How does your resume hold up for a QA Engineer role?

Paste a QA Engineer posting and your resume. Get the score, the gaps, and what this role's ATS screens actually check for.

"Tested the application and reported bugs" with no method behind it is the most common gap on QA resumes — it describes the outcome of the job without any of the process that makes QA work rigorous rather than incidental. The field has also shifted heavily toward automation and CI integration over the last several years, and postings reflect that shift even when the title still just says "QA Engineer," which leaves manual-only resumes answering a version of the role that's less common now. Check yours against a real posting to see the gap. The gap is easy to miss because QA work is inherently about catching what's wrong with something else, which makes it easy to describe the target instead of your own process.

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The job posting

What this role's postings ask for

Manual & automated testing
Test case design
Selenium / Cypress / Playwright
Bug tracking (Jira)
Regression testing
API testing (Postman)
CI/CD integration
Test plans
Performance testing
SQL
Defect triage

See how often each of these actually appears in live postings →

Common mistakes on resumes for this role

"Tested the application and reported bugs" with no methodology — no test case design, regression suites or coverage mentioned, which reads as ad hoc clicking rather than a rigorous process.
No automation mentioned. Even mostly-manual QA roles now expect familiarity with at least one automation tool, and its total absence from a resume is read as a gap even in manual-heavy roles.
Bug counts with no severity or resolution context — "found 200 bugs" says nothing about what mattered, and a large raw number without severity can even read as noisy rather than rigorous.
No integration with the release process — testing framed as a separate, siloed step rather than part of CI/CD, which is increasingly how the role is actually structured on modern teams.
Test plan or strategy work never mentioned — only execution — even though designing what to test is often the more senior half of the job and the part that most differentiates candidates.

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Weak vs. strong

Weak Tested the application and reported bugs.

Strong Built a Cypress regression suite covering 85% of critical paths, cutting release-blocking bugs found in production by 70%.

See the full action-verb list this rewrite draws from →

What "evidence" means for this role

For a QA resume, evidence is a coverage number and a downstream effect — a percentage of paths automated, a reduction in production bugs — not just that testing happened. "Tested the application and reported bugs" evidences that testing occurred; it says nothing about scope, method or result. "Built a Cypress regression suite covering 85% of critical paths, cutting release-blocking bugs by 70%" evidences the tool, the scope, and the outcome together. This is exactly the gap SteadyCV's check is built to surface — a posting asking for automation or coverage metrics where your resume currently describes testing only as an activity. The same applies to performance-testing claims — naming a load figure and what broke or held under it evidences more than "performance testing" sitting alone next to a list of tools.

A closer look at the requirements that matter most

Selenium / Cypress / Playwright: Automation tool experience is asked for as a proxy for whether testing scales with the codebase or has to be redone by hand every release. Naming the tool alongside roughly what it covers — a percentage of critical paths, a number of suites — evidences that the automation was substantial, not a single proof-of-concept script.
CI/CD integration: This requirement is checking whether tests run automatically on every change or only when someone remembers to run them manually, which materially changes how much they're actually worth to a team. A specific mention of tests wired into a pipeline, and what happens when they fail, evidences that integration directly.
Test case design: Designing what to test — edge cases, negative paths, boundary conditions — is a different and often more senior skill than executing a given test case, and it's rarely called out separately on QA resumes. One bullet describing test cases you designed, not just ran, answers this requirement in a way execution-only bullets don't.
Regression testing: Regression testing is asked for as a proxy for whether releases stay safe as the codebase grows, or whether every new feature risks quietly breaking an old one. Naming what your regression suite actually covers, and an example of what it caught before release, evidences that more directly than the term alone.
API testing (Postman): API-level testing is increasingly asked for separately from UI automation, because it catches issues earlier and runs faster in a pipeline. Naming a specific suite you built or maintained — how many endpoints, what it caught before release — evidences this distinctly from generic "automated testing" bullets that only imply UI-level coverage.

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