What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
Optical character recognition (OCR) is technology that converts images of text — such as scanned pages — into machine-readable characters.
When you upload a scanned PDF or a CV exported as flat images, native text extraction fails and OCR takes over. OCR quality depends on resolution, skew, fonts, and background noise. Errors swap characters ('o' for '0') and break employer names or email addresses.
Always submit digital-born PDFs or Word files when possible. If you must scan, use high contrast, straight alignment, and verify the result allows text selection in a PDF reader.
Some mobile CV photo apps produce image-only files unsuitable for ATS. Re-type into a proper document template instead.
OCR failures are a common source of false negative filtering. Cvaluate and our ATS-friendly checklist both stress text-based files to keep your application out of the OCR fallback path.
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