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 .

Full Stack Engineer

Hotplate · San Francisco Office

About Hotplate

Hotplate exists to enable anyone to start and scale a local food business without a brick and mortar.

The traditional brick and mortar restaurant model is broken: it requires six figures in upfront capital and comes with high operating costs. Within their first year, 2/3 of all restaurants and bakeries close.

The next wave of food entrepreneurship is emerging. These chefs and bakers run businesses from home, commissary kitchens, or mobile pop-ups. They generate hype and buzz on Instagram and run almost entirely on pre-orders. The result is 50-80% profit margins, over 10x the traditional 5% margin of a brick and mortar.

But today’s e-commerce tools weren’t built for this way of selling food. Without Hotplate, chefs and bakers hack together DMs, Google Forms, Square, and Shopify. They spend more time managing logistics than growing their business.

We support the top pop ups in the country, many of which are recognized by the New York Times, Infatuation, Eater, etc. and recently crossed 5,000 businesses and $80M paid out on the platform, but we're just getting started.

By building the foundational tool for this new model, we have the opportunity to fundamentally change the food industry for the better: increasing the diversity and accessibility of food by making it possible for anyone to start a food business.

If you want to read more to make sure Hotplate is a good fit, check out our philosophies on hiring, fundraising, and our values.

The role

As a full stack engineer at Hotplate, you'll build end-to-end features that will directly impact how thousands of chefs' and bakers' businesses run their businesses. You'll get to stretch across a range of work like building scalable systems & infrastructure to handle ticketmaster-style food drops, Chef-facing features that will provide powerful ways to manage and grow their business, and consumer-facing storefront and buying experiences that delight.

This role is best suited for someone who likes to participate in the full process of building features, from supporting on ideation and design to executing features independently.

What you will need to be successful

  • Extremely comfortable working full stack

  • A high bar for delivering clean, intuitive, UX experiences

  • A love for designing products and features from scratch

  • Have worked in early to mid-stage startups before, with experience taking projects from 0 to 1 independently

  • Comfortable with our stack: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node, Express, PostgreSQL, AWS

  • 3+ years of product-focused, full-stack engineering

Our philosophy of engineering

Hotplate's engineering team is small, and as we scale we want to keep it that way. Every engineer operates in a full stack capacity. Features are owned by individuals, so even though we all have our strengths, each of us pushes code to all layers of the app. We find this increases our velocity, results in better decision-making before and during feature development, and is a forcing function for us to grow as full stack contributors.

Our team

We are a lean, mission-driven team. We exist to enable the next million chefs and bakers to scale local food businesses outside the brick & mortar model.

We operate with high ownership, laser focus on the impact we have for our chefs and bakers, and commitment to take on projects that push us out of our comfort zones.

We’re a tight-knit crew. We jam with a daily shared playlist, often hang for team lunch and happy hours, and always have snacks on the table (made by the team or a Hotplate Chef). We love working in a place where we all have a connection, and think it helps us work better as a team.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and dependents

  • 401(k) retirement plan

  • Unlimited PTO (that people actually take)

  • Parental leave

  • Monthly budget to spend on Hotplate


Hotplate is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

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