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 .

Create Your Own Role

Heraldapi · New York, NY

About Us

Herald builds digital infrastructure for commercial insurance. Today we provide developers a single API to get quotes for insurance products from multiple carriers. Tomorrow we want to build anything that helps developers connect their applications to the insurance ecosystem. We think buying insurance should be as easy as buying anything else online and we want your help!

We’re a team of insurtech veterans with experience at At-Bay, Kin, and Insurify. We’ve raised our Series A funding from top-tier VCs (Lightspeed, Brewer Lane,  Afore, Underscore) along with a panel of insurtech founders (At-Bay, Marble), insurance executives (CRC), and early employees of other successful API infrastructure companies (Plaid, Alloy, Stytch).

The role

You tell us! We're always excited about meeting people who are excited about our business and can articulate how they can help us reach our goals. We encourage you to write a cover letter/description of your experience and a role you'd be interested in having here at Herald that may not already exist so that we can better understand how your experience may fit into our organization! 

What you bring

  • Experience working in startups, or relevant experience in insurtech or API infrastructure companies
  • Excitement about joining a fast-moving team
  • A passion for solving hard problems and the growth that results from doing so

What we bring

  • 💰 Competitive compensation packages based on experience
  • 📈 Company equity
  • ✈️ Relocation stipend (if you want to join us in the Northeast)
  • 🌛 Quarterly in-person meetups (on the company)
  • 🏝 20 days of PTO (that roll over) + 12 company holidays + 5 sick days
  • 💊 Quality health, vision, and dental insurance
  • 🚆 Pre-tax commuter benefits to be used towards parking & transit costs for those working hybrid in our offices
  • 👵 401K plan
  • 🏠 $500 additional home office stipend (beyond the standard equipment)
  • 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Parental leave for all kinds of parents (including adoption and foster care)
  • 🏃‍♀️ An agile and motivated team

 

Additional information

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are featured prominently in our company's values which you can read about below. Please reach out if you would benefit from any assistance throughout the application or have suggestions about how we can make our process more accessible and inclusive to all people.

One more note: We want to build an incredible team. As a result, we make a point of being open to surprising candidates who are the right person even though their experience doesn't exactly match up to our job description. Our job descriptions are gestures, not strict criteria. If you think you would be a great addition to our team, but might not fit the criteria perfectly, we still encourage you to apply! We recognize there are many transferable skills and traits that we may not have captured in this description and welcome all interested candidates to apply. 

 

Life at Herald

We're just getting started and building our culture with purpose every day. One of the joys of joining a small company early is that you get to build that culture too. Come join us and help us make Herald an (even more) amazing place to work!



Actions we value

There are many actions that we hope for and even demand from members of our team: communicating honestly, working hard, behaving with integrity. These are expectations. But we value these five actions above and beyond the level of "baseline expectation." We believe that if we excel at these, our business will thrive. We’re betting the company on it.

Build trust 

We always lead with empathy. We publicly own and learn from our mistakes just as we are confident and transparent in explaining our decisions. And we help get the work done because we recognize that no job is too small.

Create a shared reality

We each articulate the facts, assumptions, questions, and fears we hold about our business. We listen to and learn from others. We create a shared set of information before making decisions.

Get better every day.

We constantly seek ways to improve ourselves. We provide each other candid feedback coupled with support to elevate those around us. We refine how we work together to become more effective as a team.

Build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community.

We thrive when our team has a variety of lived experiences, values each other for their unique perspectives, and shares equitably in our mutual success. We invest in building an inclusive community for people who are oppressed because of their race, ethnicity, age, religion, gender expression, sexual orientation, physical ability, or socio-economic class.

(Remember that) we make the rules.

We once created the ways we work and therefore can change them. We do not default to momentum. We challenge ourselves to deconstruct the status quo and create a better future.

 

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