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 .

Sr Software Engineer (Data Acquisition)

Careportalinc · USA

Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.

Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.

The Role

We are seeking a seasoned Senior Software Engineer to join our Data Integration and Platforms team on the Retain squad to help support our live clients. This team is our primary client-facing engineering team for our live clients. You will be partnering closely with Product, Delivery, and Support. This is a dynamic role that focuses on both refining and enhancing our critical integrations and on strategic investments in our core data platform through data semantics, 835 processing, and data catalog and lineage.

In this role you will:

  • Lead the design and evolution of the interfaces that connect live integration data to the rest of Cedar.
  • Act as a product engineer for internal users, driving the roadmap and delivering tools and data abstractions that make messy, customer-sourced data understandable and consumable across the company.
  • Support our existing live clients by implementing strategic enhancements to their integrations.
  • Act as a technical mentor for the team, establishing coding standards and best practices for our evolving data platform.
  • Balance delivery on the needs of today while keeping an eye toward our future North Star Architecture, grounding deliverables in business critical outcomes with strong engineering fundamentals
  • Collaborate closely with delivery engineering teams on mechanisms to improve the quality, speed and scalability of data integration with healthcare providers.
  • Continuously drive scalability into data tools, processes and engineering practices in order to reduce implementation and analytic timelines, customer friction points and maintenance costs.  
  • Apply rigorous software engineering practices to the data domain, including version control, automated testing (unit/integration), CI/CD, and structured logging/observability.

Who You Are:

  • 6+ years of professional software development experience, ideally in data/system integrations roles.
  • Experienced in designing systems with real-world scale, complexity, and ambiguity.
  • Strong communicator who collaborates well with cross-functional teams and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Skilled in mentoring peers and helping others grow through pairing, feedback, and guidance
  • Comfortable with tradeoffs and pragmatic about architecture decisions.
  • Passionate about improving the healthcare experience through thoughtful, human-centered software.

Bonus Points For:

  • Comfort with Python/Django
  • Experience with Healthcare Interoperability Standards such as HL7/FHIR, X12, etc.
  • Technical expertise across the data ecosystem: storage, query and ETL orchestration technology; governance and quality; analytics, visualization, and AI/ML pipelines.
  • Familiar with data engineering paradigms like ETL, ELT, Medallion Architecture, and Data Mesh, and can reason between them.
  • Strong self-starter with initiative. Cedar is a mature startup, but successful candidates will still need a strong drive to understand the systems and navigate them to deliver successfully.
  • Familiarity with data engineering tools like dbt, Snowflake, Apache Airflow, Dagster, SQL Alchemy, Fivetran, and Kafka.
  • Familiarity with Kotlin and Go.

Compensation Range and Benefits

  • Salary Range*: $195,500 - $247,250
  • This role is equity eligible
  • This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package

*Subject to location, experience, and education
#LI-VG1

What do we offer to the ideal candidate?

  • A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year
  • Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you
  • For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge
  • 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work
  • Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians) 
  • Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month)
  • Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation
  • Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally

About us 

Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.