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 Designer

Ona · NYC, London, or Munich

We're hiring a Senior Designer at Ona.

Reporting to our COO who leads the marketing org, you'll enable our growth, field marketing, sales, and partnerships teams to hit their goals through compelling visual work. You'll create high-impact assets, like ad creatives, landing pages, sales collateral, reports, and campaign materials, translating loose direction into polished creative that drives results. You'll confidently navigate our brand guidelines and leverage it to create templates and components for the team to use. This is a role for a strategic executor who cares deeply about the intersection of aesthetic excellence and business impact. We're looking for someone with strong taste, a bias for speed, and the ability to connect deeply with stakeholders to understand what success looks like.

Who we are

We're a talent-dense group of people who transform how software is created, working to empower every company, every team, and every individual to succeed in a software-first world. We've found product-market-fit and are scaling with high velocity towards repeatable go-to-market fit.

We care deeply, and for many of us, building Ona is our life's work. Our operating principles are an honest representation of how we build relationships and make decisions. We choose colleagues carefully based on merit and their authentic alignment with these principles.

If you're energized by the above, we'd love for you to apply!


Role responsibilities

Our operating principles are a core responsibility of every role. We expect anyone that joins the team to take an active part in forming and enhancing our culture by living out these principles and holding others accountable towards them.

Role-specific responsibilities:

  • Own end-to-end creation of all visual assets in the form of digital, print, and experiential mediums across multiple GTM channels including paid, website, white papers, webinars, events, and sales enablement

  • Create a marketing design system that equips the broader team to self-serve with templates and components in alignment with our brand guidelines in Figma

  • Act as the central point of contact for all bespoke GTM design requests and create a simple and efficient intake and design process to drive business outcomes

  • Collaborate with our external brand agency and specialised contractors on larger projects like design system iterations, video creatives, brand evolution, and website overhauls

  • Develop a design community of practice in collaboration with Product Design to elevate the way we tell Ona's story cohesively across all functions


At the end of your first 30 days, you will have:

  • Gained a deep understanding of our existing brand guidelines and provided an assessment of gaps and opportunities, including an analysis of existing design templates and assets

  • Created a prioritized list of what needs to be created and/or improved

  • Established strong working relationships with key stakeholders across Product Design, Growth, Field Marketing, Sales, and Partnerships through 1:1s, demonstrating a clear understanding of their needs

  • Set up a process for design requests and triaging incoming work

  • Shipped your first assets to support an ongoing ABM marketing campaign to build credibility and demonstrate your approach

  • Created a 60-90 day plan focused on high-impact projects that enable GTM teams to hit their goals

About you

  • You work in alignment with our operating principles.

  • You have exceptional taste. Taste is attention. The weight of a well-designed object, a warmly-lit room, a deep conversation: you notice what others miss. You study craft passionately - in restaurants, film, products, fashion, conversations - and translate what inspires you into work that makes people feel something. You obsess over the details and have strong intuition for when to add and when to stop. Your pattern matching, sensitivity, finesse, and exposure to the world have perfected your ability to appreciate the moments that take your breath away and inspire you to replicate that feeling for everyone around you.

  • You view yourself as a design business partner. You understand that great design serves business goals. You don't wait for detailed briefs - you proactively connect with stakeholders to understand the context, the audience, and what success looks like. You care as much about whether an asset drives pipeline as you do about how it looks. You build trust by deeply understanding the needs of the teams you support and delivering work that helps them win while upholding strong design standards and consistent visual story-telling.

  • You thrive in ambiguity. You don't need an extensive roadmap or pixel-perfect specs to do great work. Give you a goal and strategic direction, and you'll turn it into a compelling creative campaign. You view ambiguity as an opportunity for focused creativity and can be trusted to fill in the blanks. You take complex yet vague ideas and turn them into visual narratives that compel people to action - whether it's an ad creative, a sales deck, or a landing page.


Additionally, we're looking for someone with most of the following:

  • Significant experience in B2B SaaS or tech (developer tools experience is a strong plus)

  • Portfolio demonstrating high-performing ad creatives, landing pages, and campaigns developed in partnership with GTM teams

  • Significant track record and examples of producing polished sales and marketing collateral

  • Experience working with and contributing to design systems

  • Strong use of AI design tools to increase velocity without sacrificing quality

  • Comfortable working as the sole in-house designer, collaborating with external agencies and contractors

We use these tools and expect you to have familiarity with most of them:

  • Figma

  • Adobe Creative Suite

  • Midjourney

  • Other AI design tools to give yourself leverage

Benefits

  • Flexible paid time off including holidays that are most meaningful to you

  • Employee-friendly equity terms (extended exercise)

  • Health insurance (country-specific)

  • Retirement (country-specific)

  • Wellness allowance

  • Premium work-from-home equipment

  • Regular company off-sites

Interview process

We are remote-first and so is our hiring process. Contingent on schedules, we aim to complete the entire process in about 3 weeks. We are conscious of your time and are committed to being as efficient as possible.

  1. We'll start the process with an intro call.

  2. Next, you'll complete a series of interviews designed to thoroughly evaluate our mutual compatibility.

    • Intro Call

    • Hiring Manager

    • Head of People

    • Project and Panel Presentation

    • CEO

  3. As a final step, we’ll set reference calls with people that can speak directly to your performance. Additionally, we will run a full background check (location dependent).