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 Software Engineer

Hummingbirdregtech · Remote

Hummingbird is a remote-first, fully distributed team united by the shared mission of helping fight financial crime. Since our launch in 2017, we’ve helped major financial institutions and tech-savvy trailblazers alike (e.g. Stripe, Affirm, Evolve Bank etc.) orchestrate their compliance programs through our thoughtfully designed, intuitive SaaS product. We believe finding and stopping financial crime is a problem rooted in code, language and design, so we built the product that the heroes doing this work deserve.

We are customer-obsessed, and we love building and shipping great products. We set a high bar, challenge our assumptions, seek diverse opinions, and support each other to do our best work.

We do our best to write inclusive, descriptive and accurate job descriptions, but we’re not always perfect. If you’re interested in the role, we’d love to hear from you even if you don’t feel like you meet everything we’re looking for. We’re always iterating and improving, and it’s possible that your experience is even more impactful than we could have imagined.
 
 
About the role

At Hummingbird, we’re building better software to fight financial crime—and our engineering team makes that mission possible. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Data Team, you’ll play a key role in shaping the foundation of AI at Hummingbird. You’ll design and deliver customer-facing AI features that make complex work more intuitive and efficient, like our context-aware AI Assistant and Auto Triage Agent.

In this role, you’ll collaborate closely with Product, Design, and other engineers to bring ideas to life—from prototyping to production. You’ll balance thoughtful model and tool selection with sound engineering principles, ensuring our systems are scalable, secure, and auditable. The projects you’ll take on are often ambitious and open-ended, and you’ll have the trust and autonomy to drive them from concept to completion.

We’re looking for someone who’s curious, collaborative, and motivated by impact—someone who thrives in the messy middle of hard problems and helps bring clarity and direction to the team. If you’re excited to use AI and data to make the world’s financial systems safer and more transparent, we’d love to meet you.

 
What you'll do:
    • Write code to fight financial crime: First and foremost, our software engineers use their skills to serve our shared mission.
    • Build AI features end-to-end. You’ll design, implement, and ship features that span from retrieval and tool calling to production-ready user experiences—with a strong focus on measurement, observability, and real-world performance.
    • Scale for impact. You’ll architect and deliver systems that handle high data volumes and complex workflows with reliability and speed, ensuring our AI features are as resilient and efficient as they are powerful.
    • Enhance trust and transparency. You’ll improve grounding quality with permission-safe retrieval, citations, and evaluations that make AI outputs auditable and dependable.
    • Optimize for experience. You’ll drive latency and cost improvements where they matter most—creating fast, seamless interactions for our users.
    • Shape the product and strategy. You’ll collaborate closely with Product and Design from discovery through iteration, helping define what AI can do for our customers. Great ideas come from everywhere, and your voice will help shape where we go next.

About you:

    • Experience that matters. You’ve shipped AI or LLM-powered products to real users (ideally with retrieval-augmented generation and tool calling) and are excited to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
    • Safety first. You care deeply about quality, testing, and security—because trust and reliability are non-negotiable foundations of scalable systems.
    • Curiosity and creativity. You love learning new technologies, exploring unfamiliar domains, and turning complex ideas into elegant, understandable solutions.
    • Purpose-driven builder. You want to use your technical skills to create something meaningful—AI that helps make the world’s financial systems safer and more transparent.
    • Strong engineering fundamentals. You bring solid backend experience, data fluency, and operational maturity to every project.
    • Iterative mindset. You enjoy refining ideas, incorporating feedback, and improving through collaboration.
    • Product intuition and communication. You think beyond code, partnering effectively with Product and Design to build features that delight and empower users.
    • Bonus points for: Experience with OpenSearch or other vector databases, Snowflake, evaluation frameworks like Langfuse, or familiarity with fintech and compliance domains.

Technologies we use:

    • Ruby/Rails
    • React, JavaScript, TypeScript
    • AWS, PostgreSQL, Redis

What’s in it for you:

  • The chance to help build from the ground up. The hires we’re making now are foundational to our growth as a company, so you will have an opportunity to help shape the future of Hummingbird.
  • Competitive compensation including cash and equity.
  • Remote-first, fully distributed company with flexible working hours.
  • Awesome health, vision & dental benefits, and 401k.
  • Safe, respectful & comfortable work environment with colleagues and leadership who prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

#LI-DNI

 

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please don't hesitate to contact us to request accommodation.

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