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 .

Product Engineer (Frontend-biased)

Metaview · London

About Metaview

Metaview is the anti-toil company. Toil is the force that opposes progress — it is to progress as friction is to motion. Our answer to toil is Human-Computer Symbiosis.

AI copilots will fundamentally change how work gets done:

  • More flow-state, less toil.

  • More insight, less guesswork.

  • More human-centricity, less process-centricity.

Metaview is the AI copilot for hiring.

In April 2018, Siadhal and Shahriar left their jobs at Uber and Palantir to build Metaview for themselves — to remedy all the pain they felt building products and teams. Today, Metaview is powering workflows for thousands of users at generational companies like Quora, Robinhood, Brex, Elastic, and Replit.

We have a small, high-performing, and high-velocity team — obsessed with doing great work.

About the role

At Metaview, a Product Engineer is a customer-obsessed, product-focused Software Engineer. Fundamentally, this means a Product Engineer works towards goals, not tasks. As one of our first Product Engineers, you’ll lead the design, development, and operations of our products. We’re a small and autonomous team, so you’ll end up wearing many hats and having meaningful impact.

A Product Engineer is by necessity full stack, but we appreciate everyone has their biases and areas of expertise. For this role, we're looking for frontend bias. You'll spend most of your coding cycles on the frontend but you may have to touch other parts of the stack to unblock yourself and maintain high velocity.

It doesn’t matter what languages and tools you know when you join us, but it does matter that you can write clean, effective code and are excited by learning new languages and tools. Our product is constantly evolving, so we need engineers who can do the same. Our current stack consists of tools and technologies such as:

  • Typescript and React to write our frontend application code.

  • Python to write our backend application code.

  • Serverless Framework for creating and managing our application infrastructure.

  • Terraform for managing the foundational infrastructure.

  • AWS for all of our infrastructure.

We expect you’ll also be a significant part of what gets added to and removed from this list.

About you

Here are some characteristics and traits that are good leading indicators of success at Metaview. This should also give you an idea of the type of people that are already on the team:

  • You're fiercely ambitious and fundamentally interested in doing great work.

  • You're passionate about your craft and it feels weird to call it "work".

  • You care deeply about customer needs, the problems they face, and therefore the products you can build to solve them.

  • You’re excited by the ambiguous terrain that comes with being part of an early-stage company.

  • You love building/shipping and are curious about starting your own company one day.

  • You get fired up by the fact that our most valuable asset is our velocity.

  • You enjoy shipping on Fridays.

Where you’ll work

This role will be based in our London office. You must be willing to work in office at least 3 days per week on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

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