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 .

Platform Engineer

Comulate · San Francisco / Remote

At Comulate, we’re transforming the insurance back office with AI. Our platform, which reinvents expensive and time-consuming accounting processes, is the first step in our vision to unlock the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on manual insurance operations.

Our Series B, announced in early 2025, led by BOND & Workday, comes on the heels of record growth and accelerating expansion plans.

Why you should consider joining

  • Record-setting growth, having gone from zero to 8-figure ARR within three years of founding, representing 95th+ percentile company growth among startups that achieve these milestones

  • Strong product market fit revealed in growth and through customer love, with users describing the platform as “the best thing since sliced bread” and "life-changing"

  • Our lean, talented team is creating category-defining products for large public and private enterprises, driving 7-figure ROI and cash-flow positive operations, providing the best of both worlds: outsized employee ownership and low company risk

  • We're continuing to take big, ambitious first-to-market bets for a highly committed customer base and an exciting pipeline of new customers

  • We’re in the early innings of our vision and poised to take advantage of the massive opportunity to deploy AI into core workflows throughout the insurance industry

About the role

As our first Platform Engineer you'll play a critical role in shaping our cloud infrastructure and ensuring our systems are reliable, scalable, and secure. To keep pace with our explosive growth, we’re looking for an experienced team member to execute with best practices from day one.

Our stack: TypeScript, Node, Postgres, React, Next.js, AWS (ECS, RDS, ElastiCache)

Learn more about our engineering culture and learnings on our engineering blog.

You might be a good fit if you have/are:

  • 3+ years of cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or SRE experience.

  • 1+ years of experience architecting AWS infrastructure.

    • Examples you'll work on here: Blue-green deployments, VPN for employees (e.g. Tailscale) and Postgres observability tooling (e.g. pganalyze or pghero).

  • 1+ years of experience writing application layer code.

  • Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), such as Terraform or CloudFormation

  • Understanding of networking in AWS involving VPCs and VPNs.

  • You are known for driving engineering best practices around application performance, monitoring, and alerting.

  • Developer experience is top of mind: you have improved CI/CD pipelines and local development tooling (e.g. hot-reloading, unit testing speed, etc.)

  • [Nice to have] Deep understanding of Postgres performance to help advise engineers on best practices / how to improve query performance.

  • [Nice to have] Familiarity with compliance standards such as SOC 2.


Our team & philosophy

We’re backed by BOND, Spark Capital, Neo, and Workday, as well as founders/executives from Brex, Asana, Plaid, Applied Intuition, Coalition, and more.

Our team hails from companies like Airbnb, Google, Brex, and LiveRamp and we’re fairly low-profile: focusing the majority of our energy on delivering for customers and building a category-defining company.

We’re hiring predominantly in San Francisco 🌁, as we believe in-person collaboration is strategically important for a company at our stage — both for velocity and company culture.

Benefits

  • Competitive base salary and generous equity

  • Generous medical, dental, and vision benefits

  • 401K plan enrollment

  • Flexible time-off policy

  • Lunch & dinner every day

  • Paid parental leave

  • Company outings and offsites

  • (and more benefits as we grow!)

Comulate is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture that celebrates authenticity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics.