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 .

Lead Software Engineer_GoLang

Newrelic · Bangalore, India

We are a global team of innovators and pioneers dedicated to shaping the future of observability. At New Relic, we build an intelligent platform that empowers companies to thrive in an AI-first world by giving them unparalleled insight into their complex systems. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we're looking for passionate people to join our mission. If you're ready to help the world's best companies optimize their digital applications, we invite you to explore a career with us!

Your opportunity
At New Relic, we provide our customers real-time insights, so they can innovate faster. Our software delivers insightful observability tools across different technologies and distributed systems, enabling software engineering teams to quickly identify, understand and tackle issues, analyze performance and get the most of their software and infrastructure.
The Infrastructure product organization develops New Relic infrastructure instrumentation agents, next generation data processing and management services, vulnerability management,
and security testing capabilities for on-prem and cloud customers. We work with data at a scale using a diverse tech stack (Go, Java, JavaScript, React, GraphQL, Kubernetes, many public
cloud web services, and more). As a senior backend engineer, you will help us build and extend next generation solutions such as a control plane for customers to manage their data pipelines at scale.
New Relic is looking for engineers who are interested in building a brand-new observability experience. This high-impact engineering position is a phenomenal opportunity to own and build
a set of next generation services and capabilities for the company. We are searching for a motivated engineer who is ready for a career-defining role in their next opportunity. We look
forward to talking with you!
What you'll do
● Design, Build, maintain, and scale back-end services and their support tools.
● Participate in architectural definitions with a high degree of innovation and creativity.
● Creating automation and tooling to make our systems more scalable and easier to deploy.
● Working directly within a multidisciplinary team to help our customers and partners.
● Research new tools and services to understand complex scenarios and to also propose new features.
● Working in an agile environment with a DevOps approach—teams build and maintain their own software, including taking turns with being on-call.
This role requires
● 5+ years of hands-on professional experience with distributed systems, concurrency,and scaling in a production environment.
● Strong experience in writing software in GoLang and React, you are not afraid of adapting, learning and working with different languages and frameworks.Understanding of clouds like AWS, Azure and GCP.
● Being comfortable in a fast-paced environment focused on delivering production code at a regular cadence using Agile techniques, tools and methodologies.
● Having a collaborative work style that includes colleagues in important decisions and leads to shared code ownership
● Be able to work with the rest of the team to solve and design distributed solutions to solve complex problems
Bonus points if you have
● Experience of working with Terraform, Temporal, Github Admin, DSL, Developing Command Line tools with golang
● Contribution to open source projects.
● Familiarity with the tech stacks mentioned above
● Understanding the value that build and test automation brings to a development team's efficiency and reliability and are passionate about applying these techniques to your projects.
● Experience in technical mentorship and help with leveling up the skills of other colleagues on the team.
● Experience with asynchronous programming techniques: streams, event-based flows,

Fostering a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment is important to us. We work hard to make everyone feel comfortable bringing their best, most authentic selves to work every day. We celebrate our talented Relics’ different backgrounds and abilities, and recognize the different paths they took to reach us – including nontraditional ones. Their experiences and perspectives inspire us to make our products and company the best they can be. We’re looking for people who feel connected to our mission and values, not just candidates who check off all the boxes. 

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application or recruiting process, please reach out to [email protected].

We believe in empowering all Relics to achieve professional and business success through a flexible workforce model. This model allows us to work in a variety of workplaces that best support our success, including fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid.

Our hiring process

In compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work and to complete employment eligibility verification. Note: Our stewardship of the data of thousands of customers means that a criminal background check is required to join New Relic.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records based on individual circumstances and in accordance with applicable law including, but not limited to, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. New Relic does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with New Relic.

New Relic develops and distributes encryption software and technology that complies with U.S. export controls and licensing requirements. Certain New Relic roles require candidates to pass an export compliance assessment as a condition of employment in any global location. If relevant, we will provide more information later in the application process.

Candidates are evaluated based on qualifications, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, age, disability, neurodiversity, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other legally protected characteristics. 

Review our Applicant Privacy Notice at https://newrelic.com/termsandconditions/applicant-privacy-policy