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 .

Reliability Engineer

Chelseaavondale · Remote, Canada

Chelsea Avondale is the world’s most cutting-edge home insurance group. We have developed sophisticated risk modeling and insurance pricing technologies for home insurance and deploy that technology through our own insurance company.

Our team consists of some of the brightest minds in insurance, software development, finance, and operations. Our group includes our scientific research & engineering division (Skynet Software) and Canadian property & casualty insurance company (Max Insurance).

Together, our group is transforming the Canadian and global insurance landscape.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Chelsea Avondale is looking for a Reliability Engineer with a background in infrastructure system engineering to support the growth of a secure, dynamic, and scalable IT environment across the group. Our business is going through rapid growth, and it is essential that our systems infrastructure keeps pace.

The Reliability Engineer will play a crucial role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems, enabling the continuous delivery of our products and services. They will be accountable for ensuring overall availability, as well as enhancing Engineering teams’ capability to design, build and operate robust systems at scale.

This position is ideal for candidates who have an extraordinary sense of responsibility and are not afraid to roll up their sleeves. Our IT environment is not toolkit rich. What we are NOT looking for is someone who wants to take months installing a large number of tools from their preferred toolkit. We take pride in maintaining a fundamental stack of technologies, much of it in Python, and we are looking for someone who shares this mentality.

If you are someone who thrives in a high-performance culture and is eager for work that is both challenging and constantly evolving, this role is perfect for you. We strongly encourage and help our team members to improve and enhance their personal skill sets within our organization. On your journey with us, you will have the ability to learn and grow rapidly, taking on more responsibilities.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Play an integral role in the design, implementation & maintenance of AWS cloud server environments.
  • Design, implement, and maintain robust monitoring and alerting systems in Python to detect and respond to incidents in a timely manner.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to enhance reliability of our systems and services.
  • Design, configure, deploy, and maintain infrastructure on AWS using best practices and industry standards.
  • Conduct post-incident analysis to identify root causes, implement corrective actions, and prevent similar issues in the future.
  • Assist in capacity planning & optimize services to provide scalable, stable, & secure systems.
  • Implement high availability and disaster recovery solutions to provide data redundancy, resilience, and data loss prevention.
  • Assist with the implementation of select network engineering solutions including firewalls, load balancing, VPNs & LANs, where necessary.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE & SKILLS:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
  • 1+ years of experience as a Reliability Engineer or similar role, with a focus on maintaining high-performance, scalable, and reliable web systems.
  • We also encourage highly motivated new grads to apply.
  • Hands-on experience with AWS cloud environments – instances, CloudWatch, EFS, etc.
  • Proficiency at Python is a must.
  • Experience using NGINX for reverse proxy, load balancing, and caching.
  • Experience with Unix / Windows server configuration, administration, performance tuning and troubleshooting.
  • Working knowledge of web technologies (web servers, DNS, SSL, Browsers).
  • Working knowledge of web development processes (source control, deployment, etc.).
  • Experience load testing, pen testing, and providing security for cloud resources is beneficial.

Skynet Software welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

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