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 .

Senior Growth Engineer

Ello · San Francisco, CA

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: Maximize the potential of every child, everywhere.

We’re building the world’s first AI teacher to close that gap: one that listens, speaks, adapts, and inspires, just like the best human educators.

Our first product, Read with Ello, is already helping tens of thousands of kids each week learn to read. It listens as they read aloud, offers support when they stumble, and generates magical, personalized stories using generative AI. It works—and kids love it.

Now, we’re scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. We’re building a real-time learning platform—one that combines language, speech, and memory to power personalized, interactive education for kids worldwide. We’re moving fast: we ship weekly, test directly with kids and families, and push the boundaries of what AI can do in education.

With the resources of the world's top investors and the heart of a public benefit corporation, we’re here to revolutionize how children learn globally. Featured on TIME’s Best Inventions and Fortune’s Change the World, Ello is a small, mission-driven team taking on one of the most important challenges of our time: to democratize education.

About the role

We’re looking for a strong Senior Growth Engineer to independently own end-to-end features to improve user acquisition, engagement, and retention for Ello. You will bridge the gap between engineering, product, and marketing to test and implement data-driven growth strategies. You’ll be part of a small and nimble team responsible for the full growth stack, from designing user-facing flows & prototype experiences to developing backend pipelines, experimentation frameworks, and analytics tooling. You are an engineer with a business mindset who enjoys finding leverage through code, loves rapidly iterating based on data, and thrives optimizing funnels and scaling user impact. You are comfortable working full-stack and across multiple programming environments. You have experience building growth features like A/B testing systems, referral programs, onboarding flows, and notifications. You’re highly curious and metrics-driven, with a strong bias toward experimentation and execution.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds – frontend, backend, growth product – but we prioritize strong technical foundations and proven impact on user or revenue growth. You’ve launched and scaled successful growth initiatives, either at a high-growth startup or as part of a dedicated growth team at a larger company. We work in-person out of our San Francisco office (minimum 3 days/week), and we’re big believers in face-to-face collaboration.

Responsibilities

  • Build and own growth features end-to-end, from ideation to deployment

  • Develop A/B testing and experimentation frameworks to validate growth hypotheses

  • Collaborate with product, marketing, and data to identify high-leverage growth opportunities

  • Improve conversion, retention, and engagement across the user lifecycle

  • Build and iterate on onboarding, referral, and notification systems

  • Analyze user data to generate actionable insights and inform strategy

Required Experience

  • Engineering:

    • Strong experience with growth-focused features (e.g. onboarding flows, developing in-app features, emails/notifications, referral loops)

    • Experience with at least one of: Flutter, React (or equivalent web framework), native Android development in Java/Kotlin, or iOS development in Swift/ObjC

    • Leveraged GenAI tools to accelerate your work impact

    • Familiarity with GenAI models & pipelines, including human eval infrastructure

    • Experience with A/B testing infrastructure and analytics tools (e.g. Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment, Google Analytics)

    • Familiarity with data pipelines, ETL, and writing custom metrics queries

    • Proficient with modern frontend frameworks (React, Flutter) and backend systems (Python, Node.js, Go, or equivalent)

    • Ability to set up and interpret product metrics, dashboards, and cohort analyses

  • Growth & Product:

    • Demonstrated experience owning and scaling impactful growth experiments

    • Strong product sense and intuition for user experience and conversion optimization

    • Experience working with marketing teams and customer acquisition funnels

    • Cross-functional mindset: comfortable collaborating across product, design, marketing, and engineering

    • Familiarity with agile development methodologies and collaborative development tools

Nice to have experience

  • Experience with building products or features designed for children and parents

  • Familiar with the range of tools & services available to build a full end-to-end customer solutions

  • Developed solutions that integrated across third-party systems (e.g. Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, CRMs, etc.)

  • Deep understanding of front-end architectures (web & mobile), design patterns, and performance optimization techniques

We look for candidates who

  • Have a desire to build & innovate

  • Have something to teach us

  • Want to do work they are proud of, and ship products they are proud of

  • Have an urge to make a real impact on child development at scale

  • Take initiative and full ownership of their work

  • Prefer open and direct communication grounded in empathy to beating around the bush

  • Exemplify integrity in their actions, decisions, and communication

  • Want to build meaningful relationships at work

Here are some reasons to be a part of our team

  • Dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of AI and interactive learning.

  • Experience the joy of turning your designs and code into engaging and educational experiences for children worldwide

  • Be part of an A+ team and an engineering culture of excellence

About Ello

Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children. We’re currently around 45 people, headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in São Paulo, Brazil; Nairobi, Kenya; and New York.

Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence, K-12 education, and child development across institutions such as Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Apple, and more. We were part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch and are funded by world-class investors including Goodwater Capital, Homebrew, Reed Hastings, Common Sense Growth, Ravensburger, Project A Ventures, Reach Capital, Khosla Ventures, WndrCo, Visible Ventures, and K9 Ventures.

We’re a small, collaborative team that takes each other’s voices very seriously. Because our mission is to support all children, it is crucial that our team reflects the communities in which we work; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity within our team and fostering inclusion in our culture.

We feel enormously privileged to be one of the few companies that has the opportunity to take a shot at truly revolutionizing education with AI at this inflection point in technology. We don’t take it for granted, so we work quite hard to turn that vision into reality with urgency. We want to create an environment in which we can all be our best selves, use our strengths to take Ello forward, and develop our skills. We want to have fun while working hard to do impactful things that we’re proud of – and we believe it’s possible to do both.

At Ello, diversity is a moral imperative and a competitive advantage. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, skin color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We plan and structure our interviews to assess skills and experience directly. If you need accommodations throughout the interview process, please contact [email protected].