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 .

Graduate Software Engineer

Alphasights · London

Full-time

The role:

We are looking for highly driven, aspiring software engineers who take pride in their work, to expand our Engineering team in London. Successful candidates will join a cross functional team including product managers and designers working closely with the rest of our business to deliver working code that solves real problems for both internal and external customers. You will take ownership of the problems that your team solves, ensuring a high level of quality in everything that we release, working as part of a top performing international development team. If you have a strong passion for solving problems with code, and want to work with exceptional colleagues in a high achievement environment, this role is a good fit for you. 

What you’ll do:

  • Design solutions: Define the best technical solutions to business problems, contributing to an architectural vision that will scale up to be the world's leading research platform.
  • Ship working code: We primarily work with React on the frontend and Kotlin microservices with Postgres on the backend, with some older services written in Ruby on Rails. We’ve always got an eye open to assess new technologies that might improve our stack.
  • Deploy and iterate: We release frequently to our customers, using CIrcleCI and Spinnaker for CI/CD, and quickly gather feedback in order to inform our next iteration.
  • Build your competency: You will learn quickly by building market-leading technology with experienced colleagues in a high performance environment. Engineers can also use our L&D budget to fast-track development of specific technical competencies. 
  • Maintenance and troubleshooting: Carefully monitor our services, catching errors before users notice them, diagnosing the root cause and deploying fixes.

Who you are:

  • You are pursuing a degree in Computer Science, or a related field.
  • Technical expertise with Kotlin, Java, Python, or React.
  • Proven track record – you have clear accomplishments both in and out of university, standing out from your peers. 
  • You have practical experience, applying your technical skills in a professional environment.
  • You have excellent communication skills, collaborating closely and effectively with teammates.  
  • Highly driven and proactive – you relentlessly and independently push through hurdles and drive towards excellent outcomes.
  • Meticulous – you hold high standards and have an obsessive attention to detail.

 

Learn more about our tech organisation here.

Don't worry if your experience or background doesn't match all of these areas, we believe a broad spectrum of experience provides great perspective on solving problems in new and innovative ways and we’d love to hear from you.

 

AlphaSights is an equal opportunity employer.

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