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 .

Frontend Engineer

Citadel Ai · Tokyo

About Citadel AI

Citadel AI builds software products to evaluate, monitor, and govern AI systems. Our mission is to make the world’s AI systems more reliable and trustworthy.

We’re located in Tokyo, but we have an international team and global customers. Our goal is to build a world-class startup from Japan, and our team members have previously worked at leading companies such as Google, Paidy, Apple, Stripe, and Meta.

This is a unique opportunity to join a team in Tokyo building new products for a global market. As an early employee at Citadel AI, you’ll have significant impact and ownership over the growth of our startup. We’re supported by Japan’s best investors and a top-tier enterprise customer base, and are currently scaling our business in the 1 → 10 stage.

About the role

We’re hiring our second frontend engineer to work with our small, full-stack team to build products to evaluate, monitor, and govern AI systems. Our users rely on our product interfaces to visualize and understand complex details about their AI models, datasets, and workflows.

You’ll be responsible for designing and implementing product interfaces in our existing and new products, covering

  • Evaluation: Quantitative testing of AI models and datasets

  • Firewall: Real-time monitoring of AI prompts and responses

  • Governance: System-of-record for enterprise AI use cases and workflows

As we scale our products, team, and business from the 1 → 10 stage, you will also contribute to modernizing our codebase and scaling our engineering processes.

You’ll primarily work with Svelte and shadcn/ui for new features, and vanilla JS, Bootstrap, and Jinja for existing features. Some technologies we use are: TanStack, Chart.js, Sveltekit, Vite, JSDoc, TypeScript, Vitest, Playwright.

Job requirements

Our company, technology, and market are new and changing rapidly, so a large part of the job is to adapt and learn new things. We value learning fast over pre-existing knowledge (“slope is more important than y-intercept”).

You should have at least 3 years of frontend software engineering experience. We don’t require past experience with specific programming languages or frameworks, but knowledge of reactive frameworks such as React, Vue, or Svelte is desirable.

English is required and Japanese is preferred. We prioritize candidates in Tokyo, but may consider remote for exceptional candidates.

Nice-to-have: you can work full-stack, you've worked at a startup before, or you have AI/ML/LLM experience.

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