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 .

Senior Software Engineer (Tenant Management)

Beamery · London, UK

ABOUT BEAMERY

We are a leading transformational AI platform in the HR technology industry, enabling enterprise companies to create better and fairer talent decisions – by accelerating their recruiting processes, unlocking successful internal mobility opportunities, enabling smarter upskilling initiatives, and facilitating agile workforce planning. We are helping our clients hire and redeploy over a million people annually.

Read more about our work here

What’s ahead — and why it’s an exciting time to join the team: 

Deepening our native integrations with SAP, Workday, Microsoft, and LinkedIn to seamlessly embed our skills intelligence into the platforms where critical workforce decisions are made.

Embedding our agentic AI to help customers plan smarter for the future—powering workforce strategies, internal mobility, and skills forecasting.

Advancing our use of proprietary LLMs and knowledge graph technology to help organizations unlock broader talent pools, make fairer decisions, and expand access to opportunity at scale.

But it’s not all about creating high-quality products, we also very much value the company culture we have worked hard to create; built on trust, empathy & honesty ensuring our workforce is able to bring their full selves to work.

The Tenant Management Team is a critical backend enablement team, responsible for building the secure and reliable foundation that all other product teams depend on. We own the core systems for Authentication, Authorization, Tenant Data, and the Admin Portal.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help our core services evolve and scale to ensure the integrity, security, and reliability of our platform. This person will:

  • Play a critical role in designing, developing, and operating high-integrity backend micro-services for Authentication, Authorization, and core tenant data models.

  • Evolve the Admin Portal functionality to provide self-service tools for internal CXO and Support teams, and for external customers.

  • Ensure strong data integrity, security, and access control mechanisms, enabling other product teams to build features securely and efficiently.

  • Execute on projects and follow through end to end starting with discovery and design through prototyping and implementation to gauging success and owning operations.

  • Work with teammates and the wider engineering org to continuously improve our product, technology, processes, teamwork and effectiveness.

What are we looking for?

  • Strong experience building and operating backend systems in complex environments.

  • Expertise with Javascript/Typescript and Node.js Ensuring quality and reliability through unit, integration and end-to-end tests.

  • A basic understanding of caching strategies for backend services and message queues.

  • Exposure to DevOps, incident management and CI/CD pipelines.

  • Experience with Kafka and exposure to SQL and NoSQL databases.

  • Experience debugging and troubleshooting issues using instrumentation and logs.

  • Demonstrating ownership and initiative with experience driving team projects from conceptualization to successfully delivering business value.

  • An impact-focussed mindset aligned with agile principles.

  • A sense of empathy for users, teammates, colleagues and partners.

  • A genuine desire to help the team work better together with a healthy dose of fun.

Beamery is for Everybody. Diversity and open expression are fundamental to us. We acknowledge the challenges in our industry and strive to develop an inclusive culture where everybody can contribute. We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment for everyone, regardless of ethnicity, religion, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, national origin, age, disability status, or caregiver status. If, for whatever reason, you need us to make reasonable adjustments and adaptations to our recruitment process, please email [email protected]

Visit our Diversity, Equality and Inclusion page to learn more about progress and commitments.