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 .

Subject Matter Expert - Retail

Blueconic · Philadelphia, PA

Full-time, Philadelphia, PA 
Hurry up! We’ve got a dream to build!

 

The Mission

At BlueConic, we believe when our customers win, we win. As we scale the Customer Growth Engine, we are intentionally building a new kind of capability: deep, opinionated industry leadership that helps customers execute with confidence today while clearly understanding where their industries are headed next.

The Subject Matter Expert (Retail) is central to this ambition.

This role exists to inject real-world Retail judgment into every strategic moment—commercial, customer-facing, and internal. You are not here to explain technology. You are here to interpret the future of Retail, challenge legacy assumptions, and act as a sherpa for growth, guiding executives through complexity toward clear, decisive action.

You operate at the intersection of industry, strategy, and technology, ensuring the Customer Growth Engine is applied with credibility, relevance, and inspiration—both inside BlueConic and in the market.

Why This Role Matters

Retail leaders are navigating structural change, not incremental optimization:

  • A privacy-first world that breaks historical data and identity assumptions
  • Fragmented customer journeys across owned, paid, and partner ecosystems
  • Margin pressure that demands faster time-to-value and clearer ROI
  • AI noise without practical, trustworthy guidance

Our customers don’t need more tools. They need judgment, perspective, and conviction.

This role ensures BlueConic consistently shows up as:

  • A trusted industry authority, grounded in lived experience
  • A challenger of outdated operating models, not a validator of the status quo
  • A strategic partner who connects vision to execution
  • A catalyst for measurable growth, not abstract transformation
  • A sherpa for growth, guiding executives through complexity toward clear, decisive action.

The Impact You Will Have

As the Retail SME, your work is deliberately end-to-end and tightly connected.

You develop and maintain a clear, opinionated point of view on what is changing in Retail and why it matters now. You continuously interpret market signals, customer behavior shifts, regulatory changes, and technology trends, translating them into actionable growth implications. You help customers and internal teams distinguish what is truly working from what is merely overhyped.

You bring this perspective directly into high-stakes executive moments with ICP Retail brands—new business, expansion, renewal, and transformation. In these conversations, you lead with credibility, not theory, challenging assumptions and reframing priorities based on real industry experience. Whether guiding a Future of Retail Growth or Future of Retail First-Party Data discussion, your role is to inspire confidence and create momentum toward action.

You apply the Customer Growth Engine through an industry lens, translating BlueConic’s capabilities into Retail specific outcomes, KPIs, and growth paths. You help shape Growth Plays based on how these organizations actually operate, ensuring recommendations drive faster time-to-value and measurable commercial impact.

In close partnership with Sales Growth and Customer Engagement, you help shape deal and account strategy early—before solutioning hardens. Your strategic framing unlocks larger, multi-play opportunities and strengthens executive alignment, directly influencing win rates, expansion velocity, and ACV.

At the same time, you convert what you see and learn in the field into reusable industry intelligence. You help productize insight into advisory assets, POVs, signal briefs, growth scans, and workshops that scale across customers. You feed validated, real-world signal back into Product and Marketing, sharpening positioning, roadmap decisions, and market relevance.

External Industry Voice and Internal Force Multiplier

This role carries both external visibility and internal leverage.

Externally, you are a credible voice for BlueConic in Retail. You represent the company in webinars, industry events, roundtables, and speaking engagements, contributing to provocative POV content such as social media content, presentations, panels, and whitepapers. You engage with partners, analysts, and industry communities to extend BlueConic’s influence—always grounded in real customer stories and market signals. This presence is not brand marketing for its own sake; it is expected to reinforce pipeline quality, executive credibility, and strategic differentiation.

Internally, you raise the strategic altitude across BlueConic. You act as a force multiplier by enabling customer-facing teams—Sales, Expansion, Customer Success, and Professional Services—with sharper industry context, stronger narratives, and the confidence to challenge customers constructively. You work closely with Product to translate real Retail constraints into meaningful roadmap insight, and with Marketing to ensure external messaging reflects authentic industry signal rather than abstraction or hype. Your impact shows up when teams across BlueConic sound more authoritative, more relevant, and more future-focused in how they engage the market.

Who You Are

You are an industry operator at heart, with the strategic altitude to advise executives and the practical grounding to remain credible.

You likely bring:

  • Direct experience inside Retails in areas such as:
    • Digital or Growth Leadership
    • CRM, Customer Data, or Marketing Technology
    • E-commerce or Omnichannel Strategy
    • Customer Experience or Personalization
  • Proven influencing content publication and social media followership
  • Alternatively, experience from a top-tier research, advisory, or strategy firm, combined with deep, hands-on industry exposure

You are known for executive presence, sound judgment shaped by real tradeoffs, and a clear POV on the future of Retail. You can naturally connect strategy, data, technology, and outcomes.

What Sets You Apart

You are opinionated but pragmatic—you test trends instead of chasing them. You move fluidly between boardroom narrative and operational reality. You care deeply about customer impact, not theoretical frameworks, and you elevate the people around you by consistently raising the strategic bar.

How Success Is Measured

Success in this role is measured by impact, not activity:

  • Increased win rates and ACV on SME-influenced opportunities
  • Reduced time-to-value for Retail customers
  • Elevation of BlueConic’s external recognition as the leading Retail domain expert

Why Join BlueConic Now

This is not a traditional SME role.

You are joining BlueConic at a moment of intentional evolution—reimagining how industry expertise scales through AI and systems, elevating from “easy to use” to strategically indispensable, and building a modern, bold, customer-obsessed growth engine.

If you want to shape the future of Retail and CPG growth, not simply react to it, this role was built for you.

If hired, applicants based in the US can expect an annual base salary and commission target within the following ranges, depending on experience. BlueConic also offers a comprehensive benefits package to full-time employees including a selection of medical, dental, and vision insurance plans, 401(k) matching, 28 vacation days annually, paid parenting leave, and more.

Annual base salary
$90,000$115,000 USD
Annual commission target
$9,000$11,500 USD