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 .

Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Found · Vancouver, Toronto or Remote (Canada)

About Found

The self-employed workforce is a rapidly growing, resilient, and colorful 60 million Americans. But self-employment comes with its own set of challenges: navigating taxes, accounting, bookkeeping, and business banking are just a few. That’s where we come in.

Found is building tools that give self-employed people the security and peace of mind that has historically only been possible at big corporations. We’re a business bank account that automates taxes and expense tracking because we believe small business owners should spend more time doing what they love and less time on their business finances.

We’re looking for kind, resourceful, and passionate people to join us in building the safety net for self-employment.

About this role

Our engineering team is responsible for taking products from ideation to being used by tens of thousands of users every week. We're responsible for everything from building the product to reliable and performant technical operations.

The Platform team is responsible for ensuring our systems are reliable and secure, while providing a great experience for both users and engineers. The team has broad ownership across reliability, security, compliance, and developer experience—a small but high-impact group supporting a 30+ person engineering organization.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who’s capable of balancing moving fast while moving safely, understands (and loves) SLOs and SLAs, and has experience scaling systems from 1 to 10 to 100.

We value engineers who can drive technical vision, mentor others, and architect systems that will scale with our growth. If you have any questions please include them in your application.

Day to day, you will:

  • Architect the future version(s) of our key systems like databases, distributed jobs and many others, while taking into account our scaling needs.

  • Design and implement developer tooling that makes development and deployments safer, reproducible, and easy to rollout.

  • Drive excellence in observability and monitoring while guiding incident response to ensure issues are resolved quickly and we build a great on-call experience.

  • Collaborate with engineering teams to maintain a high level of technical quality across our systems while addressing debt, upgrades and platform improvements.

  • Mentor engineering on how to design reliable, fault-tolerant systems and easy-to-use runbooks for when things go wrong.

To thrive in this role, you have:

  • 8+ years of experience with backend technologies in a public cloud environment.

  • Proven track record of scaling and troubleshooting production systems or services while leading cross-functional projects with business impact.

  • Deep understanding of end-to-end request flow and how system components interact across the stack—from frontend through CDN/WAF, load balancing, and backend services—with the ability to reason about performance, reliability, and failure modes at any layer.

  • Strong fundamental knowledge of SLAs and SLOs, as well as ideas around how to implement them at a fast-paced company.

  • Experience managing tech debt and driving engineering quality improvements across multiple teams.

You may also have:

  • Experience with opentelemetry, statsd, or Prometheus.

  • Working knowledge of compliance frameworks like PCI and SOC2.

  • Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, cloudformation, etc).

  • Familiarity with Sidekiq, Redis, or other async job processing systems.

  • Experience with mobile app infrastructure (Capacitor, React Native).

  • Experience building internal tooling or bots to improve engineering workflows.

  • Interest in financial services, accounting, and/or self-employment.

Compensation at Found

The anticipated salary range for this role is $240,000 - $278,000 (USD or CAD). The salary range listed represents the low and high end of the anticipated salary range for this position across all locations in the corresponding country. Within the range, individual pay is determined by several factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Our competitive base salary is just a piece of Found’s total compensation package. Found offers a generous benefits package to all employees see our list below or check out found.com/careers to learn more!

#LI-DNI

About You

Found is built by a team that comes from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, and we firmly believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion are crucial to our success. As we grow, we’re searching for passionate and motivated team members who are excited to bring their skill set to the team and are ready to learn from others.

If you are looking for a role where you will have the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution and great impact, we would love to hear from you!

Perks & Benefits of Found (USA)

  • 401K, FSA, and Commuter Benefits: We offer all employees access to tax-efficient benefit options alongside competitive base compensation.

  • Paid parental leave: Found supports employees through all stages of life, which is why new parents employed by Found qualify for 16 weeks of flexible parental leave.

  • Health benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits and are always 100% covered for employees, 90% covered for dependents.

  • Work anywhere: We have Found offices in SF and NYC. For team members who work outside those cities, Found also supports fully remote working.

  • Meaningful equity: Everyone on our team should feel and act like an owner, which is why Found offers industry-competitive equity to all of our employees.

  • Generous vacation policy: Vacations, appointments, mental health days- take the time you need.

To learn more about our benefits or the team please go to found.com/careers.