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 .

AI Engineer

Durable · Vancouver

This role sits at the intersection of AI engineering and application development. You’ll build customer-facing features from scratch, while also helping us integrate and scale the AI infrastructure that power them. You're deeply fluent in TypeScript and React, strong enough on the backend to own a feature end-to-end, and have meaningful experience building AI applications. You craft fast, polished, reliable software and you're drawn to problems that are genuinely unsolved.

We're looking for full stack engineers and those who lean more towards frontend.

Full stack. You understand applied AI well past the API layer: building systems that stay reliable when the model is unpredictable, writing evals that surface real signal, designing agentic workflows that hold up under production conditions. You've shipped RAG, tool calling, memory, or multi-agent patterns to real users and you know where each one breaks down.

Frontend. You notice things other engineers don't. The easing curve that's slightly off. The transition that happens too fast to register. The empty state that was clearly an afterthought. In a product where AI does most of the heavy lifting, the interface is where trust is built or broken — and you hold that line. You've built design systems from the ground up and have a point of view on motion, interaction, and what makes an AI-generated surface feel considered rather than random.

What we look for

  • Production-grade React, NextJS, and TypeScript
  • Strong backend experience: async systems, API design, schema decisions, scaling under real load
  • For full stack: applied AI in production like RAG, tool calling, memory, multi-agent patterns, and the ability to write evals and reason about whether a system is actually improving
  • For frontend: design systems, animation and motion, data-fetching patterns (TanStack Query, tRPC), and deep care for browser fundamentals and performance
  • Familiarity with our infrastructure and AI tooling (Cloudflare Workers/Durable Objects, Postgres + PGVector, LangSmith, Inngest) is a plus

What success looks like

Features that are fast, reliable, and polished. Architectural and interaction decisions that make the next thing faster to build. You raise the bar for the people working alongside you.

Application process

Your works speaks louder than your resume. We want to see how you think, what you've made, and how you work with AI. Our application asks for three things:

1. A Loom video (2-3 minutes)

Tell us who you are, what you're working on or have recently built, and how AI is a core part of how you work. Don't script it. We want to see how you think out loud.

2. Something you've built or designed 

A link, a side project, a campaign. Anything that shows what you're capable of making. One strong example beats ten weak ones.

3. A few short questions

  1. Why Durable 
  2. Where are you located
  3. What are your salary expectations

Fine print

We are a Vancouver-based company and candidates need to be based in Canada. Remote is fine - you can expect travel to Vancouver once per quarter (minimum) to work in-office with the team. 

Compensation is $180,000–$225,000 CAD base plus equity, for Vancouver-based candidates. Actual salary takes experience, location, and other factors into account.

 

View full listing