Key Takeaways

  • 75% of U.S. employers use automated applicant tracking systems to screen resumes before a human reviews them (Harvard Business School & Accenture, 2021)
  • The most common ATS failures are missing keywords, incompatible formatting, and incorrect file types
  • ResumeGeni scores your resume across 8 parsing layers — modeled on the same steps enterprise ATS platforms like Workday, Greenhouse, and Taleo use to evaluate candidates

How ATS Resume Scoring Works

Applicant tracking systems parse your resume into structured data — extracting your name, contact info, work history, skills, and education — then score how well that data matches the job requirements. Many ATS rejections happen because the parser couldn't extract critical fields, not because the candidate wasn't qualified.

LayerWhat It ChecksWhy It Matters
Document extractionFile format, encoding, readabilityCorrupted or image-only PDFs fail immediately
Layout analysisTables, columns, headers, footersMulti-column layouts break field extraction
Section detectionExperience, education, skills headingsNon-standard headings cause sections to be missed
Field mappingName, email, phone, dates, titlesMissing contact info is a common cause of immediate rejection
Keyword matchingJob-specific terms, skills, certificationsKeyword overlap affects recruiter search visibility and ATS scoring
Chronology checkDate ordering, gap detectionReverse-chronological order is expected by most ATS
QuantificationMetrics, numbers, measurable outcomesQuantified achievements help human reviewers and some scoring models
Confidence scoringOverall parse quality and completenessLow-confidence parses get deprioritized in results

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ResumeGeni free?
Yes. ResumeGeni is currently in beta — ATS analysis, scoring, and initial improvement suggestions are free with no signup required. Full guidance and saved reports may require a free account.
What file formats are supported?
PDF, DOCX, DOC, TXT, RTF, ODT, and Apple Pages. PDF and DOCX are recommended for best ATS compatibility.
How is the ATS score calculated?
Your resume is processed through an 8-layer parsing pipeline that extracts structured data the same way enterprise ATS platforms do. The score reflects how completely and accurately your resume can be parsed, plus how well your content matches common ATS ranking criteria.
Can ATS read PDF resumes?
Yes, but not all PDFs are equal. Text-based PDFs parse well. Image-only PDFs (scanned documents) and PDFs with complex tables or multi-column layouts often fail ATS parsing. Our analyzer will flag these issues.
How do I improve my ATS score?
Focus on three areas: use a clean single-column format, include keywords from the job description naturally in your experience bullets, and ensure all sections (contact, experience, education, skills) use standard headings.

ATS Guides & Resources

Built by engineers with 12 years of experience building enterprise hiring technology at ZipRecruiter. Last updated .

Staff Python Software Engineer

Abound · London

About Abound

We’re redefining consumer lending in the UK, and beyond. Using advanced AI and Open Banking data, we make fair, affordable personal finance available to more people. While traditional lenders rely almost entirely on credit scores, we look at the full financial picture - how much you spend, and what you can afford to repay to build a deeper, more accurate understanding of each customer's unique financial situation.


And we've shown it works at scale. We’ve issued over £1.3bn in loans directly to customers while delivering market-leading credit performance - for every 10 defaults the industry expects, we see only 3. We also reached profitability just 2.5 years after launch.


Backed by £2bn+ of funding from top-tier investors including Citi, GSR Ventures, and Deutsche Bank, we’re recognised as one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs (Sifted, CNBC). Now, we’re expanding into new markets and product lines - and we’re looking for ambitious people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and grow with us.

 

Staff Platform Engineer

We are thrilled to open up a brand new opportunity on our Platform team.

Abound is a fast growing scale up. We are here to build something important for millions of customers, not to offer a comfortable average job. Our Platform team is the backbone of our engineering organization. Right now, it’s a tight-knit, high-performing group of four engineers (two Seniors, two Staff), primarily focused on DevOps. I am looking for a Staff-level Platform Engineer with a deep focus on Python engineering to balance our capabilities, elevate our code standards, and supercharge our developer experience.

If you love diving into complex engineering challenges, standardizing patterns, and enabling other teams to ship faster, this is the role for you.

🚀 What You Will Do

The Platform team operates across two main pillars: DevOps and Engineering. While the team shares these responsibilities, your focus will be firmly on the Engineering side.

  • Drive Cross-Cutting Impact: Lead cross-functional projects that create immediate business value. You will add new infrastructure, optimize deployment patterns, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines to deliver an unmatched developer experience company-wide.

  • Optimisation: Design and update infrastructure patterns for meet practical demands around performance, scalability and reliability.

  • Set the Engineering Standard: Define and implement standard settings for how we write code across the business. This includes establishing best practices for shared design patterns across all teams.

  • Maintain Core Components: Take ownership of dependency maintenance and heavily contribute to our most complex, mission-critical shared services.

  • Enable, Don't Block: Act as a true team player. You will not hold other teams hostage to rigid central patterns or infrastructure; instead, you will collaborate closely with them to deliver on their needs and unblock their projects.

🛠️ Our Tech Stack

You will be working with a modern, scalable stack designed for high concurrency:

  • Backend: Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, OpenTelemetry, Procrastinate), Java

  • Cloud: AWS Environment

  • Databases: RDS (PostgreSQL & MySQL)

🎯 What We Expect From You

  • Technical Mastery: Exceptionally strong Python and SQL skills.

  • System Design: Deep knowledge of asynchronous development and proven experience dealing with highly concurrent systems.

  • Strategic Vision: The ability to balance immediate team needs with long-term platform health and developer velocity.

🧬 How We Work at Abound

To be successful here, our culture needs to energize you. We are not a lender with thousands of pages of operational procedures to follow. Here is how we operate:

  • High Bar & Real Ownership: We are a high performing team, and we hire people who raise the bar and take pride in great work. We own outcomes, not tasks. You don’t assume someone else will do it; you follow up until the issue is resolved.

  • We Work Hard: We care about impact, not face time. But at key moments, we stay until the job is done. That can mean evenings or occasional weekends, especially around launches or live incidents.

  • MVP & Tech Debt Culture: We ship fast, learn from real customers and iterate. Early in a product’s life we optimise for speed to market and learning, not perfect enterprise architecture. We are comfortable amassing and actively managing technical debt through the lifecycle.

  • One Team Collaboration: We collaborate deeply and are curious about the whole business, not just our own lane. People routinely help outside their formal role when it moves Abound forward.

  • Office-First: We are hybrid but office first. At least 3 days a week in the office is a minimum. Being together is one of our performance advantages.

  • Thrive in Change: Priorities shift as we learn what works. Roles, teams and roadmaps evolve with the business. When there is no rulebook, we expect you to use good judgement for our customers and for Abound.

If you are looking for a highly collaborative environment where your technical decisions will shape the future of a rapid-growth business, we want you on the team.

What we offer

  • Everyone owns a piece of the company - equity

  • Hybrid with 3 days a week in the office

  • 25 days’ holiday a year, plus 8 bank holidays

  • 2 paid volunteering days per year

  • One month paid sabbatical after 4 years

  • Employee loan

  • Free gym membership

  • Team wellness budget to be active together - set up a yoga class, a tennis lesson or go bouldering