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 .

Backend Engineer

Meter · San Francisco

Our backend is the critical infrastructure that powers a modern network-as-a-service platform. It's a high-stakes, always-on system where reliability isn't optional—it's existential. As a Backend Engineer at Meter, you'll build production systems that can never go down, wrangle billions of real-time data points, and architect solutions that scale across cloud infrastructure.

The impact you’ll drive

  • Design and maintain production-critical systems where downtime directly impacts customer operations—bugs and architectural shortcuts aren't an option

  • Solve challenging data problems at scale: indexing and querying billions of telemetry data points while maintaining real-time performance

  • Build container-native architecture that scales across geographic regions in a multi-tenant environment

  • Partner with frontend engineers to power real-time dashboards and data visualizations from streaming telemetry

  • Create APIs and tooling that enable both customer integrations and internal velocity


What your craft looks like

You'll work on hard engineering problems that sit at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time data processing, and cloud infrastructure. We build primarily in Go and our stack includes Postgres, Kafka for streaming data, ClickHouse for warehousing massive telemetry datasets, and GraphQL for flexible integrations. We deploy cloud-native, containerized services across AWS and Azure.

Current technical challenges include: optimizing our ClickHouse cluster as telemetry volume grows, evolving our multi-tenant architecture for global deployment, security hardening across the stack, and maintaining sub-second latency for real-time data streams.

What makes this role unique: you'll work in a fully integrated organization where backend, firmware, and hardware engineers collaborate closely. You'll gain perspectives and context that simply don't exist at traditional software companies—understanding constraints and opportunities from the physical layer up creates better software architecture.


What makes you a fit

  • You bring deep technical craft and hold a high bar for quality, reliability, and scalability

  • You thrive with autonomy, communicate with clarity, and help those around you move faster

  • You’re motivated by building elegant backend systems that directly touch real infrastructure and customers

  • You want to make an outsized impact on the foundation of a fast-growing company, where even small improvements create major leverage


Why Meter?

The internet runs the world. Every email you send, purchase you make, video call you join—it’s all packets flowing through networks. But those networks haven’t changed for decades. They’re brittle, complex, and surprisingly hard to set up in an enterprise space.

We started Meter to build better networks. We had to build everything from the ground-up: designing and building our own enterprise hardware, intuitive software, and streamlined operations to deliver great outcomes for our customers. Today, we build and deploy these networks at scale. Ambitious companies and enduring institutions like Bridgewater, Lyft, Reddit, rely on Meter to keep their thousands of employees and locations online and productive.

Our bet with Meter is simple: we will all use the internet more than we do today. We believe we have the definitive networking stack in place to enable business to do so as seamlessly and reliably as any modern utility.


Compensation

  • The estimated salary range for this role is $163,000 - $220,000.

  • Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Meter's equity plan.

By applying to this job you acknowledge that you've read and understood Meter's Job Applicant Privacy Notice.