagement" or "change leadership" instead, the same resume response might not count at all, because Jobscan's own guidance says close phrasings like "project management" and "managed projects" may not register as a match. Either way the line is scored on its vocabulary.
ResumeAtlas
The resume response sits in a work bullet rather than the skills list, so it clears the first bar. ResumeAtlas publishes its rule that a requirement mentioned without scope or outcome counts as Weak, and this response has neither, so by that rule it lands as Weak. That's a fairer call than a keyword count, but it still doesn't tell you whether this person wrote the status emails or sat across from the CFO and renegotiated the scope.
Marovi
Marovi would weigh the experience on quality, frequency, relevancy and recency. Frequency and recency tell you how often and how lately someone did something. Marovi doesn't publish how it scores quality, so from the outside there's no way to say how this resume response would land against the ask.
MPE
MPE first reads the ask for the level it needs. Leading executives and a steering committee through an enterprise-wide rollout sits near the top of the six-stage Dreyfus scale. Then it reads the resume response for what it shows the person doing. It's communications on a rollout, there's no decision in it and nothing about scope or what came of it, which is evidence of working inside a process somebody else designed and sits toward the bottom. The report shows that gap for that capability, quotes the resume line it came from and says how confident it is given how little the line gives it to go on. If another bullet shows the same person renegotiating scope with a steering committee, MPE reads that one too and the level moves with it.
This example is illustrative, not output from a real report.
How each tool decides, side by side
| Tool | Built for | What counts as "met" | Does it say at what level? | Shows the evidence it used? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jobscan | Job seekers | Hard skills, soft skills and other keywords from the posting that appear on your resume, hard skills weighted most. Jobscan says word count and measurable results aren't factored into the match rate. | Not in the match rate as Jobscan describes it. Jobscan also lists a separate Job Level Match feature, which this page hasn't assessed. | Matched and missing keywords |
| Teal | Job seekers | Teal's help pages say the Match Score depends on how many of the job description's keywords you've included. The free version shows the top five keywords per job. | Not described | Keywords to add |
| ResumeAtlas | Job seekers | Proven if described in a work or project bullet, Weak if mentioned without scope or outcome, Listed Only if it's only in the skills section, Missing if absent. The score counts required keywords your experience bullets demonstrate. | Not described. It grades where and how strongly a skill appears, not the level of the work. | Requirement-by-requirement proof map |
| Marovi | Enterprise and private equity talent teams, with search services. Its candidate portal is invite only, Director level and up. | A weighted scorecard built from the job description, measuring quality, frequency, relevancy and recency of experience with a proprietary data model and executive search consultants. | Not published | Marovi says every recommendation traces back to its evidence |
| MPE | Boutique and retained search firms, recruiters and senior candidates checking their own resume. Self-serve. | MPE pulls the capabilities the job needs from the job description and sets the level each one asks for, then reads the resume for evidence of each. | Yes. Each capability is scored on the six-stage Dreyfus scale, Novice to Mastery, against the level the job asks for. | The resume lines each score came from, with a stated confidence |
So which one should you use?
If your problem is vocabulary, meaning you did the work but describe it in words the posting doesn't use, Jobscan and Teal will show you the posting's words. They won't tell you whether your resume shows you doing the work at the level asked for, and stuffing words in to lift the score is a big part of why so many resumes now read the same.
ResumeAtlas is upfront that tailoring should stop where your evidence stops, and its Listed Only flag catches skills you claim but never show anywhere in your work history. If your question is whether a skill is on your resume in a form a reader will believe, it does that job.
Marovi was started by people with decades in executive search and pairs its software with search and research services for enterprise and private equity teams. If you're a large hiring team that wants consultants attached to the evaluation, that's who it's built for.
I built MPE for the question the others don't take on, which is level. Can this person do this job at the depth it needs, going by what their resume actually shows? That's the question a search partner is paid to answer and the one a senior candidate needs answered before they apply, and MPE applies the same criteria to every resume on the search so the 300th candidate is held to the same bar as the first.
What MPE doesn't do
- It doesn't make the hiring decision. It gives the person making it a read of the resume against the job, with the evidence attached.
- It only reads what's written. If you did the work and never wrote it down, MPE can't credit it.
- It isn't a lie detector. An invented line can still read well, and catching that is what interviews and references are for. What MPE does is stop a vague line from scoring well on vocabulary alone.
- The Dreyfus scale is a published model of how people move from following rules to working from experience, and MPE uses the six-stage version Rousse and Dreyfus set out in 2021. It's a defined yardstick every candidate on a search is measured against, not a psychometric test.
See what your own resume shows. Paste a job description, upload a resume and MPE reads it capability by capability. Six free credits when you sign up, no card.
Related: Does your resume prove what the job is asking for?
How this page was put together
Every description of another company's tool on this page comes from that company's own website, help pages or press releases, linked below, as they stood on October 20, 2026. Where a company doesn't publish how something works, the page says so rather than guessing. If anything here misdescribes your product, email me at [email protected] and I'll correct it.
- Jobscan, Jobscan Tutorial (match rate priorities, hard skills weighting, results not factored)
- Jobscan FAQ as reproduced by WGU Career Services ("project management" and "managed projects" may not count as a match)
- Jobscan, Jobscan vs. Teal (Job Level Match feature)
- Teal, Using Matching Mode (Match Score and keyword limits)
- ResumeAtlas, Compare Your Resume to Job Description and Methodology
- Marovi, marovi.io
- Marovi press release, Marovi's Evaluation Intelligence Takes Executive Hiring to New Levels, GlobeNewswire, September 22, 2026
- Marovi press release, Marovi Opens Its Evaluation Intelligence Engine to Executives Exploring Their Next Move, GlobeNewswire, October 14, 2026