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 .

AI-Forward Engineer

Nimblerx · Redwood City, CA

Nimble is a healthtech company on a mission to simplify access, understanding and management of healthcare. We are starting by building the largest, most loved pharmacy business in the world. We are a fast-growing, technology-first startup driven by perfecting the patient and pharmacist experience. Nimble fosters a culture of collaboration, open communication and deliberate action that allows us to face today’s most exciting challenges head-on and grow incredibly quickly.

Your name may not start with A(ndrej) or B(oris); but hey, we are not hiring for A/B testing.
 
As an AI-Forward Engineer, you will be at the frontier of how AI transforms every function in our startup. You will experiment with, evaluate, and implement AI-powered tools and workflows that accelerate teams across product, engineering, data, design, as well as sales, operations, customer success, and product marketing. The AI landscape evolves weekly — you will be our vanguard: rapidly prototyping with products, then shipping the integrations that give our teams an unfair advantage. A successful candidate combines solid software engineering fundamentals with deep curiosity about the AI ecosystem and a drive to put the best tools in the hands of every team.
 
Our engineering culture: We operate with shared trust and no egos. We enjoy being "in this together" and collaborating on the challenges of a rapidly scaling business. We live out our company values of empathy, simplicity, autonomy, leadership, ownership, burning curiosity, bias for action, mentorship, and operate with context, not control, in a highly collaborative environment.
Your name may not start with A(ndrej) or B(oris); but hey, we are not hiring for A/B testing.
 
As an AI-Forward Engineer, you will be at the frontier of how AI transforms every function in our startup. You will experiment with, evaluate, and implement AI-powered tools and workflows that accelerate teams across product, engineering, data, design, as well as sales, operations, customer success, and product marketing. The AI landscape evolves weekly — you will be our vanguard: rapidly prototyping with products, then shipping the integrations that give our teams an unfair advantage. A successful candidate combines solid software engineering fundamentals with deep curiosity about the AI ecosystem and a drive to put the best tools in the hands of every team.
 
Our engineering culture: We operate with shared trust and no egos. We enjoy being "in this together" and collaborating on the challenges of a rapidly scaling business. We live out our company values of empathy, simplicity, autonomy, leadership, ownership, burning curiosity, bias for action, mentorship, and operate with context, not control, in a highly collaborative environment.
Please note
  1. Applications need to include links to your Github repos -> show us what you've built.
  2. This hybrid role is based in Redwood City, California. 2 - 3 days in office is required. 

At Nimble, we are dedicated to putting patients first and improving pharmacies across America. Join us on this exciting journey!

Diversity, inclusion and belonging at Nimble: Nimble is building a diverse and inclusive work environment where we learn from each other. We pride ourselves on being an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of diverse backgrounds, abilities and perspectives.

You will:

  • Work closely with every function (product, engineering, data, design, operations, sales, and product marketing) to discover pain points and translate them into AI-enabled solutions
  • Experiment with and implement AI-assisted developer tooling, leveraging Claude Code for agentic coding workflows and AI-enhanced CI/CD pipelines that help engineering teams ship faster with higher confidence
  • Leverage frontier models (Claude, Gemini, Kimi, GPT) as core engineering tools, evaluating new model releases for coding, reasoning, and agentic capabilities, and integrating the best-fit models into team workflows as they evolve
  • Build and evolve our AI-augmented testing pipeline: from product spec use cases through test cases, test data, unit tests, and end-to-end Playwright automation, all generated via Claude Code, plus large-scale codebase improvement and refactoring through AST-based tooling (Java/Spoon, TypeScript/OXC, Flutter Dart Analyzer)
  • Evaluate and deploy AI-powered design tools, such as Figma, Pencil, Stitch, Veo, Nano Banana
  • Integrate AI-native intelligence platforms into go-to-market, operations, customer success, and support workflows
  • Stay on the leading edge of the AI tool landscape: continuously scouting, testing, and benchmarking new tools as they emerge weekly
  • Create internal tools and interfaces (chat-based assistants, dashboards, browser extensions, Slack integrations) that make AI capabilities accessible to non-technical stakeholders
  • Establish best practices for agentic engineering, model evaluation, cost management, security, and responsible AI use across the organization
  • Instrument and monitor AI-powered systems for reliability, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness
  • What you bring:

  • 2+ years in engineering or DevOps roles, you know how software gets built, tested, and shipped
  • Well versed in multiple programming languages including TypeScript, Java, and Python
  • Hands-on experience with Terraform, GitHub flows/actions, and CI/CD pipelines, and an instinct for where AI can accelerate them
  • Knowledge of AWS
  • Already building with AI, whether it's frontier models like Claude, Kimi, or Gemini, agentic coding tools, or something you hacked together last weekend
  • Comfortable working across teams that don't speak your language (product, data, design, sales, ops), and translating their pain into working tools
  • A tinkerer's obsession; Show us what you've built
  • Bias for shipping over perfecting: you'd rather demo a rough v1 in an hour than a polished v3 next week
  • What's in it for you:

  • Compassionate and driven colleagues in a fun environment where success is celebrated
  • Accelerated career growth in a fast-growing company
  • Coaching from experienced engineering leaders
  • Direct access to executives and a transparent company culture
  • Rare opportunity to change an industry and lives of millions
  • We are reinventing healthcare / pharmacy - your (grand)parents and your (grand)children will understand and appreciate what you do
  • Medical / dental / vision / 401(k) package that fits your needs
  • Generous Vacation Policy - 15 days of paid vacation in the first year, then increases to 20 days after one year
  • 11 paid holidays
  • Work out of our HQ in beautiful downtown Redwood City