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Key Takeaways
- Requirement density varies significantly by field, which means the same percentage carries different meaning across industries.
- Credential-heavy fields (healthcare, law, licensed trades) tend to have a smaller number of hard requirements, making scores more binary — you either have the licence or you do not.
- Technical fields with long tool lists (software, data) tend to produce lower average scores even from strong candidates, because postings list more than any one person is expected to have.
- There is no published, verified industry-by-industry benchmark table anyone can point to with confidence — treat any specific number here as a rough pattern, not a verified statistic.
- The more reliable approach in any field is reading your own missing-requirements list rather than comparing your percentage to an external benchmark.
Asking "is 70% good?" has a different answer depending on whether you are a nurse, a software engineer, or an electrician — not because the scoring math changes, but because what a typical posting in each field actually demands is structurally different.
Why Industry Changes the Meaning of a Score
A match score reflects coverage of a specific posting's stated requirements. How many requirements a typical posting states, and how binary or continuous those requirements are, varies by field — and that variation is what makes an identical percentage mean different things.
Credential-Heavy Fields: Fewer Requirements, More Binary
Healthcare, law, licensed trades, and other regulated professions tend to have postings with a smaller number of genuinely hard requirements — a specific licence, a specific certification, a specific years-of-practice threshold — surrounded by comparatively less extensive skill-list padding than, say, a typical software engineering posting.
In these fields, a missing required item (the licence, the certification) tends to be closer to a binary pass/fail than a partial deduction — you either hold the credential or you do not, and no amount of resume wording changes that specific fact. This means a strong candidate in these fields who genuinely holds all required credentials may see high, tightly clustered scores, while a candidate missing even one hard credential may see a score gap that resume tailoring cannot close. See our healthcare resume guides — nurse practitioner, physician assistant, respiratory therapist — for how credential presentation specifically affects this.
Technical Fields With Long Tool Lists: Lower Average Scores, Even for Strong Candidates
Software engineering, data roles, and similar technical fields frequently produce postings with long lists of tools, frameworks and methodologies — more than any single realistic candidate is expected to have fully. As covered in a JD lists 20 skills, which matter, much of this length reflects aspirational padding rather than a literal checklist.
The practical effect: even a genuinely strong, well-qualified candidate in these fields often sees moderate rather than very high scores against any single posting, simply because the posting names more tools than the role realistically requires from one person. A 65-75% match in a technical field with a long, padded requirements list may represent a stronger relative position than the same percentage in a field with a shorter, more essential-only list.
Fields With Structured, Standardised Requirements
Accounting, certain government and civil service roles, and other highly structured fields often have requirements that map closely and specifically to formal qualifications (a specific certification, a specific exam passed, a specific classification level). Scores here tend to behave similarly to the credential-heavy pattern above — closer to binary on the hard requirements, with less room for wording-based improvement to close a genuine credential gap.
Fields With High Requirement Variability Between Postings
Marketing, general management, and other roles without a single standardised skill set tend to show wide variation in what different postings for the same job title actually require — as covered in why does my resume score differently for similar-titled jobs. In these fields, comparing your score across different postings for the same nominal title is less meaningful than in more standardised fields, because the underlying requirements genuinely differ more from posting to posting.
Why We're Not Publishing a Specific Benchmark Table
It would be easy to present a table of "average scores by industry" here, and we are deliberately not doing that, because no verified, methodologically sound source for that data exists publicly, including from us — different scoring tools use different models (see why do two tools give different scores), and there is no shared, audited dataset of real scores across industries to draw an honest benchmark from. Presenting invented numbers with false precision would be worse than being direct about this limitation.
What to Do Instead of Seeking an External Benchmark
Read your own missing-requirements list, sorted by required vs preferred, using the method in required vs preferred qualifications. This tells you more about your actual standing than any cross-industry percentage comparison could.
Track your own scores over time within your specific field, across multiple postings you have applied to. This builds a personal, relevant baseline — if your typical score in your field and role type is consistently 60-70%, that becomes your meaningful reference point, more useful than any general claim about what is "good" across all industries.
Weight credential and licence gaps differently from tool and skill-list gaps, regardless of your specific field — a missing required licence behaves closer to binary in any field; a missing item from a long, padded tool list behaves more like a partial, addressable gap. This distinction matters more than which industry you are in.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a published, reliable source for industry ATS score benchmarks? Not that we are aware of with sound, verifiable methodology — treat any specific benchmark claim, including general patterns described here, as informed reasoning rather than a verified statistic.
Why does my score seem lower than colleagues report in a different field? Requirement list length and structure vary meaningfully by field, which can produce systematically different typical scores even among equally qualified candidates.
Should I feel discouraged by a moderate score in a technical field with a long requirements list? Not automatically — read the missing list first. A moderate score against a padded, aspirational requirements list may reflect the posting's structure more than your actual qualification.
Does a missing licence or certification always behave as binary? In most regulated fields, yes, functionally — resume wording generally cannot substitute for a required credential you do not hold.
What is the single most useful thing to do with any score, regardless of industry? Read the missing-requirements list and sort by required versus preferred — see which missing skills actually matter.
Build Your Own Reference Point
Rather than searching for an external industry benchmark that does not reliably exist, the more useful data is your own pattern across postings in your actual field.
Scan your resume against several postings in your field and track the range of scores you typically see. That personal baseline, combined with reading each missing-requirements list, tells you more than any general industry claim could.
Free, about a minute per scan. See also what is a good ATS match score and required vs preferred qualifications.
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